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SpyFu How To: The SpyFu Instruction Manual

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Contents

OverviewWhat is SpyFu 3Exploring the Site 4SpyFu Terminology 5Charts 6

SearchingThe Search Box 7The Advanced Search Page 8

Major SpyFu PagesThe Term Page 9The Domain Page 13The Company Page 23The Host and Path Pages 24

Browsing SpyFuOverview 25Categories 25Industries 26

Your SpyFu AccountWhat do you get with an account? 27Using Custom Lists 27

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Overview

What is SpyFu?

SpyFu is a website that allows you to “Spy” on your Google adwords competitors. We run over 2 million terms through Google every month and index the search results and advertisements that come back. In addition, we do pricing lookups on all the terms we run. A a bunch of number crunching and roll ups and we can tell you what a domain or company is doing on Google. The final ingredient is some category and industry mapping of those domains and companies and you have SpyFu.

To learn more about the site visit our press room at http://www.spyfu.com/PressRoom.aspx.

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Exploring the Site (Built in Documentation)

We’ve been adding documentation to the SpyFu site that you can find as you browse. The thing to look for is the question mark icon. Hovering over this icon or clicking it will cause a pop up explanation for the parent box to pop up.

In addition to the question mark icons you can also click on the stats at the top of any major SpyFu page.

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SpyFu TerminologyOrganic Results Search results that return from Google naturally. That is, how

Google thinks they should be returned. No one is paying for this content.

Advertisements (Ads) The results that Google returns that someone has paid for.

Adword A term that returns advertisements in Google. This presumably indicates that a company has paid for this term, or at least something close to it.

When you look up your domain on SpyFu your first reaction may be, “Hey! I know I don’t advertise on that!”, and we won’t argue with you on that point. However, if an adword is listed for your domain, then your ad did return when that search was performed. From a Term page you can follow the “Cached Page” link to prove to yourself it is true.

Why the apparent error? Google takes a little liberty with ads you bid for and tries to make it match in as many appropriate contexts as possible. Advertisers rarely want to be restricted to the exact spelling of the adwords they bid on.

Charts

Organic Results

Advertisements

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A recent addition to SpyFu is its charts. There should be more to come, but right now there are two major places to find charts. The first is in the statistics of any page. The other is on the Domain page if you are a member and logged in.

The charts in the statistics of any page allow you to see the trend of a given stat over time. You can change the chart by clicking on the chart icon next to any stat. Below is a screenshot along with a blow up of the chart icon.

The domain page chart allows you to see a rank breakdown for organic results and advertisements. You can switch between the chart and normal list view via the icons blown up below.

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Searching

The Search Box

There are three different types of things you can search for within the SpyFu search box; terms, domains, and company names. These three types are illustrated in the “e.g.” below the search bar. SpyFu will first check if your search matches a domain, then a term, and finally a company.

There is currently no way to force SpyFu to search for company before term. If you intended to search for a company (such as Velocityscape) you follow a link from the term page to the Velocityscape.com domain page. From there you can navigate to the Velocityscape company page.

So there are then four possible outcomes to any search in SpyFu. Either one of the three types of pages (Term, Domain, and Company) will come back, or the search will find nothing. If the later is true, you will remain at the search page and related domains and terms will appear underneath.

SpyFu keeps track of all searches submitted to it, even the ones that return nothing. This is so that SpyFu can possibly add them into its data collection runs next time to create a more robust database.

So if a search returns nothing one month, that doesn’t mean it will return nothing the next! Our data is always growing.

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The Advanced Search Page

If you are a full member, you can follow the “Advanced Search” link from the main SpyFu page. It is located in the black search box. Once there, you specify by the tab you select at the top whether you’re looking for a term or a domain (company is not available). Instead of landing on a term or domain page that matches what you searched for, you’ll see a detailed list of terms or domains that fit within the restrictions you entered. From there you can export your list to excel or view the details for any matching term or domain.

