Digital adverts are everywhere; websites, social media, game apps, and even music apps. Companies are embracing digital advertising over traditional advertising because not only is it more effective, it’s also cost-effective.
Are you an advertiser or publisher? It can be challenging to come up with ads and campaigns that convert. Well, one strategy that has worked for others and continues to work is ad spying.
If your competitor is getting more leads from their ads, it means their ads are converting. You can spy on their ads, see their strategies, spending, and others before you replicate them.
This is simple but it won’t be if you don’t use a good ad spying tool. In this article, I’ll be reviewing Adbeat, a popular tool for spying on competitors’ ads.
Is it a reliable digital advertising tool as many people claim or not? Read on to find out.
What Is Adbeat?
Founded in 2010 by Mike Colella, Adbeat is all about digital advertising. It’s a platform for advertisers, agencies, ad networks, and ad publishers.
As an advertiser, you can use Adbeat to get insights on your competitors – what they are doing and how they are doing it. Many top advertisers make use of Adbeat including Amazon, 99designs, BuzzFeed, AOI, and Salesforce to name a few.
For advertising agencies, Adbeat can help you easily meet and exceed your client’s expectations. This will make you a more valuable partner. Popular ad agencies that make use of Adbeat include MindShare, MundoMedia, McGarry Bowen, and Marshall Fenn.
If you’re an ad publisher or network, there are many Adbeat features you’ll find useful. Notably, the platform will help you uncover the ad networks your competitors use and also the advertisers that buy them.
Yahoo, Acuity, 50-on-Red, and Acquisio, are some top ad publishers and networks that use Adbeat.
How To Get Started
You can visit Adbeat.com, enter an advertisers’ URL, hit the search button, and get insights into their strategies. However, to get more insights, you have to sign up.
Signing up with Adbeat is simple. You just have to provide an email and select your business industry. You can sign up as:
- An advertiser
- An agency
- A publisher, ad network, or, DSP
- An affiliate marketer
- An SEM manager or analyst
Once you click the signup button, you’ll get a verified email in your inbox. Click the verification link and you’re ready to start using Adbeat.
You can complete your profile by providing your name and creating a password. Also, you’ll select your advertising budget. You’ll be redirected to your dashboard and you can start searching.
Note that the account is a free one. While you’ll be able to get insights, there are limits. You can easily upgrade to a premium account anytime you want.
Features
Database
Adbeat has a very large database. This is as a result of over 40 data centers and hundreds of high-end servers operating round the clock to convert raw advertising data into competitive insights.
The Adbeat database is a global one and features intelligent crawlers. These crawlers scan the internet to bring in as much raw advertising data as they can from top advertisers and publishers.
The high-end servers also collect raw data and begin the cleaning process. Adbeat detects, analyzes, and processes over eight million ads per day. In addition, it crawls over three million pages and covers more than 1.1 million advertisers.
After cleaning, the insights are delivered in simple data visualizations that anyone can understand. This is done using cloud-based workflows that involve over two billion calculations per week.
You get all of these in your dashboard. The Adbeat dashboard is innovative and you can view, sort, and filter data as you like.
Ad Networks
There are two main categories of ad networks Adbeat works with – display networks and native networks. In addition, Adbeat also covers video ads, interstitials, and page takeovers.
The platform covers over 90 display ad networks and over 15 native ad networks from more than 25 countries. You can get insights on both desktop and mobile ads.
Some popular ad networks that Adbeat covers include Taboola, OutBrain, RevContent, AdRoll, Turn, and RocketFuel. The platform covers different types of native ads including in-feed ads, paid search ads, content discovery ads, and promoted listings.
Furthermore, Adbeat covers the ad spend, direct buy, brands, and categories of the ad networks and their clients. As an advertiser, you can use these insights to know which ad network performs the best.
Adbeat is also a platform for ad networks and publishers. Hence, such a vast coverage of ad networks gives you access to what your competitors are doing.
Audience Insights
Audience insights are very useful in business and even more useful in digital advertising. When you know your audience – where they come from, their ages, devices they use, etc – you’ll be able to create better ads that appeal to them.
Adbeat is an ideal ad intelligence platform if you want in-depth insights on your audience – or your competitors’ audience. As mentioned earlier, the tool tracks ads from over 25 countries.
You can drill down and view data for each country individually. This gives you insights into where most ad viewers come from. You can also sort the audience according to the ad advertiser and publisher.
In addition to the country, you can get insights on devices and platforms. The platform here implies desktop and mobile. Devices are mainly mobile and include Android, Android Tablet, iPhone, and iPad.
