SPY services are tools for finding profitable creatives and converting strategies. Through SPY, you can assess the market, understand what competitors are up to, and see what's currently trending. Whether to follow the crowd or try to stand out is your choice. But arguing that SPY services provide a wealth of valuable information is, at the very least, foolish.
How SPY services work
The mechanism of operation of SPY services is quite simple: specially created bots monitor advertising campaigns and collect them in the service's database. By analyzing the data collected by these bots, you can find the creative that suits your needs, whether it's a trending one, the least risky, or a rare one, and use it as a reference when developing your advertising campaign. Many SPY services also come with built-in filtering options, allowing you to sort creatives by verticals, ad keywords, GEO targeting, and freshness.
Additionally, SPY services can be categorized based on their field of operation:
- Social networks
- Mobile advertising
- Teaser advertising
- Push notifications
So, if you're looking for something specific for your campaign, it makes sense to turn to a thematic service.
What are the advantages of SPY services over manual analysis?
Some arbitrageurs collect data manually, not using SPY technologies. This method of market analysis certainly has its merits, but let's analyze what advantages the use of SPY services has over manual research.
- Time. Manual analysis takes several times longer than working with SPY tools. As time is money, even expensive spy services pay off in this case. Additionally, the data in the service's database is updated faster than you could search for manually.
- Efficiency. SPY services can also provide you with information about a campaign: which network a competitor used, what software they worked with, and which advertiser they turned to. This kind of information would be challenging for an arbitrageur to gather manually.
- Abundance of information. The difficulty of collecting all the statistics on an offer is evident, and its "lifespan" is very short. With rare exceptions, campaigns run for a short time, as long as the offer is popular and the audience is fresh. By the time you manually gather all the data, the offer may have burned out, and competitors may have moved even further ahead.
Functions of SPY services
The main functions of most popular services can be classified as follows:
- Demand analysis within a specific vertical.
- Utilizing data for forecasts.
- Searching for effective creatives with filtering options based on various parameters.
- Defining your own KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
- Finding suitable combinations for specific offers.
- Developing a comprehensive promotion strategy for an offer.
- Analyzing data related to contextual advertising and the effectiveness of its individual components: landing pages, text, images, offers, and targeting settings.
Thus, SPY services in traffic arbitrage can be valuable as they represent extensive libraries of advertising offers constantly replenished with new works. This accumulates 'insight' for novice arbitrageurs and provides experienced webmasters with room for deeper development, helping them stay in trend. Moreover, using spy tools significantly reduces the risks of budget loss in ad campaign testing. Therefore, working with spy services contributes to 'cultivating taste' and offers arbitrageurs the opportunity to develop their own recipe for creative success.
Why do creatives require adaptation for specific offers
SPY services can indeed find valuable creatives that can be downloaded and used in your advertising campaign right away. However, we do not recommend using other people's creatives and strategies, as they may be flagged by the advertising network or may have already become 'stale' (the audience has already seen them, leading to reduced interest). The creator-arbitrator may have higher payouts for leads generated by that offer compared to what you can get. Additionally, webmasters may hide critical campaign settings from SPY services, settings without which the campaign would be unprofitable. To make a creative unique, you need to remove metadata and adapt the visual content to your offer using photo editing software (such as Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator). Also, check out our collection of tips on working with creatives.
Signs of a good SPY service
Let's compile a rough list of features that advanced SPY services possess:
- Ability to set up filtering options: by verticals, keywords, etc.
- Detailed information about the offer.
- Links to the landing page and pre-landing page.
- Tracking of all campaigns with the same promo.
- Ability to subscribe to updates for specific creatives.
- Lists of favorite promos.
- Tracking of targeting settings.
Earlier, we discussed SPY services suitable for arbitrageurs and created our own top list.
SPY services in traffic arbitrage can serve as valuable support, through which webmasters learn from each other's mistakes and successes. Using 'espionage' wisely can lead to significant results: saving time, budget allocation optimization, creating high-quality creatives, and staying up to date with industry trends.