Advanced searches are hard on our database! Especially if there are a lot of results. That is why we limit the number of results to 1000 terms or 500 domains

If you still are unable to get your advanced search to return please let us know. We are looking to improve our performance all the time, and appreciate the feedback. Also, we can discuss pricing for getting your report generated manually on the back end

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Major SpyFu PagesThe Term Page

The term page is one of the three pages that you can land on right after performing a search in SpyFu. A term is a word or series of words that will return information when entered into a Google search. Below is a screen shot of the term “Web Scraping” along with an explanation of all the information on this page.

Term Statistics

Cost/Click Cost/Click is the amount Google charges an advertiser every time someone clicks on one of their ads. Google lets advertisers bid for keywords and generally the higher the bid, the closer the ad is to the top of the page. That’s why there is a range. Some advertisers adopt a strategy of bidding as much as is necessary to always get the top ad position. Others would rather minimize cost by bidding lower and appearing near the bottom of the page.

How You Can Use It     When you know how much a keyword costs, you can take that into account when you are writing search optimized content for your website. If a keyword is cheap and gets very little traffic, all things being equal, you probably don’t need to include it in your content. On the other hand if it would be expensive to buy the traffic on the keyword, you should definitely consider trying to get that traffic organically and include it in you content.

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Clicks/Day Clicks/Day is the number of clicks that Google estimates that it can deliver from an ad that appears on its search result page for this keyword. So, assuming that you don’t exceed your max daily budget, you should receive this number of visitors daily if you advertise on this keyword.

How You Can Use It     The number of clicks per day is the best way to gauge the traffic that a keyword gets. It is a useful number in a lot of ways. Consider the difference between the keywords “Low Fares” and “Cheap Tickets”. If you are a travel industry insider, you might assume that “Low Fares” gets a lot more clicks than “Cheap Tickets”. Indeed, “Low Fares” is an industry term, but “Cheap Tickets” gets almost 100 times more clicks. Which keyword would you rather optimize your content for?

Cost/Day

 If you advertise with Google on this keyword for an entire day, assuming you don’t exceed your max daily budget, this is how much you should expect to pay. Google lets advertisers bid for keywords and generally the higher the bid, the closer the ad is to the top of the page. That’s why there is a range. Some advertisers adopt a strategy of bidding as much as is necessary to always get the top ad position. Others would rather minimize cost by bidding lower and appearing near the bottom of the page.

How You Can Use It

     When you know how much a keyword costs, you can take that into account when you are writing search optimized content for your website. If a keyword is cheap and gets very little traffic, all things being equal, you probably don’t need to include it in your content. On the other hand if it would be expensive to buy the traffic on the keyword, you should definitely consider trying to get that traffic organically and include it in you content.

Advertisers

 Advertisers is the number of domains that pay for an advertisement to appear on Google’s search result page for this keyword. The maximum number is 21 because we only drill down to the second page of ads.

How You Can Use It

     The more advertisers as keyword has, the more competitive it is. Competition is not always bad. It probably means that there are things happening in the space, and

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that there is money to be made. In fact, if you are using the number of advertisers to help you decide whether to enter the market, think twice before entering a market where there are no advertisers. It might be a sign that no money can be made.

Search Results

     Search Results is the number of pages Google reports to satisfy the search for this keyword. At the top of every search page, Google returns the total number of results. For example searching for “lard candles” returned a result page that says “Results 1 - 10 of about 98,700”. In this case, the Search Results value is 98,700.

How You Can Use It

     You can use Search Results to get an idea of the popularity of a keyword. When Search Results is low, it should be easier to rank high when you put the keyword in your content. Conversely, when there are tons of Search Results, it will be tougher to rank high in the search results.

Other Term Information

Ads:

     By Ads we mean the exact ads that were returned from Google when we last ran the term for this page.

How You Can Use It

     If you go enter the term for this page into Google, you won't get the same ads. If you want to see what the ads that come back for a given term in real time, you should just go run that term through Google. The use of this box is that it serves as a launching point to other domain pages. There you can see all terms advertised on for a given domain and leverage the real power of SpyFu.

