Ever wonder which keywords your competitors using in their online advertising campaigns? When we started to get serious about advertising we wondered the same thing. Using our Web Scraper Plus software, we set out on an experiment to get some answers. We fed in a basic list of keyword searches (Web Scraping, Love, God, and Sex) to Google and noted the ads, ad placement, and organic search results returned for each. We also extracted other keywords on the page to grow the search. In the end we had data on about 500K keywords.

After spending some time crunching the data for our own and our competitor’s keywords, we came away with some interesting insights about our online advertising. With our new information in hand we set about making changes to our online ad campaign and did what any entrepreneurial company would do with all this great information, we put it on the shelf. "I remember Googspy being real hard to justify doing. I am a big 'focus, focus, focus' guy, and although I had really wanted to do it for a long time, making it something we should do was a stretch in my mind," recalls Velocityscape’s President, Michael Roberts.

Michael knew he had something unique and was continually drawn back to it. I had read all of those Tips & Tricks articles and each one said 'Find out which search terms your competitors use.' That seemed obvious, but apparently the 'best practice' for this was guess-and-check." Other companies had been providing information about keywords, cost, clicks per day, and even recommending keywords; but nobody was doing a good job of telling you which actual keywords your competitors’ were using. Googspy had to be done.

When we launched GoogSpy, it was purely experimental. Our vague initial goal was use Googspy as a marketing tool for Velocityscape. We built it fast and with no bells and whistles. We thought it had potential and were anxious to see the response.

We launched GoogSpy on April 25th, 2005 and it was an instant hit. Word of Googspy spread quickly on Search blogs and forums and we received a tremendous response. Within two weeks we had been mentioned in an article in the Wall Street Journal and our online sales leads increased by 25%.

Astonished, we watched as the traffic leveled out, and we listened to our customers. The biggest wants were more raw data and keyword statistics. SpyFu has nearly 20 times more data, and the coolest statistics imaginable. We are math geeks at heart, so we really like the statistics. This time we did it right. We can’t wait to see what people think of SpyFu.