5 Questions with Michael J. Roberts, President of Velocityscape (and Proprietor of GoogSpy)
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Written By Reprise Media | August 18, 2006 | Share This
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One of the first rules of a good SEM campaign is, “find out what the other guy’s bidding on.” That once-tedious ordeal - involving a lot of guess-and-check - was made much simpler last April with the launch of GoogSpy, an indispensable tool for collecting competitive intelligence. This week we chat with Velocityscape president (and GoogSpy guru) Mike Roberts about an upcoming launch that promises to make the site even more essential to SEMs.
1. How has response been from the SEM and marketing community?
The response has been incredible. GoogSpy was just this little idea I had bouncing around the back of my head to solve a problem that, at as an entrepreneur, I encountered when I first opened my Adwords account. The idea stayed there for a couple years until it occurred to me that building the site would be a pretty good way to show off the power of our flagship product Web Scraper Plus+. We actually included the extraction templates that we used to create GoogSpy as a sample in Web Scraper for at least a year prior to building the site. In fact, we still do.
GoogSpy took all of four days to create. It was 100% experimental.
We issued a couple of press releases, and a few days later we were in the Wall Street Journal! I wish I could say that I was expecting that response.
We never expected to have the opportunity to build it for “real.”
We watched as the traffic leveled out, and we listened to our customers.
The biggest wants were more raw data and keyword statistics. The new site
has nearly 20 times more data, and the coolest statistics imaginable. I’m a math geek at heart, so I really like the statistics. This time, we put 8 months into it.
2. When GoogSpy first launched, there was a lot of sentiment on the blogs about enjoying GoogSpy “while it lasts,” as though a cease & desist letter from Google was imminent…and yet here you are, over a year later. What response, if any, have you gotten from Google? If not, do you expect a response?
Um, no comment. No, seriously, we ARE still here. We provide an important service to Google’s clients, and I think they respect that. Initially, we had AdSense on GoogSpy which captured a live glimpse at the difference between ads on the search site and the content network. Google didn’t like that which, frankly, I can respect. I doubt GoogSpy visitors were
interested in buying the product or service being advertised.
3. You mentioned that GoogSpy is ramping up to a huge new release in the next few weeks, when it’ll offer more features, more results - and a name change. Can you talk a bit about what regular GoogSpy users can expect to see when it all goes down?
In the new release (called SpyFu, by the way), we will offer nearly 20 times more raw data, and a ton of new features including price and spending estimates. Much of SpyFu will still be 100% free. The free interface will
be similar to GoogSpy, but better and more extensive. That said, some new
features like pricing will only be available to paid subscribers.
4. Let’s talk about the subscription-based features. How widely do you expect them to be adopted, particularly among industry pros? Does charging for the service complicate your relationship with Google?
We have spent a lot of time talking with professional SEM guys, and I hope that what we have come up with will truly fulfill their wildest fantasies.
Clearly, I am really proud of what we have done. I just can’t wait for the launch. I mean, with SpyFu, I know with a reasonable degree of accuracy how much each of my competitors spends on ads each month. It makes me want to buy a hairless cat and a monocle to go with my villainous cackle. It is awesome.
By the way, in addition to the subscription service, we are also offering full data subscriptions and branded interfaces targeted towards mid to large
firms. We actually already have people signed up for that.
5. You’ve talked about unleashing some GoogSpy-style science on other top engines. How about it? Are we going to see an MSNSpy or a YaFu!?
Absolutely! In fact, that’s part of the reason for the name change. Of course, there’s only so much you can put into a single release. Once we are up and running, there are a lot of improvements that we can roll in through a normal beta process. What we have with SpyFu is an extremely solid foundation. We have some more cool stuff in the pipeline.
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