Search Results:

     By Search Results we mean the exact results that were returned from Google when we last ran the term for this page.

How You Can Use It

     If you go enter the term for this page into Google, you won't get the same search results. If you want to see what results Google returns for a given term in real time, you should just go run that term through Google. The use of this box is that it serves as a launching point to other domain pages. There you can see all terms that a domain ranks on organically and leverage the real power of SpyFu.

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Competitors Also Bought  Competitors Also Bought is a list of the Top 999 keywords that domains that advertise on this keyword also advertise on. The list is ordered by the number of domains that bought both keywords.

Related Terms

     Related Terms are keywords that are related to the current keyword linguistically. So, the related keywords either contain the current keyword or they are contained by the keyword. So, if the current keyword is “sports car”, Related Terms might be “fast sports car”, “sports car fans”, “car”, and “sports”.

Related Concepts

     Related Concepts are keywords that are related to the current keyword semantically. So, for example, if the current keyword is “television”, related concepts might be “remote control”, “soap opera”, “Plasma”, and “FCC”.

Categories

     Categories are a list of categories that this term falls under. Our category list is from the open souce category directory dmoz.org.

How You Can Use It

     You can use categories as a powerful way to browse to related domains and keywords.

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The Domain PageThe domain page is one of the three pages you can land on right after performing

a SpyFu search. A domain is a part of a URL. In the URL, http://www.velocityscape.com/BuyNow.aspx, the entire domain is www.velocityscape.com. www is a sub domain of velocityscape.com. No matter how specific of a domain you specify, SpyFu will return the most general domain excluding top level domains like .com. So a search for www.velocityscape.com and velocityscape.com will both take you to the domain for velocityscape.com.

When searching for a domain in SpyFu, you can leave off sub domains to the left of the entire domain, but you can’t leave off parent domains to the right. For example, velocityscape.com will work, but velocityscape or even www.velocityscape will not return a domain page.

Below there is a screenshot of the velocityscape.com’s domain page and an explanation of all the items on this page.

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Domain Statistics

Daily Ad Budget

     The Daily Ad Budget is the amount that we estimate a domain spends on Google Adwords in an average day. We express the Ad Budget as a range to express our margin of error. The lower number is the bottom of the range and the larger number is top of the range.

How You Can Use It

     At a glance, you can use the Daily Ad Budget to get a reasonable idea of the online ad spending of a competitor, customer, or prospect. With a little research, you can even use the Daily Ad Budget to estimate revenue. If you assume that a company’s marketing budget is some proportion of their revenue, and that the amount that they spend on Google ads is some proportion of their marketing budget, you can take a pretty good guess at the company’s revenue.

     For example, suppose SpyFu tells you that a domain is spending about $200/day on Google ads, and you know from experience that companies in their market typically spend 25% of revenue on marketing. Furthermore, you know that the company that owns the domain has a significant offline division and you estimate that they spend about 50% of their marketing dollars online and half offline. You estimate that the company spends about 30% of their online marketing budget on Google Adwords. Given these numbers, you might be able to calculate in your head that they spend about $1,333 per day on marketing, which means they make $5,333 in revenue per day or about $1.9M annually. If you’d prefer not to stress your brain that much, try this handy spreadsheet.

     Of course, these are rough estimates but they give you a much more quantifiable way of evaluating the competition than most alternatives. If you want to improve the accuracy of your predictions, calibrate your estimates using the reported revenue off of the 10Q from a public company in the same market.

More on Daily Ad Budget

     We provide a range because there is just no way for us to know for sure how much a domain pays Google for their ads. Knowing precisely would require us to have access to the backend of the Adwords billing engine. When we calculate Daily Ad Budget, we start with all the keywords that we have seen a domain advertise on. We eliminate overlapping keywords. For example, “race cars”, “luxury cars”, and “cars” becomes “cars”. Then, we take into account the current and historical positions that we have seen the domain’s ad appear for each given keyword. Based on the position of each ad, we estimate the price that the domain likely pays for the keyword. Basically, we then add up all the custom individual keyword costs per day and we arrive at the Daily Ad Budget.

