Late last week I received an email from Ray Drainville (Argument from Design) about a site called SpyFu.

I don't know if any of you have heard of this site but I would certainly steer clear. The reason I say this is because it caused me more grief over the last 5 days than all of the other tasks I had on all put together.

This website is a SEO related keyword tool. But the difference is that it tries to also give you an approximate spend for your competitors based on the knowledge it has built after scraping the internet.

I have found its results to be totally unreliable.

We spend a certain (not inconsiderable) ammount advertisint on Google. Nowadays we do this through an agency and not directly for ease of management.

While this means that we do not get the full spend on our Adwords campaign it should mean that it is well managed.

Running our site through the SpyFu system I got the result that we spend about £10 per day on our CPC campaign. This is waaaaay off. I wish we did spend £10 per day.

But this got my cogs turning. Are we really spending that much and are the agency taking the rest?

I have spend most of the last 5 working days getting to the bottom of it and the conclusion is that SpyFu's data is unreliable.