SpyFu Allows You To View Competitive Advertisement Rates Online

By Amit Chowdhry ● Dec 2, 2006

SpyFu is a new product that was created by Velocityscape that allows users to gain insight about the rates that competitors are spending through online advertising. Michael Roberts founded and created Velocityscape in 1999 and has been a provider of analytics to various enterprises.

How does SpyFu aggregate the advertising budgets from these companies? SpyFu takes in feeds from Google Adwords budget estimation software and Velocityscape contains over 2 million keywords with related prices.

I read on Startup Squad that if a chocolate company wanted to figure out what competitors are paying for online advertising, they could log on to SpyFu and search for the keyword, “chocolate” to find out costs per click, clicks per day, cost per day, the advertisers involved, and the search results that are pulled up for the various keywords.

I searched for the keyword, “Zune,” but there were not any results (I suppose because it is a new product) so then I searched for “iPod.” The results are below:

It appeared that the cost/click for iPod is $0.70 and that there are 47 advertisers using the iPod as a keyword including Apple.com, Circuit City, Best Buy, etc.

As far as future services that will be provided by SpyFu, Start Squad reports that “SpyFu is planning to add features like trademark monitoring, favorites list, include data from Yahoo and MSN to provide more comprehensive set of results, and provide graphical trends of keyword pricing over time.”

Velocityscape is a private company in Phoenix, AZ and has grown exponentially since then. The CEO, Michael J. Roberts is a former software architect for Microsoft.