     Daily Ad Budget, of all the data points we offer is the farthest removed from the

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raw data. In order to get to it, we make plenty of assumptions and extrapolations. We provide a range rather than a single number as an indication of our uncertainty. The fewer the data points we have to support our estimate, the greater our uncertainty and the wider the range.

     All things considered, we hope you find that the Daily Ad Budget data point is remarkably accurate. It is our best educated guess, and we think we are pretty close most of the time. That said, we recommend that you use it for order of magnitude comparisons only. Don’t call up a prospective client or competitor and tell them you know exactly how much they spend on Adwords every day. Feel confident, though, that they spend hundreds, not thousands of dollars per day.

Total Clicks/Day

     If you take all the ads that link to a given domain, and you add up all the clicks that those keywords get in a day, you get Total Clicks Per Day. Total Clicks Per Day is calculated separately from Daily Ad Budget, but in a similar way. We express the Total Clicks Per Day as a range to express our margin of error. The lower number is the bottom of the range and the larger number is top of the range.

How You Can Use It

     Total clicks per day tells you how many potential customers visit your competitor’s website every day due to their advertisements. If you can estimate your competitor’s conversion rate, you can also estimate daily sales or lead volume, and if you can estimate their average sale (or lead value) then you can calculate revenue.

     Your competitor wants each of those potential customers to do something once they get to their site. Often they want the customer to buy something, but they might also want them to click on another ad or affiliate link, download a file, or give up their contact information. Some visitors will do what your competitor wants them to do, and others won’t. The ratio of visitors that do what your competitor wants to those that don’t is their Conversion Rate. For example, if out of 100 visitors 3 make a purchase, then the conversion rate is 3%.

     Several factors contribute to the conversion rate including how targeted the ad is to the offering, the quality of the landing page, the quality of the offering itself, the nature of the offering, the cost or inconvenience to the visitor. Based on these things, and your knowledge of the industry, you should be able to estimate a competitor’s conversion rate.

     With the estimated conversion rate, all you have to do is multiply it by the Total Clicks/Day to calculate the average sales/lead volume. For example, if a domain gets 200 Total Clicks/Day and you estimate their conversion to be 3% then can conclude that they convert 6 visitors into sales or leads every day. If you go further

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and estimate the average sale (or put a dollar value on a lead), then you can calculate the sales revenue per day. For example, if the average customer spends $50 then the estimated sales revenue per day would be $300.

Average Cost/Click

     If you take the Average Cost per Click of every keyword that a domain advertises on, add them all up, and divide by the total number of keywords, you will have the Avg Cost/Click for a domain. For example, if a domain advertises on 3 keywords with Avg Cost/Clicks of $1, $2, and $3, respectively then the Avg Cost per Click for the domain would be $2.

How You Can Use It

     You can use Avg Cost/Click as a barometer to gauge the relative efficiency of a competitor’s advertising campaign. A domain that buys lots of low traffic, low cost long-tail keywords will have a lower Avg Cost/Click than a domain that buys fewer high traffic keywords. The former is a domain that is executing efficiently.

     When you see that a domain’s Avg. Cost/Click change or change percent is increasing, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they are getting less efficient. It probably means that they are getting more competition.

Average Clicks/Day

     If you take all the keywords on which a domain advertises, add up each of the Avg. Clicks/Day and then divide by the total number of keywords you get this number. For example, if a domain advertises on “cat food”, “dog food”, and “bird seed” and those keywords have an Avg. Clicks/Day value of 30,40, and 20, respectively. The Avg. Clicks/Day for the domain would be 30.

     That is the general idea anyway, but we actually factor in each keywords position in the ad results to determine a domain-specific clicks/day value. So, continuing with the previous example, if all the domain’s keywords were in the number 1 ad position, we’d give them an Avg. Clicks/Day of something like 45; if they were all in position 7, we’d go with something like 15; if they were in position 16, we go with 5. Those are rough guesses, not based on the real algorithm, but they illustrate the trend.

