How valuable would it be for you to pick a domain name and see what PPC keyword terms and pay per click advertisements that site was using to market their site?

What if you could monitor the keyword and campaign purchases of your competitors?

That was the initial promise and sales pitch for CompetiorKeywords.com.

They are offering a 7 day free trial, so I thought I would login and play with the tool.

At first glance, the interface was a little clunky, but I was impressed when I dug into the reports. I was able to quickly type in the name of one of my merchant's sites and get an extensive list of keywords. Many that had not come up in my prior research, which I thought had been extensive. I found terms that made me smack myself in the head and say "how could I have missed THAT one!".

Here are some of the "quick reports" that they offer:

Monitor Your Competitor's Keywords

Enter up to 20 domains and this report will quickly display a list of keyword searches that generated ads that marketed these domains. It's interesting to note, that these are "actual searches" that triggered ads, not necessarily terms those companies or their affiliates bid on. So if the competitor bid on IPOD as a broad match term and the actual term the user type in that triggered the ad was ipod nano, than this term would show up in the report.

Monitor Your Own Domain

This is very similar to the competitor keyword report, but is for your own domain. I am not sure why I couldn't have just put my own domain in the competitor report. The results are the same. My guess if I had configured a specific domain in my account than the competitor report would have excluded my listings. I did a search on one of my domains and it did pull up only a limited number of terms. My guess is that their panel hasn't search all of the terms.

Find Competitors Bidding on Specific Terms

This report lets you specify a keyword and see who is currently bidding on that term.

View User Searches by Keyword

This report lets you enter a term and see specific searches that included that term. This report is not nearly as powerful as Wordtracker. It is limited to searches that incude the term specified, where Wordtracker will list derivative terms. For example, a search for costumes might pull up Tony Arma Halloween Costumes it wouldn't pull up terms like Halloween Decorations.

View Your Competitor's Text Ads

This is a quick way to get an idea of the types of ads your competitors are running.

View Text Ads Containing Specific Keywords

This report let's you select a keyword term and display the text ads that contain that term. It might be a bit more useful if the urls accompanied the text ads.

View Text Ads Triggered by Specific Keywords

Again these text ads don't contain urls, it might just be easier to go and do a search on one of the search engines to see these ads. It should show multiple ads being run for the same merchant though, so it might have some uses, I just can't think of any off the top of my head.

View Competitor Landing Pages (Basic URL)

This report should pull up landing pages being used by a specific domain. My test indicated that it pulled up a few landing pages and some for competitive sites under a specified sponsor domain. I am not sure why that is, but seeing the landing pages used by a site is interesting.

View Competitor Landing Pages (Full URL)

Similar to the Basic URL report, this one actually shows the full url. I found this report to be a bit more interesting, it identified affiliate codes and tracking codes that the other report didn't reveal. I could see using this report to identify is a competitor is using specific tracking and bid management tools.

In summary, it's an interesting tool that provides some extra incite into competitive behavior and actual searches being used to trigger ads. The cost is a bit steeper than Wordtracker though. At $49.95 per month (approx $600 per year) it's 143% more expensive. If I had to pick one tool for keyword research I would go with Wordtracker, if your doing well and want to expand your research, this tool is interesting choice.