Adbeat also allows you to search ad audiences using keywords. However, the number of results you can view depends on your subscription plan.
Competitor Spying
Spying ads is one of the primary features of the Adbeat platform. Just as with the audience, you can monitor competitors from over 25 countries.
This applies to competitors as an advertiser, agency, or ad network and publishers. When you analyze your competitors, you can get their most recent ad history. You get data history of the past two years, one year, or 90 days; it depends on your subscription plan.
For ad publishers, the publisher placements feature is very helpful. It’ll help you know exactly where your competitors place their ads on websites; you’ll know the pages and page sections that convert the most.
There’s also the Ad Paths & Tags feature for advertisers. This feature uncovers how other advertisers access their publisher’s ad inventory. Notably, Adbeat uncovers the top brands that your competitors work with. You can view data for each brand separately.
Furthermore, you can see the ad spend, direct buys, and campaigns of your competitors.
Sales Prospecting
With Adbeat, you can identify top leads that you can convert into profitable opportunities. This is because the platform gives you insights into all spending. You can view the spending of advertisers by publisher.
With this, you’ll know who’s buying ads, which type of ads they’re buying, and how much the ads cost. You’ll know advertisers spending within and outside your budget. This will also help you identify top advertisers in your niche.
You can know your competitors from the Similar Publishers section. As an ad publisher, leveraging these insights helps you better organize your sales process and subsequently close more deals.
Furthermore, there’s the Recommended Advertisers section where you can find more advertising prospects. These are simply advertisers that are already working with publishers in your niche.
Finally, Adbeat helps you identify the biggest spenders. You can view the ad creatives and landing pages amongst others for any advertisers. With this, you can hijack deals with better pitches.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are very important for advertising. For your ads to convert, you need a landing page that complements them. Adbeat doesn’t come with a landing page builder.
While you can’t create landing pages from scratch, you can spy on that of your competitors. As you search advertisers, Adbeat lets you access all of their landing pages. All of Adbeat’s plans support this and you can uncover any type of landing page.
This includes both website and social media landing pages. However, if you download the source file of these landing pages, you can only download full-page screenshots.
Nevertheless, with these screenshots, you can easily replicate the landing pages on any page builder you use. From Adbeat insights and other comparison features, you’ll be able to identify the best landing pages.
There are five main elements you’ll look at including the selling proposition, media files – images and videos, benefits of the products & services, social proof, and calls to action.
Advertiser Comparison
Adbeat allows you to easily compare advertisers and publishers with each other; it’s called competitive benchmarking. This is very similar to split testing where you compare different ads and pages to see which converts the best.
Since Adbeat has no exclusive feature for split testing, you can use this as an alternative. You can compare advertisers and publishers side by side and overlay visualizations.
Once you do this, it’s easy to point out the differences between them as they’re featured in close tabs. You can monitor the spending strategy of each one, how it’s evolved, and more.
Adbeat allows you to compare up to five advertisers of publishers at a time. Furthermore, you can sort the comparison for the past 24 hours, week, month, or quarter.
However, note that you can only compare advertisers and publishers with Adbeat’s top two plans. You can’t do it with a free plan or with the standard plan.
Alerts
With Adbeat, you can set up Alerts and Smart Alerts. Alerts let you keep tabs with advertisers and publishers you’re interested in. Simply turn on their notifications and you’ll get an alert when they do anything.
Just like other ad spying tools, Adbeat alerts you when advertisers and publishers launched a new ad or publisher network or if they create a new ad. You either receive notifications from your Adbeat dashboard or to your email.
It’s also possible to receive both. The number of alerts you get depends on your plan. For example, the standard plan gives you five alerts per month, the advanced plan gives you 10, while alerts are unlimited with the enterprise plan.
With Unlimited Smart Alerts, you get updated more. You’ll get updated when your target advertisers and publishers spend a particular amount on an ad, campaign, or publisher. It’s up to you to set what that amount will be.
For example, you can set up smart alerts for spendings up to $10,000. You can only use this with the enterprise plan.
Analytics and Visualizations
Adbeat is all about analytics as it primarily delivers insights and metrics on other advertisers and publishers. When you analyze an advertiser or publisher’s profile, you get easy-to-read visualizations.
To start with, there’s the number of ads viewed per month which is displayed on a bar chart. The ad channels are featured in a dot graph and also a pie chart with different colors so you can easily identify each ad channel type.
Similarly, the ad creatives are featured in a line graph with different colors for each one. You can get more analytics details than what’s displayed when you click on the graphs.