How You Can Use It

     You can use Avg Clicks/Day as a barometer to gauge the relative efficiency of a competitor’s advertising campaign. A domain that buys lots of low traffic, long-tail keywords will have a lower Avg Clicks/Day than a domain that buys fewer high traffic keywords. The former is domain is executing efficiently.

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     Before making an assumption on a domain’s efficiency, you should also look at their Avg. Ad Position and Avg. Ad Percentile. Because Avg. Clicks/Day is weighted based on each keyword’s ad position, a low Avg Clicks/Day coupled with a high Avg. Ad Position (low Avg. Ad Percentile) means that the domain’s strategy is to bid low on a lot of keywords possibly as an arbitrage play, or possibly because the are very broad (like Ebay) and they just want to get as much traffic as cheaply as possible.

Average Ad Position

     An ad’s position is the order it appears on the result page. Google has up to 3 ads at the top of the page, and up to 8 ads on the side. If there are 3 ads at the top of the page, then the position of the second ad in the side results is 5. If there are no ads at the top of the page, the ad at the second position on the side is 2. Ads that appear under the More Results section start counting at either 12, 11, 10, or 9 depending on how many ads there were at the top of the page.

     Average Ad Position is calculated by adding up all of the positions that a domain’s ads appear on every keyword that they buy then dividing by the total number of keywords. For example, if a domain advertises on the keywords “coffee”, “tea”, and “me”, and their ads appear at position 7, 3, and 8, respectively then their average ad position is (7+3+8)/3 = 6.

How You Can Use It

     Average Ad Position gives you insight into a domain’s advertising strategy. If you see that they have a very low ad position, that means that they are consistently ranking at the top of the ad results. It also means that they are spending more money to achieve those premium positions. It means that they are most likely receiving more traffic than others on the keywords that they buy. It may also mean that they have more advertising money than they know what to do with, and that they are not spending it as efficiently as they could be.

     If, on the other hand, a domain has a very high (12-20) average ad position, it means that most of their ads are showing up on page 2. If we give the domain the benefit of the doubt, that could mean that they are engaging in a shrewd strategy of maximizing their traffic for their ad dollar. This, for example, is how Ebay advertises. It may be the basis of a profitable arbitrage campaign. If I were a betting man, I might wager that at least 75% of domains with an average ad position between 12-20 are there by accident. These are probably poorly executed campaigns that for most businesses could be targeting more effectively, and achieving higher conversion rates. If the domain is a competitor or a potential client there is opportunity here.

     If a domain is consistently appearing at the bottom of the first page i.e. an average ad position of 8-9, they may be managing their ad campaign very

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efficiently. Generally speaking, the most efficient place to advertise is near the bottom of the first page of ads. By efficient, I mean cost per conversion. Professional search marketing specialists typically target this position.

Average Ad Competitors

     Average Ad Competitors is the average number of other domains that advertise on the domain’s keywords. For example, if a domain buys the keywords “fork”, “spoon”, and “knife”, and there are 6, 18, and 21 ads on each keyword respectively, then the Avg. Ad Competitors is (6+18+21)/3 = 15.67. So, for any given keyword that a domain advertises on, it is reasonable to assume that there will be about 15 other domains also advertising.

How You Can Use It

     Average Ad Competitors gives you insight into the competitive landscape in which a domain lives. You can use this information to decide whether to start or expand a business to compete with the domain.

     Lots of competition is usually a good thing. It probably means that there is plenty of money in the space, and that the market is highly fragmented. Few competitors usually means one of two things: 1. There is no money in the space, and unless you are both a visionary and a glutton for punishment, you should stay away. 2. There is plenty of money in the space, but it is dominated by a few highly consolidated players.

