Affiliate marketing is a competitive business. Even though the market has become very saturated over the last few years, affiliate marketers are still able to achieve amazing profits.
The results don’t come without effort, though. You need to constantly stay on top of your game in order to succeed. You need to know what other affiliates are doing, and you need to use the best tools, offering the widest range of the most advanced features. You need to spy on your competition and always try to be one step ahead of them.
Affiliate marketing is a new twist in the old idea of a suitable product or service, recommending it to a blog reader and making a portion of the profit from each sale.
Many people wonder if affiliate marketing in 2020 will still make money, and the answer to that question is yes. In October 2019, Entrepreneurs on Fire earned $66,537 from the affiliate.
In 2020, the affiliate is still an effective method of marketing, but to make more profits, we must choose the networks that best suit us.
The best way to choose the affiliate networks that best suit you is to use the affiliate spy tools to see the affiliate networks used by your competitors. By monitoring competitors’ affiliate marketing methods, you can quickly learn more about the market and benefit your marketing promotion.
We will now discuss some of the best affiliate marketing spy tools and the reasons why they can work for your business.
- What are spy tools in affiliate marketing?
- What are the Top Affiliate Marketing Spy Tools?
- Why should you use spy tools?
- What to look for when choosing a spy tool?
- Why Copying your Competitors Might not Work?
- How do you use affiliate Marketing?
- What Trends do you Foresee in Affiliate Marketing?
- Is AdSpy free?
What are spy tools in affiliate marketing?
A spy tool is essentially a database of landers and creatives which are used at various traffic sources, in different GEOs, verticals and ad formats. Depending on the features offered by different spy tools, you can take a peek, and often download, the most popular, most clicked, longest running and best-converting landing pages and creatives.
Read Also: What Are The High Earning Categories For Affiliate Marketing?
They are updated daily or even hourly to give you up-to-date insights on top performers.
There are a lot of different kinds of spy tools, with some of them specializing in a particular traffic source like Facebook or native, and some offering different options together in multipacks.
How to use affiliate marketing spy tools?
If you’re thinking that by investing in a spy tool you won’t have to worry about creating landers… then you are not entirely correct. Spy tools do offer the option to download assets created by others and use them with minimal adjustments — exchange the links and you’re ready to go. But this isn’t the best way to go about things.
Creative fatigue is a serious issue hindering your campaigns from becoming profitable. By downloading the assets and using them as they are, you are walking into a trap. The creatives you find on spy tools with the highest number of clicks are the ones people have seen the most. You might think that if their CTR is high, then by not changing anything, your CTR will be equally high.
In reality, however, creative fatigue is the reason people will not click on your ad because they might have already seen that ad a couple of times and they know where it leads.
The proper way to use spy tools is for inspiration and research. Gather data on what works and what doesn’t. You will likely see patterns in the look of popular landers. Minimalistic page with a spin wheel is the top lander for sweepstakes? Don’t copy it — just remember these things while creating your own stuff.
When it comes to technical aspects of using a spy tool, it usually lets you choose any combination of country, operator and OS before searching for anything specific. When you want to search for landers promoting diet pills, all you need to do is specify where and on what devices you want to display the ad and then search by keyword, e.g. ‘diet pills’.
Also, if you have your chosen offer and are looking for inspiration on how to run it, all you need is the campaign landing page URL and you can search for it to see how others are promoting it!
What are the Top Affiliate Marketing Spy Tools?
Here’s an introduction to the 5 most popular types of super affiliate spy tools in 2021.
1. AdPlexity
AdPlexity is one of the world’s most popular advertising spy tools. It divides ads into 6 categories, and users can purchase the spy tool that’s right for you. AdPlexity’s ads include mobile advertising, desktop advertising, native advertising, e-commerce, push ads and adult ads.
AdPlexity was one of the first advertising spy tools. AdPlexity contains more than 700k of ad creatives in 31 countries. AdPlexity has 100 networks.
AdPlexity finds successful campaigns and filters them by keyword, advertiser, publisher and member network.
Date range
Days
Types of ads
Type of device
Countries
Language
Traffic source
Affiliate Network
After screening the affiliate network, AdPlexity can see the ad analysis include: landing pages, external web sites, advertise activities.
Pricing:
AdPlexity pushed $149 per month
AdPlexity Mobile $199 per month
AdPlexity Desktop $199 per month
AdPlexity Native $249 per month
AdPlexity Adult $199 per month
2. AdBeat
AdBeat has access to data for 4 device types from 120 ad networks in 20 countries. AdBeat discover competitors’ most profitable publishers, ad copy, and login pages.
With Adbeat, you can see trends that are not visible in any other way. Easily see when advertisers increase spending on other affiliate networks and publishers. If you’re an ad network, you’ll appreciate how Adbeat will show you ads when competing networks add new powerful publishers to their products.