The above is mainly basic as they’re what you get with the Adbeat free plan. With a pro account, you get even more in-depth analytics details and visualizations. Adbeat has a database of more than 1,500 advertisers and publishers so it’s not surprising that it has rich analytics.
Reports
Adbeat features some advanced reporting tools. An example is the Advertiser Vertical Report. With the Advertiser Vertical Report, it takes only a few clicks to create beautiful custom reports.
You can download the custom reports in PDF or PowerPoint formats. They come ready for presentation and pitching. Unless you’re using a free plan, you can download all Adbeat reports in CSV or PDF format.
Furthermore, Adbeat supports Private Label Reports. It’s a white-label platform so you won’t see the Adbeat logo or related branding when you download reports. Instead, you can upload your brand logo and get branded reports.
With this, you can immediately share your reports with your managers, clients, and prospects, with little or no editing.
Integrations
Adbeat doesn’t directly integrate with any third-party platform. It only draws data from ad publishing networks. However, the platform does have an API. You can use the API to build apps, create integrations, and generate custom reports.
The Adbeat API is based on REST + JSON. You can use it to connect Adbeat with other platforms. The API comes with thorough documentation so you should have no problems with connecting it.
To make it even easier for you, there are sample codes so you just have to copy and edit. These code examples are known as recipes. Follow, RevJet, and Taboola are some top platforms that make use of the Adbeat API.
You need a key to use this API which you’ll have to purchase. The pricing is separate from Adbeat pricing plans. You’ll have to mail the sales team to pay and get your API key.
Customer Support & Resources
As an Adbeat user, there are many channels for you to get support. You can get support by email or phone. Email is the most common as all Adbeat plans support it.
To access phone support, you must be an enterprise user. Enterprise users also have access to a dedicated support representative. Hence, you’ll have a particular Adbeat staff attending to you.
Furthermore, Adbeat features an onboard training program which also is only available to Enterprise users. For resources, Adbeat features a knowledge base.
The knowledge base covers a range of topics including general, getting started, billing & accounts, API, and support. There’s also an FAQ page with direct answers to questions.
You can still chat with an Adbeat staff directly using LiveChat. However, you won’t get feedback very fast. It takes a few hours for them to respond. Another option you have is social media via Twitter and Facebook.
Adbeat Pricing
Adbeat doesn’t offer a free trial. However, you can use the basic plan free for as long as you want. The plan features just basic Adbeat features. For the real deal, you’ll have to pay for a subscription.
Adbeat features three different pricing plans and you can pay monthly or yearly. The plans include:
Standard Plan
- $249 per month with the monthly plan
- $200 per month with annual plan (billed at $2,400)
Advanced Plan
- $399 per month with the monthly plan
- $315 per month with the annual plan (billed at $3,780)
Enterprise Plan
- Custom pricing
Adbeat Pros
- Global database
- Audience and competitor insights
- Sales prospecting
- Advertiser & publisher comparison
- Smart alerts
- Branded reports
- API
- Reliable support
Adbeat Cons
- Expensive
- No native integrations
- No landing page builder
- Limited features for standard pro plan
Adbeat Ratings
Ease of Use
Adbeat has an intuitive user dashboard which makes it ideal for newbies and experienced users.
In terms of ease of use, Adbeat is rated 5 over 5.
Features
Adbeat incorporates several ad spying features and an advanced database. That way, users can quickly spy on competitors from the same niche or industry.
In terms of features, Adbeat is rated 5 over 5.
Pricing
Adbeat has three pricing plans that are tailored for both professional affiliate marketers and enterprises. However, Adbeat is pricier than other ad spying tools.
For pricing, I give Adbeat a rating of 4 over 5.
Customer Support
With Adbeat, you can rest assured of getting quality customer support service that can be reached via email, phone, and social media. Not to mention, Adbeat provides a helpful onboarding program and knowledge base to get new users started without issues.
For customer support, I give Adbeat a 4.5 over 5 rating.
Is Adbeat Legit?
In short, Adbeat is a legitimate ad spying platform. It was launched in the year 2010 and it continually evolves into becoming a giant in the industry.
Adbeat Review Final Verdict
Adbeat has all the important features you’ll need for ad spying hence it’s recommended. The platform boasts of a global database with hundreds of ad networks across different countries. With Adbeat, one thing’s for sure, you’ll never run out of ads to uncover.
Furthermore, the platform delivers good data visualizations, branded reports, smart alerts, API, and good support. Even if there are no integrations, you can count on the API. The only major downside is that Adbeat is expensive.