     The next thing to consider is how well the domain is executing. You can use Avg. Ad Percentile or Avg. Ad Position to get an idea of their ad campaign efficiency, but you will need to study the company in a deep and comprehensive way in order to decide whether they execute well. If you are looking to enter a market, the best case is a highly fragmented space with poorly executing competitors. The worst case is a space dominated by a solidly executing monopoly.

Average Ad Percentile

     Average Ad Percentile is a measure of Ad Position taking into account a domain’s average ad competitors. Also, whereas Avg. Ad Position gets larger as the actual ad positions decrease in cost and traffic, Average Ad Percentile approaches 100% as a domain gets closer to dominating the first ad position. Avg. Ad Percentile is calculated by dividing Avg. Ad Position into Avg. Ad Competitors. That number is then subtracted from 100%. So, for example, if a domain has an Average Ad Position of 4, and an Average of 10 Ad Competitors, then their Average Ad Percentile is 100% - 4/10 = 60%. So, regardless of the number of competitors the domain’s ads typically show up in the top 60th percentile.

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How You Can Use It

     Average Ad Percentile, like Avg. Ad Position, gives you insight into your competitor’s ad strategy. Unlike Ad Position, Ad Percentile essentially removes the number of competitors from the equation. Because Avg Ad Percentile increases as the Cost Per Click, Clicks Per Day, and Cost per Day increase, you can use it to adjust or evaluate those numbers. In fact, this is a key measure that we use when we calculate Estimated Daily Budget, Clicks/Day, etc. So, if Avg. Ad Percentile seems out of whack, so might the rest.

Other Domain Information

Organic Results

     Organic Results is a list of all of the keywords that the domain ranks in the top 50 search results on Google. Organic search results are those that are displayed naturally and cannot be purchased. Unlike the ads that appear at the top and side of a Google results page, Organic Results appear down the center of the page.

     The number in parentheses is the total number of keywords on which the domain ranks in the top 50. If you are a subscriber, and you click the More button, you will be able to view all of the keywords and even download them to Excel.

How You Can Use It

     When you have a complete list of a competitor’s organic keywords, you are essentially looking at the blueprints for their entire Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy. You are free to copy, improve, or exploit anything that they are doing. There is absolutely no shame in copying what your competitors do best and improving on it.

     Compare a domain’s Organic keyword to their paid keywords. In most cases, a domain would like to rank organically on all their keywords. A comprehensive SEO/SEM strategy would be to rank organically on the best keywords that are least competitive, then buy the rest as over Adwords or other PPC channels. If that is what your competitor is doing, then use their keywords as a template.

     On the other hand, many domains have absolutely no SEO strategy. They might rank haphazardly on a few keywords, but end up buying far more relevant keywords than they rank on organically. If that’s the case, you’d do best not to copy their SEO strategy, but perhaps take the keywords that they advertise on and build a SEO strategy from those.

     If a domain has managed to rank organically on lots of real high quality keywords and advertise on almost none (Epinions and DealTime come to mind),

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they are executing the SEO model to the extreme. If you can figure out what they are doing, and how they have structured their site and their content to do what they do; if it makes sense for you and your site, you’d probably not regret the research.

Advertisements

     Advertisements is a list of all of the keywords that a domain buys from Google. The text based ads appear at the top of the page and on the right side of a Google search results.

     The number in parentheses is the total number of keywords tracked by SpyFu that the domain buys. If you are a subscriber, and you click the More button, you can view all of the domain’s keywords and even download them to Excel.

How You Can Use It

     This is SpyFu’s quintessential guerilla marketing tactic. You can take the list of keywords your competitor buys; their secret formula for success; the list that took years to perfect and start advertising on it on day one. You can use your knowledge of their online marketing strategy to kick start your own, or exploit their weakness. Is it an unfair advantage? Absolutely.

     Unless your competitor is executing an SEO strategy very effectively, meaning that their Organic Keywords get lots of very targeted traffic, then their Advertisements keyword list is probably a great for optimizing your site’s content. In other words, if your competitor could rank organically on the keywords that they advertise on, they probably would. The fact is, they either didn’t know which keywords would be most valuable when they created their site’s content, or they just didn’t execute search optimization well. This is a common weakness that you can and should exploit.