Pricing:
Standard: $249 per month
Advanced: $399 per month
3. Anstrex
Anstrex is a native spy advertising tool. Anstrex contains data from more than 50 affiliate networks and 17 million ads from more than 90 GEO sites. Filtering options include: affiliate network, country, platform, language, category (local only), tracker and sort filter.
Anstrex can instantly preview the landing page. You can have the details of your ad network. You can continue to filter ads by different metrics, such as (Alexa ranking, days run, ad intensity, and gravity).
You can even download the login page. It covers both mobile and desktop platforms. You can analyze local ads in different countries, categories, and languages
Pricing:
Standard: $59.99 per month
Custom: $79.99 per month
Ultimate: $129.99 per month
4. Advault
Advault is a native advertising spy tool. Specifically, we monitor the content discovery of native ads to collect useful data about them. If you’re planning to run your native ads, it’s an essential tool because it lets you see which ads other advertisers are serving and whether they’re successful.
Affiliate Ads
Affiliate ads point to landing pages (usually pre-sale member offers for blog posts/ads), and sometimes even directly to the affiliate Offer/Product page. Their goal is to sell and get a commission.
Filtering method:
You can also make a smart choice by when your ads are running, specific ad networks, countries, and your device is filtered, and if you’re looking for affiliate ads, select Redirects Only.
Once you’ve found some interesting ads, save them. Then click View all ads to the domain, which will show you more ads pointing to the same product/target page.
Advault 16,130,971 Native Adverts. 13 Networks. 19 Countries.
Pricing: $97 per month
$1499 per month: Contact The Advertiser (LeadFinder)
5. BigSpy
BigSpy is a popular ad spy tool in recent years.
BigSpy currently has 160 million creatives for search, and BigSpy has more than 500 million data in its library. BigSpy quickly became popular with users for surpassing a large amount of a competitor’s ad material data. BigSpy currently monitors six social platforms, including Facebook, and 10 affiliate networks. BigSpy affiliate supports searching for competitors’ ads through id and offers id.
Filtering options supported by BigSpy:
Countries
Marketing goals
Creative
Industry
CTA type
E-commerce software
Ad first time
Last time ad
network affiliates
BigSpy features:
Exclusion options, submit excluded keywords, more conducive to search
Download your creatives
Track 30 days of ad performance
See other people’s favorite ads
5 sort ways to find the ads you want
Pricing:
Free version
Basic: $9 per month
PRO:99 Monthly
6. AdPeriscope
AdPeriscope is a spy tool limited to adult advertising only. It’s created by the people from Anstrex so you might notice some similarities between the two products.
The community says the AdPeriscope does exactly what it promises. It’s a great tool with a massive inventory of adult ads. It’s also said to offer excellent value for money.
It covers inventory from over 50 countries, all major adult networks, and 150+ mobile carriers.
You can search by keywords, ad-network, country, mobile carrier, device type, language, third party trackers & banner dimension and then sort your data by duration, ad-strength, date-seen & alexa rank of the landing page. You even have the option to create a vault of favourites.
AdPeriscope costs $89.99 and is absolutely essential for advertisers working mainly with adult traffic.
7. Mobidea spy tools
The ad network Mobidea has their very own spy tools! With two options: native and push, Mobidea offers an impressive inventory of ads that you can spy on.
With over 19M of ads, from over 90 countries, and 40 push networks, Mobidea offers a huge inventory which might even outbest the legendary spy tools.
Apart from the impressive data coverage, Mobidea Push Ads Spy Tool offers insights into exactly which traffic sources perform best with a given offer along with up-to-date information on which devices and countries are being targeted. Additionally, you can check exactly how much your competition is bidding for clicks in every campaign.
The price for the push options is $79.99 while the native option alone costs $59.99. For duo packs, however, the monthly price amounts to $124.99. Good price for excellent data coverage.
Why should you use spy tools?
Spy tools are a very important part of market research. Besides network and traffic source representative’s recommendations, it’s good to look at the whole industry to get the broadest perspective possible.
If you already have an offer you can use a spy tool to search for matching creatives. You can also check in which GEOs that type of offer performs best. You can take a note of the angles used in popular choices and create your landers based on that.
It actually works both ways. If you do the research before choosing an offer you can tailor your campaigns to best fit the needs of the market — the needs that you determine by browsing through data gathered by spy tools.
In general, spy tools are needed to help you come up with ideas. Which offer to run, what lander and creative to choose, what angle and strategy – you can get all of that by subscribing to a spy tool for your chosen ad format. All you need to do is set those search filters the way you want them and research!
What to look for when choosing a spy tool?
There are many spy tools available on the market, and unless you have enough funds to subscribe to many of them, you need to pick carefully.
