Welcome to the new and improved PPC Kombat. Now it’s easier and more actionable than ever.

With Kombat you can compare your domain against multiple competitors and use their combined strategies to quickly find new keyword opportunities for your ad campaigns.

We also include next gen metrics, filters, and grouping so you can prune the keyword list to perfectly fit your advertising strategies.

We wanted to make Kombat as simple and practical as possible, and I’m excited to show you the ropes of its features.

Intro

For most people doing competitive PPC research on Kombat, we suggest entering your own domain into the search box at the top.

We will go over the method of entering ONLY competitors in a bit, but if you have an active PPC campaign let’s start by entering your own domain and hitting enter.

SpyFu will automatically scroll you down where you can see all of the keywords that any of these domains have been advertising on. As well as different next generation metrics related to these keywords.

If you click on the columns button, you can add or remove different columns of these metrics, by checking and unchecking them.

On the left you’ll notice that we’ve included various filters that you can use to hone in the list of keywords that you want. And next to that tab is where you’ll find these keywords automatically organized into easy to use groups.

We will be going over all of these things in more detail in a moment, but let’s first scroll back up to show you one of the biggest changes that we’ve made, the multi-domain Venn diagram.

Multiple Domain View

Kombat has been a great tool for comparing your domain against your two biggest competitors. But NOW you can add as many competitors as you’d like.

You can easily add or remove domains from this list until you build a keyword list you think would be beneficial for your campaign.

Being able to add several domains has a multitude of advantages. Two of the biggest ones is that

That second one is important because the key rule of ad buying is that - if one or two of your competitors are buying keywords, they might be interesting to look into. But if a bunch of your competitors are buying the same keywords and you are not? Those are almost must-buys, or at least must-trys.

So I want to look at some of those buy recommendations from this curated list of domains. I’m going to click on Consider Buying to check out those keywords.

These are all keywords that all of these other domains buy, but my domain does not.

It’s quite a list, so I’m going to trim it down a little by using filters.

Filters:

Filters quickly eliminate the noise and get to the actionable stuff that can help your PPC campaign.

Keep in mind that, currently, these filters still apply to the overall segment of “Consider Buying”, so we are still looking at a keyword set that our competitors buy but our domain does not.

You can whittle down these results even by including or excluding various keywords.

On top of that you can add a range of the search volume for this domain’s paid keywords. Or even the average cost per click for these keywords.

When you combine these filters you can really customize the result list to the keywords you’d like to focus on, as well as your ad budget.

Groups:

If you’re looking for opportunities you might as well look for the big opportunities first. Groups give you “group sized” opportunities and you’re able to see how big that group size is.

It's also a good "forest for the trees" guide. It helps you to see the overall themes you might be missing, it’s a more effective way than skimming individual keywords.

As you click on the different ad groups you’ll notice the keyword results on the right adjust to fit within those categories.

This comes in extra handy when you’re organizing buy recommendations from Kombat.

Add → (Convenient timesaver), (copy to clipboard)

After clicking on a keyword group or subgroup you can add the entire thing to a MySpyFu project. Make sure you have the right project open here on the right, and then simply click add group.

You can then open up MySpyFu and see your new group added to your project. SpyFu will automatically start tracking the performance and trends of this group and its keywords. It’s a simple feature that will save you a ton of time.

You can also export the entire keyword list to a CSV, Google Sheets, PDF, or simply copy it to a clipboard and use whatever software is most comfortable for you.

Combining these strategies:

When you combine multiple competitors and look at the consider buying segment for their keywords.

Then use filters and next gen metrics to hone in on keyword sets

And then automatically group those sets and export them to the format that you prefer

You are basically building an entire ad campaign with focused suggested keywords, with the ability to scale it to multiple campaigns and groups. This process of research and execution used to take hours or days to accomplish, but with Kombat, you’ll be on your way in a matter of minutes.

And that was the entire intent of this tool and this update.

Before we move on, let’s talk about a lesser known but extremely helpful segment, Potential Ad waste.

Potential Ad waste

This segment is pretty much the opposite of Buy Recommendations because it will show you the keywords that you’re advertising on, but all of these competitors are not.

Sometimes it’s your brand name, a specific product you sell, or even clever high converting keywords that you thought of yourself. But sometimes you’re accidentally broad matching on weird keywords, and wasting your ad budget on those keywords month after month.

This section is great for sniffing out those pesky keywords so you can negative match them out of your campaign, and stop wasting money on them.

If you see a keyword that looks fishy, you can use the filters to look more into them and weed out the variants.

Saving money by eliminating wasteful ad spending is almost as important as making money with well targeted ads. This segment makes it incredibly easy to prune your ad waste and save you a ton of money over time, so be sure to take a look at it throughout the life of your campaigns.

Competitors Only Approach

Let’s rewind for a second, and talk about another other approach you can take in Kombat.

Let’s say you don’t want to start with your own domain. Maybe because you haven’t actually created a PPC campaign yet, or you do have active ad campaigns but you want to venture into a category that’s new to you.

Or maybe because this is simply the way you prefer to do your research.

Whatever the reason, PPC Kombat is there to help.

I’m going to remove my domain from this top list.

Kombat will still offer the same segments, but in this case “Consider Buying” might not be the best focus because it’s recommendations for this first domain, which isn’t our own anymore.

All keywords and core keywords are a better bet when only focusing on competitors.

Core Keywords are the keywords that all of these competitors buy, and since our domain does have active PPC campaigns running, it’s possible that we buy some of these keywords as well!

So I’m going to put my domain in “Hide Your Site’s Paid Keywords”, and sure enough, the keyword list went down significantly.

This will yield similar, if not the exact same results as the Consider Buying technique that we used earlier. But might give you more flexibility when adding or exchanging different competitors up top.

Again, it’s all in how you prefer to do your research.

All of the filtering, grouping, and exporting work exactly the same as they did before.

Wrap Up:

Kombat is one of our personal favorite tools here at SpyFu, it has been for a long time

We are so excited for it to be faster, more in depth, and more useful than ever. Use Kombat to build actionable and focused ad campaigns using the lessons of your biggest competitors.

As always Thank you for watching

Related: Try our video guide to Kombat for SEO. It helps you uncover popular topics amongst your competitors that you might not have covered yet. Pick up some clicks with untapped content.