     Look at the keywords that your competitor buys. Do they buy mostly broad single-word keywords? If they do, you might be able to improve the efficiency by buying more long-tail keywords.

Top Organic Competitors

     Top Organic Competitors is a list of the Top 1000 domains that rank on the same keywords as the current domain. For example, if LardCandles.com ranks organically on one search term “Lard Candle” then we might show a list of 49 competitors; one for each competing result on the Google search “Lard Candle”. On the other hand, if a domain ranks organically on hundreds of keywords, we will find domains that overlap most frequently and return the top 1000 in order of the number of overlapping keywords.

How You Can Use It

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     Whereas Top Ad Competitors is amazingly accurate at telling you who a domain’s true competitors are, Top Organic Competitors is often surprisingly inaccurate. That’s because companies that have similar product and service offerings often advertise on the same keywords. They are essentially self classifying themselves by advertising on those keywords, therefore, predicting who is a competitor is really accurate. Those same companies pay vastly different attention to how well they optimize their site for the same keywords. Generally speaking, Top Organic Competitors tells you how well or how poorly a site is executing it’s search optimization. If your site sells candles, but somehow all of the Organic Competitors that SpyFu lists are banks, you should probably look at improving your search optimization.

Top Ad Competitors

     Top Ad Competitors is a list of the Top 1000 domains that advertise on the same keywords as the current domain. Domains that overlap most often show up at the top. The exception is when one domain advertises on vastly more keywords than the other. If not for that exception, Ebay, Yahoo, and Amazon would be everyone’s biggest competitor because they advertise on so many keywords.

How You Can Use It

     If you want to know who competes with a given domain, from the largest to the smallest, Top Ad Competitors is the best place on the Internet to find out. Unless a company is big enough that a financial services firm has hired an analyst to specifically track it’s competition, you will not find publicly available a better report. And let me not in any way risk being modest. If that analyst did not check their report against the Top Ad Competitors report, they probably don’t have a full list of competitors. Check your domain against the full list of Top Ad Competitors. If you are like me, you’ll find competitors on there that you didn’t even know about. It’s spooky how good it is.

     The reason Top Ad Competitors is so amazingly accurate is that when a domain advertises on a keyword, they are essentially classifying themselves. It is like tagging something ala del.icio.us. Sites that compete on keywords almost always compete in real life products and services, so it works real well.

Sub Domains     Subdomains are used to divide websites into different sections. Usually the subdomain is a descriptive name placed before the main domain. For example, Yahoo has several subdomains for their website. The finance section is under the subdomain http://finance.yahoo.com and their shopping section has the subdomain http://shopping.yahoo.com. In fact, according to SpyFu, yahoo.com has 3,458 such sub domains.

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     The number in parentheses is the number of organic keywords that each subdomain ranks on. The subdomains are ordered from most organic keywords to least. SpyFu keeps track of all the statistics kept for a domain for each subdomain as well. When you click on the link, you will go to the stats for the clicked sub domain.

Other Domains Owned

     A company can, of course, own as many domains as it likes. Microsoft, for example, owns at least 182 domains that SpyFu tracks. So, when you want to get the full picture of what a competitor is up to, you should look at all of their domains.

Categories

     These are the dmoz.org Open Directory categories to which the domain belongs. The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others.

How You Can Use It

     This gives you an understanding of the various topics that a domain deals with. If it belongs to many diverse categories, while you may consider it a direct competitor, there may be domains that it considers competitors that you don’t consider yours. These may be opportunities for partnership.

