Keyword Rockstar Review

Ok so, in my last post I touched on how important research is and how it can really make the difference between finding a high ROI campaign winner - or a dud. Proper research is key. I also promised you a review, and here is my first in this series - my Keyword Rockstar review.

Comprehensive Research with Keyword Rockstar

Here is something I hear all the time; “The best keyword research tool is your brain“. Alright…yes, our brains are awesome. And we can think up tons of good and unusual ideas that no tool out there is gonna give you.

But when it comes down to it - our brains can only help to a certain extent with the creative side of keyword research. To really prepare well for a solid campaign, you will benefit from some help…

The best free keyword tool out there is still the one and only Google Adwords Keyword Tool. I still use it every week, but it still doesn’t meet all my needs when I wanna do some serious keyword research. Besides, it can get time-consuming to use if you wanna do several iterations of searches based on prior results.

So what do I do? I use a new and powerful tool called Keyword Rockstar.

The first version came out not too long ago, but it is already my favorite keyword tool for research.

Keyword Rockstar is…
- part keyword research (based on the Google Adwords tool)
- part campaign builder (kinda like “Speed PPC”, but for both search and content)
- part content placement finder (kinda like “Content Bully” but better)
- part competition landing page and ad analysis tool (kinda like “PPC Bully”)
- part competition keyword analysis tool (kinda like “KeywordSpy”)
- part image / banner ad generator (like nothing else out there!)

I’m not saying Keyword Rockstar will replace all those tools entirely (with the exception of “Content Bully”, lol). But if you don’t wanna fork out the money for a bunch of other tools - you will have most of your research needs covered, and then some, with this one.

Features

First, let’s take a bird’s eye overview of the Keyword Rockstar features. Now let it be said that this isn’t just your average keyword tool that simply gives you a bunch of keywords and their monthly volume.

• Always fresh keyword data. Not based on outdated sources or estimates.
• Advanced placement finder for content network or media buy campaigns
• Deep keyword research based on a set of root keywords, or a list of competitor URLs
• Built-in, multiple-format, image ad generator for content network campaigns
• Adwords Content network campaign builder
• View competitors’ ads for each keyword found
• Advanced filtering, sorting, and keyword grouping engine
• Proxy support with country filtering
• Extensive reporting system, allowing export to multiple formats including PDF, Excel, CSV, TXT and more.

One of the things that separates Keyword Rockstar from many well-known competitors, is that it’s NOT based on outdated databases or “estimates” from 2nd or 3rd tier search engines like so many other keyword tools. Keyword Rockstar gathers all its data in real-time from the best source available: the Google Adwords Keyword Tool itself.

Note: More data sources are planned for future releases, but Google is the default choice as of now.

What also separates it from the rest is that it obviously can do so much more (as you can see listed above).

Installation, Usability and Interface

Unlike many other keyword tools, Keyword Rockstar installs on your pc (or will run fine through VMware if you own a Mac). The installation procedure is easy, but slow. According to the developers, this is something they are working on and future versions are promised to install much faster.

When you first start up the program, you are welcomed with a screen showing the latest version/bugfix updates as well as a “Feature suggestion” feedback box. I really think more apps should have this as it’s a nice and quick way for you to tell the developers something you’d like to see changed or added.

The overall interface and navigation feels intuitive enough. Nothing jaw-dropping, but it doesn’t need to be either. It’s a keyword tool! Well, I take that back… there is one really awesome part of the user interface that I find very, very clever. More on that later though - in the section about their filtering and grouping engine.

Working with Keyword Rockstar

But let’s move on to the fun, shall we? Alright - so the first thing you wanna do is create a new project. Keyword Rockstar is project-based, which means you can create and work on several research projects simultaneously whenever you want.

For each new project, you tell the program what to (and what not to) search for, and what sort of data you want to gather for all of your results.

