It is no secret that spying on your competitors can save you a large amount of time when it comes to setting up winning affiliate campaigns. The traditional affiliate model requires you picking an offer, setting up a few campaigns on paid traffic sources and then testing to see what converts.
But the problem with this process is that there are dozens of variables to test (i.e. split testing banner creatives) and before you can develop a winning campaign, you have already lost a lot of money. One of the quickest shortcuts to success is watching what is already ready working in the market and simply improving upon it. There is nothing wrong with this and is simply the equivalent of a company going to the supermarket to see their competitor’s new packaging.
There are many tools available that allow you to see which ads have been running for months on pay per click search engines and media buying platforms. The logic is that if the ad has been running for a long period of time, the advertiser must be making money.
As an affiliate, this can also help you identify affiliate programs that are profitable and save you a large amount of time in the testing phase to see what works and what doesn’t. You can then take their ads and banners and build upon them to create even better ones.
There are many spy tools available online that allow you to see what is working today. You can easily click on one of the many successful ads and reverse engineer entire ad campaigns. In fact, many affiliates leave tracking footprints on their landing page, so you can clearly see what paid traffic platforms they are using to send traffic.
As an advertiser, it may be concerning to know that your ads are being monitored, but that is the evolution of Internet marketing. Spy tools are nothing new and have been around for years.
I know at one point there was concern from PPV marketers about PPV spy tools coming out and spying on what was running on the PPV networks. This was a concern because anytime an automated robot crawls the PPV networks, this costs the advertiser an impression. And PPV advertisers pay their ad campaigns by impression and not click. Luckly so far, I haven’t seen this become a major issue – yet.
A new service called MixRank just recently launched and they have catalogued the entire Google Content network so you can see what ads have been running for extended periods of time. I have arranged a $1 trial offer with the guys over at Mixrank for a 7 day membership for my readers.
I highly recommend that you take the $1 trial offer and see if this tool fits in nicely with the rest of your traffic arsenal.
Click Here To Try MixRank For $1
What are your thoughts on spying and using tools like this? Comment below.
Best wishes,
Gauher Chaudhry