     For example, Microsoft is a very diverse software and services company. It is so diverse that hundreds if not thousands of smaller software companies see it as a direct competitor. Imagine that you are a software maker and your flagship software is a word processor. Clearly, Microsoft is a big competitor of yours. When you look at Microsoft.com’s categories, you see that in addition to belonging to a Word Processor category, the site also belongs to a Small Business Accounting category. Suddenly something clicks: What if you could partner with a Small Business Accounting vendor? Perhaps with some cross promotion and clever bundling you could create the foundation of an office productivity platform to take on the giant. Perhaps you would be quickly crushed and sued out of existence. But, the moral of the story is you were able to quickly find competitors of your competitor that were not also your competitor. Such people make great partners, regardless of the destiny.

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The Company PageThe company page is the last of the three pages that you can land on directly from

a search. This page rolls up information from domains owned by the same company. So the stats and content shown is the same as the domain page. One difference is the “Domains” box which gives you a means to navigate to any domain that the company owns. The other is the industries box which allows you to browse to other company pages in the same industry.

Below is a screenshot of the company “Velocityscape”. See the domain page section of the manual for detailed information about the stats and other content. The definitions are the same.

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The Host and Path PagesWhereas the company page rolls up multiple domain’s information into a single

page, the host and path pages break down a single domain page into multiple pages. For example, instead of viewing information for all of velocityscape.com, the host page can show you the information for just forums.velocityscape.com or www.velocityscape.com. The path page can break things down even further by showing the differences between www.velocityscape.com/download and www.velocityscape.com/news.

So company gives you the biggest roll up of data (except for Categories and Industries) and path gives you the most detailed breakdown. You can navigate between all of these page by either links in the right column or the top most title bar as shown below.

Navigate to breakdown results (links in right column)

Navigate to roll up results (top most title bar)

Company.aspx None

Domains.aspx

Host.aspx

Path.aspx None

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Browsing SpyFu

Overview

The alternative to doing a search in SpyFu is browsing by either industry or company. Our list of industries is determined by SIC code. Our hierarchy of categories is from dmoz.org.

CategoriesBoth terms and domains are categorized in SpyFu. As you click on sub

categories, the cookie trail (in this case Root > Health) at the top of the page will grow to allow you to go back in the hierarchy. The rollup of stats at the top will also change to show what we estimate for the entire category. Below is a screenshot followed by some detailed information about the other related content you’ll find on these pages.

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Related Terms

     Related Terms are similar terms that you would associate with this category.

How You Can Use It

     Use the term links to jump to the actual SpyFu stats for each term.

Related Domains

    If you were to visit Dmoz.org and browse to this category you would find a list of links. If you take the root category of those links you would then have the list we have below. Of course here you can just click a category to get all of the stats available on it from SpyFu.

IndustriesOnly companies are classified under different industries in SpyFu. However,

when browsing industries SpyFu will give you a list of terms called “Popular Terms” that are used within the industry. When these terms are entered into Google, it is likely that companies in the given industry will be among the search results.

Also, statistics for companies in a given industries are wrapped up and displayed on this page. The statistic definitions are the same as you would find on a company page. They’re just averaged for all companies in the industry you are currently viewing.

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Your SpyFu AccountWhat do you get with an account?

With an account you will be able to do the following: No More Ads. View complete lists. Click the more button on a list to see its entire contents. Export lists to excel or csv. After viewing the full list you will find export

buttons as well. Of you can click the “Xls” and “Csv” links that appear at the bottom of the list preview after you login.

Store lists of terms and domains for easy monitoring. (discussed more below) View more charts. We are always trying to add more ways to view the data.

Look for more charts other than those you see for free. Access forums. The forum link is in the top right of virtually every SpyFu page.

We are in no way finished adding functionality for our users. We are always happy to hear suggestions for additional features. Please use the forums or call us to let us know how you need to see your SpyFu data.

Using Custom ListsAs you search through domains and terms you will notice that there is the option

to add them to “My Terms” or “My Domains”. This is just the default custom list for each these categories that comes with an account. As you add and rename lists, you will see this link turn to a drop down box, so that you can add any term or domain to any list you want in a single click.

To edit your lists, you’ll need to click the “My Account” link that appears in the top right after you login. From there you’ll see tabs for each of the custom lists you can have. From there you can rename, copy, and create new lists.