As input to the program, you can specify either of these or both:

• A seed list of root keywords
  For example, “weightloss, losing weight, fat loss diet, acai berry, lose weight fast”. Your seed list doesn’t need to be long but I usually input 10-15 words. These are the words Keyword Rockstar will go out and retrieve other relevant keywords for (for both broad, phrase and match)
• A seed list of URLs
  This is the equivalent of entering a URL in the Google Keyword Tool. The program will query Google’s tool with these URLs and return relevant keywords. This is great for getting an idea of what your competitors could be ranking for or bidding on. Google’s results aren’t always accurate of course, but like I said - this will give you tons of more ideas.

Now we need to specify what we want Keyword Rockstar to return for each keyword. This is done under a pane called “Stats to Collect”. The options here are pretty impressive. Remember; you can gather all these stats for EACH keyword…

• Adwords stats
  Such as approx. avg. search volume, level of advertiser competition, estimated average cpc, estimated ad position, estimated clicks per day, search volume trends, and highest volume month.
• Current 1st Page Ads & Total Ad Count
  Pretty self explanatory.. It will retrieve the number of competing ads AND the ads themselves! This is really neat, as you can copy/paste from these later to get ideas for your own variations (hey - don’t be a douche and blatantly copy ads word for word, lol).
• Placements Available
  Awesome if you ask me. This feature alone adds a lot of value to Keyword Rockstar in my opinion. In fact, this feature does what “Content Bully” does (a paid tool from the PPC Bully guys). So why pay for Content Bully, when you can use Keyword Rockstar’s built-in functionality?
• Competing Page Count
  This is particularly helpful if you’re doing SEO research as well. It basically returns the number of indexed pages for the keyword / keyphrase in question.
• AllInTitle Count
  Another useful SEO statistic. Anyone with basic SEO knowledge will tell you the importance of keywords contained in a page title tag. With this , you can get a full overview of this number for all the words in your list.
• Online Commercial Intent
  One of my favorites! This data is gathered from MSN Adlab’s excellent tool. It will give you an idea of how commercially viable each keyword possibly is. TIP: By sorting or grouping the list by this data later on, you have a great way of grouping your keywords - perfect for dividing your list to different visitors and their buying modes. In other words: Perfect for the stuff I was talking about here.
• PPC & SEO Rockstar rank
  This is their own proprietary score given to each keyword based on the variables above. To be honest, I have yet to use this option so I can’t tell you too much about it.

It’s up to you if you want to gather all the detailed data upfront, if you don’t want or need too many details, or if you wanna get the basics first and then come back to the project later to get the deep details just for the keywords you need. I usually do the latter.

I find that running a heavily detailed search initially slows down processing time tremendously. This because Keyword Rockstar will then retrieve all kinds of details from different sources - for EACH keyword in your list (even iteratively on its own results if you let it). This obviously can become an ambitious task.

So I prefer to first only gather relevant keywords along with search volumes, and then later filter the results. From the resulting list, I then start up a new data collection process on only the keywords I found interesting.

Performance and Proxy Support

The last (optional) step you can do before you tell Keyword Rockstar to start retrieval, is to specify any proxies you want to use. The main benefit to using proxies is increased retrieval speed. Without proxies, you can only retrieve results at a certain pace. (You can actually tell the program to retrieve faster - but you you will then quickly run into temporary IP bans from Google or MSN). So the lack of proxy use can sometimes mean having to type in captchas every once in a while.

(For some strange reason, they don’t like it when people try to scrape thousands of keyword data from their tools in a short time….dunno why..

So my recommendation is to use proxies. As a member of Keyword Rockstar, you also get access to updated proxy lists that you can copy and paste right into the tool. I sometimes get my own proxy lists around the web, but it doesn’t hurt to have this option.

Adding these to the project setting is a breeze. You can also filter them based on the country you want to retrieve keyword data for.

With proxies in place, retrieveal can be set to move faster. There is a speedometer-looking dial that you can move with your mouse to set the speed. I’ve never pushed it to the max but let it run on around 50%. For a medium-sized project (15-30 root keywords), expect Keyword Rockstar to be working for a good couple of hours.

