I started my first serious ppc campaign about three weeks ago for a small dropshipping ecommerce store I had built. The store was in the gaming niche and I had seen a similar one for sale on Sitepoint which claimed an amazing $1700 return a month on a $10 a day ppc budget, which sounded too good to be true, and it was. (I later found that this was a scam. A post on this is on the way!)

The person who bought the site on Sitepoint was still running ads which meant that it must be profitable, if not to the extent the seller claimed. Impossible as it seemed for a complete novice with Google Adwords, I took on the challenge of bringing my site into profit on a $10 a day budget. I wasn’t looking for a $1700 return but doubling my money would be nice.

Week one was a disaster. I hopped from content to search, to search only to content only to search only in 3 countries to search and content in 179 countries …. you get the idea. I was clueless. Needless to say, there was no profit this week.

Week two I slowed down and broke even and week 3 was similar.

Feeling really frustrated, I remembered an email I had gotten from Rosalind Gardner a long time ago that I had glimpsed and then trashed.  Some guy was paying over $3 a click in the spyware niche for specific keywords. How did she know this?   She was using  ppc keyword spy to check out what keywords competitors were bidding on, how much they were paying and how many clicks they were getting.

At last, a glimmer of hope.  I could possibly find out what keywords my competitor was using to keep her campaign in profit.

When I checked it out,  I was amazed to see that I could try out  ppc keyword spy for free and it was a simple Firefox plugin!

Immediately, even with the trail limitations I could see my competitor was bidding on keywords that I hadn’ t even thought of and I could see how much I needed to pay to be up there in the ranks.

The PPC Keyword Spy plugin simply places a ‘View Keywords’ link under each ad. The free version shows only 10 results, which sometimes can be enough to give you competitive advantage. The full version will display up to 100 competitor keywords. Simply clicking on the

View Keywords will pop up all the information you need. PPC Keyword Spy is a dream come as far as competitor espionnage is concerned.

PPC Keyword Spy, the full version is definitely next on my list of IM investments. I don’t run enough ppc campaigns yet but this tool has given me the little push to feel safer experimenting with dropshipping.

So is my Adwords campaign turning me a profit.  Yes! I spend $10, I make $20. That was my goal.  Nothing to shout about but I know now that I can create 10 more dropshipping sites, confident that I have the tools to set up and manage a profitable ppc campaign!