If you already have some experience, you might already know what are your favourite ad formats to run and where. The more specific you can get with your preferences, the easier it will be to make an accurate choice. Spy tool subscriptions are usually divided into different ad formats so it’s best to have a chosen go-to money making niche.
The most important thing for a spy tool to have is a good coverage of GEOs and networks. Different spy tools have different inventories so it’s important to check whether your favourite and most used ad networks and ad exchanges are included in the spy tool’s inventory.
The bigger the database of the spytool the better.
Once you have a huge amount of data you need to be able to navigate through the results. That’s why the next important thing are good result sorting options. In that case, the more granular the better!
Lastly, creatives should be easy to download. Whether you want to try your luck with coping the landing page or you intend to use it as a base and change it into something original, spy tools should not complicate the process of downloading assets. Researching and filtering takes time so saving shouldn’t take more than a second.
Why Copying your Competitors Might not Work?
Copying the big guys doesn’t work for several reasons. The first is the use of ad rotation. This means that an affiliate may have several ads being used one after the other. If this is the case, then by the time you get round to using the copied version, it’s already out of date, and pales in comparison to their shinier, updated version.
Another issue could also be GEO or time based. If an affiliate has targeted their campaign to a specific geographic audience, or to users at a certain time of day, then they will be seeing successes based outside of the range which you are targeting.
One more issue of why the original is making more money than yours is that the payout for the original affiliate is higher and they may have a direct deal with the advertiser.
With these aspects in mind, it is far more profitable to use spy tools as a source of inspiration for your campaigns rather than trying to run a simple copy and paste operation.
How do you use affiliate Marketing?
affiliate marketing revenue eventually can become a form of passive income, but you still have to do some heavy lifting up front. The success of your program will depend on the quality of your review.
To create a good review, it’s best to get personal. Share your experience in your blog, social media post, or video. If you’re writing a personal review, give a candid opinion based on your experience with and knowledge of the product.
The more open you are, the more authentic you will be. People will be more comfortable following your advice if they feel they can trust you.
Trust is a key factor in your affiliate marketing efforts, because people need to trust you enough to act on your recommendations. The level of trust you’ll need to make affiliate sales depends on your industry and the products you’re recommending—for example, it takes more trust to be an effective affiliate for a $1,000 course than it does for a $20 t-shirt.
Beyond just sharing your experiences, you can build trust by limiting the number of affiliates you promote, or by only becoming an affiliate for products you personally use, and sticking to your area of expertise. For example, people trust my recommendations for Canadian financial apps, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to have much luck as a Sephora affiliate.
Desirae Odjick, founder of Half Banked
Talk to a product expert
Another option is interviewing others who use the product or service, or even interviewing the person who makes or sells it. This can give your review more depth, creating a narrative for the reader.
Create a product tutorial
While your success with affiliate marketing can depend on the overall size of your following, another way to drive higher-converting traffic is by providing a tutorial on the offer. People often perform “how to” searches on Google, such as “how to save money for college” or “how to decorate a laundry room.”
If you offer a tutorial that solves a searcher’s problem and clearly showcases the value of the product, your referrals will make more sense in context and you’ll provide the customer with a stronger incentive to purchase the product you’re recommending.
Find relevant search terms
If you’re promoting an offer through a blog post, research which keywords someone might use in a search engine to find an answer to a related problem.Google Ads Keyword Planner is a good tool that can help. (It’s free to use, but you’ll need to create an account.)
Consider your angle
Depending on your offer, figure out how much energy you should invest in instructional or tutorial content, which is often a natural lead-in to someone trying a product for themselves.
For example, you could record a video of yourself using and getting the most out of a physical product, or showing off the benefits of a digital product, like software. Unboxing posts are popular, so if you receive the product in the mail, document your experience opening it up.
Set your distribution strategy
Once you’ve written your promotional content, share it on your website or social media platforms. If you have an email list, you can create an email marketing campaign. And be sure to have an affiliate marketing hub on your website with a Resources page where you share a quick list of all of the tools you use and love.
Try offering a bonus
Sometimes marketers promote their affiliate programs by offering bonuses to anyone who purchases the offer. For example, you could give a free ebook you wrote to any follower who makes a purchase. Promotions like this encourage customers to buy by sweetening the deal.
They’re especially persuasive if the bonus you offer is something you normally sell, because then shoppers can see its actual dollar value added value right on your site.
You can find several examples of affiliate bonuses in action when business coach Marie Forleo opens her popular B-School for entrepreneurs each year. To encourage sign-ups through her affiliate link, Laura Belgray, Forleo’s own copywriter, offers a one-on-one copywriting session as a bonus.
Marketing coach Amy Porterfield adds a bonus bundle, with an invitation to one of her live events, access to a private Facebook group, Q&A sessions, and a variety of downloads. Adding a bonus can be a good way to stand out if several other affiliates are promoting the same product.
