Spying On Competitors to Find Their Best Ads and Landing Pages

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Estimated reading time: 3 min

There are 2 techniques to find information about competitors using Native Ad Buzz, and both are useful in different circumstances:

  1. 1. Using the Advertiser page to spy directly on competitors
  2. 2. Using the Advanced Search Filters on the Adverts Page

Here we will discuss the first in detail.

 

Using The Advertiser Page To Spy On Competitors

Using the search field on the advertisers page you can find competitors and click to open their full details popout.

For more info on how to do this go here.

The full details popout shows information regarding a specific advertiser and allows you to:

  • Search their best performing adverts and analyse each in detail.
  • Check their best performing content and landing pages and view each in detail
  • See which networks their content has been approved on
  • See which geos and on what devices their content has worked

In the following example I am looking at a competitor doing arbitrage in the pet / dog niche.

Advertiser Popout

Looking at the advertisers popout’s details tab, I can deduce a few useful things immediately:

  1. 1. 80% of ads shown to tablet traffic (equal split between android and iphone)
  2. 2. 87% of Traffic from Taboola
  3. 3. 80% of ads shown to USA traffic

Adverts Tab

By clicking on the adverts tab I can see a table of the ad creatives and a useful overview of each:

 

From here I can directly add adverts to my favourites library by clicking the heart or even do a deeper dive into the advert first by clicking the row to open the advert’s full details page in a new tab.

The adverts in the table are sortable by clicking the sorting icons next to each column’s title.

To learn more about identifying successful ads check out this article here.

In this example I like the advert: “Dog Breeds Who Live a Long Time” as although it does not immediately jump out the data suggests it has performed well (even if it has not been active in a while).

Looking at the full details pages of any interesting ads can be useful as it provides insights about other advertisers who may have tried this same advert, and how it performed for them. [/mkb-tip]

Landing Page Tab

Checking the landing page tab I can see how all the landing pages (LP) for this advertiser have performed and sort them by strength:

 

In this instance the best performing LP is the one associated with the best performing advert above.

Remember there may be multiple ads pointing to the same landing page
PRO TIP: Sometimes the strongest landing page is not the one associated with the strongest advert. This may indicate that some less popular ads are still producing a more effective funnel as they point to a better converting or performing landing page.

This can be a bit awkward to get your head around initially, but just remember a successful funnel is one that generates positive ROI and not an ad or landing page in isolation.

Clicking a row on the LP table opens the second level of the table:

Hovering over a domain on the second level will display a tooltip of the full LP url, including any tracking parameters (which themselves may also contain useful information).

Clicking the URL will open the live LP in a new browser tab (assuming that the page is still live online).

Viewing the LP directly provides access to the complete funnel including, page layouts, content, and the offer / ad stack.

 

 

Using useful plugins for Chrome browser it is also possible to identify what technology is being used on the site, including which CMS, plugins and even any ad stack.

Summary

Here is a demonstration showing all of the above in a single flow:

 

 

This process shows how to use Native Ad Buzz to analyse competitors and break down their entire native advertising funnels to discover:

  1. 1. On which network an advertiser performs best
  2. 3. In which geos and on which devices an advertiser performs best
  3. 2. The adverts which have performed best for an advertiser
  4. 3. Which landing page has been most successful
  5. 4. The Landing page layout, content and onsite technology including the ad stack.

Now you can use Native Ad Buzz to scientifically build a campaign and benefit from all the research that your competitor has already paid for 😉

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