I sometimes leave it sitting overnight while I sleep, as retrieval time can stretch out for many hours if you have or want lots of data.

Interpreting the Results

You can stop retrieval at any time of course, or wait for it to be done (which I recommend) on its own. Results are presented in their own tab window named (surprise!)….”Results” . Here is where you will be spending most of your time checking out all the information Keyword Rockstar found for you.

If you selected additional data to gather before you started, you will now have all that available here as well. Things like competitors’ ads, content network placements, etc, etc. Everything is laid out pretty logical. This is also where you can view the ads & placements for a keyword by clicking a small “+” plus-sign next to the keyword:

Competitor PPC Ads (for a given keyword)

(I blurred out URLs in this screenshot as not to be outing anyone’s landing pages. )

Content Network Placements (for a given keyword)

For each different project, you can customize the view and what columns you’re interested in for the time being:

Now remember I mentioned earlier how I really liked one part of the user interface? I was referring to the way you can sort and filter your keyword list. Sorting is self-explanatory. Clicking on a column header alternates between ascending/descending sort.

Filtering works sort of like filters in Excel and if you like advanced control, you can even build out your own custom filtering using the built-in Filter Builder. Pretty cool!

Not to mention how you can group or theme all the thousands of keywords together in more logical subsets..

For example - let’s say I wanna break the entire list up into groups depending on commercial intent (think visitor buying mode). The benefit to this is obvious: to be able to create different adgroups (and landing pages) for different sets of my keywords.

So I simply drag the “Commercial Intent Value” column up to the main header of the result screen, and voila - Keyword Rockstar has now grouped the list based on this value instantly. Any of the data columns can be dragged and dropped this way - and moved around in any grouping order:

All of this makes keyword research a lot more manageable. Can you do all this using Notepad and a spreadsheet app like Excel? Sure - but it would take you way, way more time to accomplish the same structured and usable lists for use in your campaigns.

Keyword Rockstar as a Campaign Builder

Speaking of which… Ever seen a keyword research tool with a built-in, full-fledged campaign builder?

Keyword Rockstar will generate your campaigns for you, ready to import into the Google Adwords Editor (or ready to convert to MSN and Yahoo by using Export202).

I’d have to say that this is another area where Keyword Rockstar really shines. It actually gives Speed PPC a run for its money (or this free ppc campaign builder for that matter). And to boot it has the best content and placement campaign builder I have seen. Speed PPC on the other hand is only search-focused.

Basically, you start by selecting multiple (or all) keywords from your main results list, and right-clicking the mouse. This brings up the contextual menu:

From here you simply choose what sort of campaign you want to generate; Search, Placement, or Content.

I’m not gonna go into all the details on how you use the campaign creator because it’s fairly self-explanatory - especially if you have used campaign builders before.

Some of the features:

• Full fledged token system (e.g. {Keyword}for capitalized keyword insertion)
• Grouping by keyword / final mix / expansion
• Individual bids for broad/phrase/match
• Option to specify a pairing keyword list to pair with root words (instead of mix)
• Database with lots of words for prefix / postfix expansions*
• Text ad generator
• Option to limit the # of keywords per adgroup, and the # of adgroups per campaign
• Tracking support, including T202 or Tracking202 Pro query string support

* This includes quite the selection of various action words, US/Canada/UK/Germany city names, states, regions, buy words, colors, descriptive words, price keywords, car models, pet breeds, brand names, and more.

For content campaigns, you can even choose how you want to break up your image ads and text ads. Do you want them all in separate campaigns (recommended), same campaigns but different adgroups, or same campaigns and adgroups?

Note: Keep in mind which keywords you select for a content network campaign. Preferably, your content campaign should be set up like I discussed in this post. Just apply those tips and use some common sense when you pick your keywords here.

Text ad generator

Straightforward stuff. Works just like in Speed PPC or Derek Beau’s free ppc campaign builder:

Image ad generator

I love this part. Keyword Rockstar is the first image ad generator I have seen that can generate image ads for all 9 standard Adwords formats AND is integrated with a campaign builder.