Keep things legal and above board
Don’t forget to disclose to followers that your post contains affiliate links. For one thing, it’s required by the FTC. But explaining the reason for your affiliation also can help you connect with your audience.
For example, the financial independence bloggers at Frugalwoods offer this disclosure: “Frugalwoods sometimes publishes affiliate endorsements and advertisements, which means that if you click on a link and buy something, Frugalwoods might receive a percentage of the sale, at no extra cost to you. We only write about, and promote, products that we believe in. We promise not to tell you about stuff that’s dumb.”
If you need help figuring out what language to use in a disclaimer, it’s worth taking time to consult a lawyer.
What Trends do you Foresee in Affiliate Marketing?
In affiliate marketing terms, that’s practically a lifetime ago! With the industry always evolving and changing, and with so much competition to contend with, there’s no choice but to identify new trends and be among the first to take advantage of them.
So, here are our top picks for affiliate trends expected to take the lead in 2021:
1. Seasonal campaigns
The days of ever-lasting campaigns and evergreen products are far from gone. But we are now seeing more and more affiliates working on specific campaigns aimed at specific events or special seasons. For example, as summer approaches, there’s a surge of interest in fitness apps and other outdoors-y products.
Another good example is nutrition offers going up whenever there is a new diet trend. So, make sure to keep ahead of the popular seasonal shifts in consumer interests and optimize your strategy accordingly.
2. TikTok
It’s always a good idea to stick to the platforms and channels that are working for you as a media source. But, keeping your eyes and ears open for new supply channels can make a huge difference. Unless you’ve been hibernating for the past six months, you already know that TikTok is all-the-rage among the younger demographic segment.
If you’re looking to reach a young audience, go for the platform they love to be a part of. Make no mistake, this hot new channel is a huge growth opportunity for many affiliate marketers.
3. Stay Focused
Affiliate marketing is all about experimenting and optimizing to get better and better results. If you know how to convert and scale e-comm campaigns, do what you can to become even more professional and successful. Don’t lose focus by trying to replicate this success on completely different verticals.
Yes, a good portfolio is a diverse one, but that shouldn’t stop you from first trying to become the absolute best in the the business at what you are already doing (or you risk someone else taking the top spot before you do).
4. B2B Rising
We are already seeing more and more affiliates running B2B campaigns, and not just B2C. More and more traffic channels are now allowing you to target industry professionals (BTW, Outbrain allows it too!).
With more options open to reach B2B audiences and win those highly lucrative campaigns, there is no longer any reason for affiliate marketers not to take advantage of everything the B2B world has to offer.
5. Localization
We’ve got the entire world at our fingertips at the click of the mouse. Ironically, for affiliate marketers, going local is a growing trend, and one that can’t be ignored. Localization is much more than just translating a web page to another language for a specific offer.
It means learning about the interests and behaviors of users from various cultures, with different mindsets, lifestyles and priorities. A good affiliate marketer is not just trying to reach users in different locations; you are trying to reach different states of mind.
This is what will help you find the best way to sell them what they want or need – that’s the true meaning of localization.
Is AdSpy free?
AdSpy is a powerful Facebook and Social Media Spy Tool. PPC by itself is highly dynamic and competitive. Add that to typical Fb Ad Spying and you got a conundrum.
AdSpy boasts the Largest Database of Ads. The numbers nestled in the neighborhood of 74.2 million Ads from 12.7 million advertisers across 198 countries.
In a word, AdSpy helps you to Spy and Copy your competitors’ Ad campaigns, Landing Pages etc. You can Track your Keywords, find Lucrative Micro-niches, and Properly Position your Fb and Mobile Ad campaigns and your landing pages.
Perhaps the best way to highlight AdSpy is to relay the best features including the unbelievable deal on our Adspy Coupon Just $74 per month.
The good news is, AdSpy is not the priciest Ad Spy Tool in the market. For $149 a month, you can enjoy all the goodies that come with this powerful Spy Tool.
Upon Sign-up, you will receive Free Credits that you can use as a Trial Run, then its $149 per month. If you use our Adspy coupon its just $74 per month. All rights reserved.
Read Also: How Can You Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?
But be vigilant. Most of the credits are used up during the searches and scrolling of the results.
Final Thoughts
Spy tools are necessary for staying on top of your competition. They let you gain inquisitive insights into what’s going on in the industry and help you make choices regarding your future business moves.
The most important thing to remember when choosing a spytool is to decide exactly what sort of ads you’ll be spying on. Also, make sure to check if the spy tool’s inventory includes your favourite traffic sources and ad networks.
While downloading assets in an easy and straightforward way is a good option to look for in a spy tool, it shouldn’t encourage copycatting. Spy tools should help you research the market as well as customer needs and preferences rather than serve as a menu to reuse ready-made creatives.
Do your research, get inspired and design creatives that will break the bank!
