The company offers GoogSpy as a free online utility to demonstrate a taste of the power of their paid products. Advertisers can use the tool to research keywords that their competitors may be using, in order to not only find out the competition’s tactics, but also to help build your own keyword list competitively.

When you enter a keyword for your AdWords campaign into GoogSpy, the search results in a list of companies that already pay for that word and a list of “search terms”, which aren’t really intuitively explained. With some searches, you will also see related keywords used by other sites. If you click on one of these, you not only see companies who pay for that related keyword, but also the top 10 organic listings and more related keywords – this time for the original related keyword.

You can delve deeper and deeper into related keywords if you wish, although sometimes your searches go off on weird tangents far beyond your original intent. If this sounds a little confusing, it can be.

You will receive much more useful information from GoogSpy if you choose to browse either company names/URLs or keywords themselves. For example, clicking on the keyword from GoogSpy’s “browse” listing brings up a lot more information organized in a more comprehensive fashion. GoogSpy will initially return three types of listings – links to websites that pay for that specific keyword/phrase in their AdWords campaigns, the top 10 websites that come up in an organic Google search for that keyword, and other keywords that are used by companies that use the keyword you first entered. From here, you can investigate any of these keywords, related words, see how a company’s ranking changes for different keywords, and other permutations.

The tool is especially interesting when you choose to search a company/URL that is in the database. With one click, you can discover the keywords a specific company is paying for in AdWords, as well as where it ranks in the top 10 for those keywords.