Now granted, the version I have been using (up and until June 21st) only has a limited style of banner design. It’s basically based on one template - one that looks like a text ad, but has “hand drawn” red arrows and circles on it. So the ads will look something like this:

However - I contacted the developers about this, and was told that they are actually working in more templates in upcoming versions. Even a template builder is in the works, so that you can blend in your own style of graphics, layout, and colors. Can’t wait to see what they will come up with!

Seriously…this image ad generator is pretty damn powerful. I have spent countless hours in the past creating image ads manually and it can be an extremely time-consuming task with all the formats needed. Not to mention if you want different ad descriptions written into each image.

You could outsource this job of course - but it still means it’s gonna take some guy or gal a few days of work to deliver all the ads you request. Keyword Rockstar’s image ad generator is a HUGE time-saver. Especially if you wanna get an image ad campaign up and running quickly to test out a new offer.

Of course - you can also choose to include any other image ads or network creatives you may have. I never use the default affiliate network creatives by the way because I think they usually suck, lol. Traditionally I have made my own creatives using Adobe Photoshop but I can save that for another “How To…” blog post.

Other Features

Time to wrap this review up. Before I finish, I should mention that you also have a few more functions available in Keyword Rockstar’s right-click context menu. I showed you this earlier, but here it is again:

As you can see, there’s immediate access to do quick lookup on more data for your keyword:

• View Google Trends (opens a new window showing the volume and geographical trends from Google)
• Keyword Spy lookup
• SpyFu lookup
• View the given keyword’s 1st page search results in the 3 major search engines
• Domain checker (e.g. if you wanna see if the longtail www.iwannamakemoniesonlineinmyboxers.com is available)

It’s nice to have access to some of these handy. I have also been told more lookup otions will be added here in the future.

Lastly - you can export your findings as reports into formats like Excel (csv or xls), Rich Text Format (RTF), HTML, PDF, Text, print, or as images. The PDF and HTML I would imagine would really only be useful if you’re doing reporting for company SEM work. I have really only found the TXT and CSV export useful myself but - each to their own.

Price, Support and Conclusion

At the current price of $97/month, Keyword Rockstar is not a free tool - but honestly it shouldn’t be either. The guys behind it have put a lot of work into making this a quality product. It still has some minor flaws (being somewhat system resource heavy) but these are being ironed out.

Response time from contacting support has been excellent for me. The founder of Keyword Rockstar, Jon Shugart, has been an affiliate for a long time himself and seem to know exactly what we as affiliate marketers need and want in a tool that can contribute more towards a profitable business.

I recommend this program to both beginners and experienced affiliate marketers. The newbies will find it useful for getting new niches researched quickly and get campaigns up and running for testing offers. The seasoned guys will love it for its deep research abilities and image ad builder for massive campaigns.

PROS:
- Lots of them.
- Efficient keyword research NOT based around months-old data. Uses Google Adwords Keyword Tool for iterative retrieval
- A very good keyword grouping engine allowing you to theme your campaigns, ads and landing pages much more in tune to what each visitor would want to see
- Proxy support for heavy duty mass retrieval
- Competitor research on ads and landing pages. Granted, it does NOT do analysis over time (like PPC Bully does) and so what you see is not necessarily competitors’ profitable ads or landing pages. Just what is currently found.
- Solid campaign builder rivaling other tools that cost way more
- Overall a great money- and time-saving “jack of all trades and master of a few” tool
- The price

CONS:
- Somewhat slow installation time (this is being worked on according to developers)
- Occasionally slows down my system (my desktop pc is also 5 years old so that could be my problem, lol)
- Image ad generator still limited to one template (but lots more templates as well as a custom template builder is being worked on for an upcoming release).

You can read more about it on their official website by clicking here. And yes, that is obviously my affiliate link but if you rather not sign up under me just go to KeyworRockstar.com