How to increase the performance of your ads using spy tools
All affiliate marketers have one and the same question: “How do I stop wasting money on traffic experiments and start making a profit?” I’ll let you in on a secret: all successful affiliate marketers use monitoring services.
Which offers have the best yield? Which banners boast the highest CTR? Which creatives work, and which don’t? You can find answers to all these questions with the so-called intelligence services.
What ad analytics and monitoring services are out there?
There are many apps, platforms, and services — whatever you want to call them — that can crawl around and gather creatives, landing pages, or ad copy in different mobile ad networks. There are platforms that focus on a specific region, such as the ones that cover mainly Russian networks on VK (a Russian social network), OK (Odnoklassniki — a Russian social network), and Avito (a Russian classified advertisements website).
On the other hand, there are tools with global coverage that analyze platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, AdWords, and some other display networks (MobFox, StartApp, and Airpush) with redirect networks (PopAds, Zeropark, and ExoClick) added to the mix.
There are some examples of good mobile ad intelligence platforms:
AdMobiSpy — monitors the Russian ad networks of OK, VK, and Avito. It also works on Facebook (some limitations apply) and 20 non-Russian ad networks.
Publer (doesn’t have an English version of the website) — monitors OK, VK , Avito, and Instagram. It also accesses promo posts in communities and groups in VK, OK, and Instagram.
WhatRunsWhere — a tool for monitoring non-Russian networks.
OnlineAdSpy — Facebook monitoring.
WhichAdsWork — monitors mobile app ads in Facebook.
At Mobio, we are working mostly with AdMobiSpy, so we would like to share some experience.
How does AdMobiSpy work?
AdMobiSpy operates an army of “spy bots” that disguise themselves as various devices and look through ads while collecting data on impressions. The data is all stored in a database, and it can make all the difference when used by a skilled specialist. AdMobiSpy helps find answers to a number of crucial questions, like:
- What are the top offers right now?
2. What creatives are worth using and what targeting sets should be applied?
3. Which affiliate network has the most interesting offer?
4. What does it take to make an efficient banner?
We have answers to the questions listed above to share with you.
1. What are the top offers right now?
Actually, the question should be phrased as “What can bring me money right now?” Finding a profitable offer is half the battle. 90% of failures in ad arbitrage result from a poorly picked offer. When an offer occupies one of the top positions in the AdMobiSpy ranking, it means someone is buying a lot of media for that offer. This tells you that there is a big budget behind the offer, and it guarantees good earnings, otherwise no one would have picked it.
In fact, the answer you get from AdMobiSpy is almost exhaustive. You need to use the general search and filter the results by the source you are interested in. Then pick “mobile apps” and sort the list by popularity. To see relevant info, check the results for the last 7 days/yesterday/today. It will look something like this:
Look through the first 5–10 pages to find interesting offers. Each banner has a counter under it that shows how many times AdMobiSpy bots found that banner served. Please remember that some of the results will be irrelevant to you, since they are:
Apps advertised directly and not found in affiliate networks.
Old offers that found their way into the list by mistake (you can filter them out as shown below).
Exclusive and private offers that are not open to anyone (if you want such an offer, contact your affiliate network manager).
Another great tool for finding hot offers in AdMobiSpy is Analytics. Essentially, it automates what is described above and shows you which apps are getting the most ad space, as well as the current trend. When there is a very good offer on the market, the system shows you the trend the same day it hits the networks.
2. What creatives are worth using and what targeting sets should be applied?
Let’s examine the nuances of picking the right creatives and targeting sets for this or that offer. We’ll use AdMobiSpy’s search and analytics tools again. Enter the name of the app you are after — say, Dragon Soul — and check the performance for the last 30 days/7 days/yesterday/today. As a result, you get a number of creatives that really work :
*myTarget — is an advertising platform provided by Mail.Ru Group. It includes all the major social networks on the Runet (Russian-speaking Internet).
You can download all of them and then use them in your campaigns. Next, browse to the creative’s page:
On the left you see the targeting set, and on the right you see a list of redirects. Important: DO NOT believe what you see to the left. AdMobiSpy is good, but not quite that good. It sometimes makes mistakes when identifying targeting sets and geo settings. To learn the real settings, look at the redirects, which are the links the user clicks through before landing in the app store.
Redirects
How do you use redirects to learn targeting settings? It’s actually not very complicated. Redirects are a very powerful tool, but they are heavily underutilized due to insufficient skills. Most affiliate marketers add gender, age and the campaign ID to their links so they get their stats right.
Let’s take a closer look at the Dragon Soul link: affsub1 and affsub2 have the banner id and the campaign data, and affsub3 and affsub4 show the age and gender of the user that clicked the ad.
Want to see other ads that were A/B tested? Search for affsub2=6486194:
Gender
Want to know which creatives influence women and which are preferred by men? AdMobiSpy lets you find out, with the help of search and redirects. “Male” clicks have “=m” in the link and “female” clicks have “=f”. You can’t search directly for links with these parameters — the system isn’t able to do that yet. But you can make your search query look like this: app:”DragonSoul” site:*aff*=f* — and this will show you all the ads with affsub3=f. So you learn that this one was targeted at women:
And this one was designed for men:
3. Which affiliate network has the most interesting offer?
Redirects also tell you which affiliate network has the offer with the best price tag on it. Looking at the chain of redirects, you can see where the network gets the offer from, be it the advertiser itself or yet another network.
As you know, each affiliate network bites off a chunk of the offer, which means you make less money. You earn best when working directly with the advertiser or with a network that does that. In the example above, the tracking domain in the chain belongs to Rebound Mobile. They have the offer directly from the advertiser, and this means that in most cases the network will pay you best. With some rare exceptions, this is the rule. You can also find the list of networks that have the offer in the redirects section of the analytics tool:
The middle tells you if it is a direct-from-advertiser offer or a resell from some other network. Position 1 belongs to trackers like AppsFlyer, Adjust, AppMetrica, MAT, and so on. What you are looking for are affiliate networks with position 2.
4. What does it take to make an efficient banner?
You can also use AdMobiSpy as a tool to find the right ad ideas. Over the last three years, the platform has accumulated a huge collection of banners. If you check creatives used earlier for apps similar to the one you have at hand, you can find the ones that had the highest CTR.
For example, let’s say you need banners to advertise a dating app. Search for Badoo, LovePlanet, Mamba, Link, and Scout to get tons of really good creatives. You can use the same approach for travel apps, ecommerce, and games. There are literally no app categories that AdMobiSpy does not have banners for.
Summing up
AdMobiSpy offers a wide range of tools that may not seem useful at first glance, but they prove very handy when you dig deeper into it. Our experience shows that successful and fruitful mobile affiliate campaigns rely on checking stats and other data from monitoring services on a regular basis.
You need to do this at least once a week, or even every day at the outset. Don’t try to skip the step of analyzing what others are doing. The time you spend on analysis will be well worth the investment.
If you don’t have enough time for this, contact us. We will help you to make your mobile strategy profitable.
