Last Updated on August 26, 2024 by Content Team
Starting a native ad campaign is relatively easy. Making it profitable is a different challenge on its own. Depending on your current stage as a marketer, the things that are required to make profitable high conversion campaigns possible might seem complex and confusing for you. And that’s where the best native ad spy tools come into play.
Probably before this time, most of your campaigns had been 100% dependent on your intuition or guesswork. Perhaps, this has not been delivering the type of results you want. Now is the time to think differently.
Simply by leveraging the best native ad spy software, you can begin to gain a new competitive edge in your target niche market.
Before getting into these powerful tools, let’s look into why it is interesting to start spying on your competitor’s past and current live Ads.
Brand New Starter: As a starter, you understand that making native advertising profitable isn’t an easy thing. But you have the challenge to get in anyway. In this scenario, the native ad spy tools will give you a strong foundation to start advertising like a pro. Knowing that there are complex dynamics and variables involved, getting any of the tools below should be a no brainer.
Entering A New Niche: The dynamics of every unique niche market is hardly the same when a comparison is made. This makes running profitable native ads harder when you move from one niche market to the other. With an affordable ad spy software, you’ll begin to gain empowering insights into the most engaging as well as poor performing native ads in any niche you want to enter.
A/B Testing Is Costly: Here is the third reason why you would want to invest in the best native ad spying tool with a free trial. Running A/B test to discover what works and what doesn’t take a lot of time, money or both. When you are starting a new campaign with a limited budget, spending 50 – 95% of that budget on A/B testing won’t get you anywhere.
The shorter route is to look deeply into what multiple competitors in your niche had spent money and time to test.
Now let me hint to you. Forward-thinking marketers and business owners work smarter, not harder. Want to start making smart making decisions that lead to higher profits margins? Let’s check out the tools for that.
#1: PowerAdSpy
Based on its growing brand popularity, some people do come to market searching specifically for PowerAdSpy pricing and free trial information. For most of these people, they are following recommendations from other satisfied users.
At the time of this writing, PowerAdSpy has around 30,000 users from 20 countries. We have already written about PowerAdSpy as a top Facebook Ad Spy Tool.
To some extent, I can bet that the above number includes users residing in or targeting the same country as you. This tool gives users a broad view of what is happening in their specific niches across 17+ native advertising platforms like Outbrain, Taboola, Mgid, Revcontent etc.
From inside their database, you’ll be able to gain insights from past and current live advertising campaigns. You can narrow down the type of Ads you want to review based on demographic factors like location, age, gender or specific keywords.
If you follow any of the criteria above to discover some Ads, PowerAdSpy makes it easier to see the creatives, like images, video and copy used in each Ad. In addition to this, you can also look into the landing pages that each Ad is leading to as well as other countries or demographics audience segments being targeted.
PowerAdSpy pricing starts at only $49 per month but you can get a free trial without having to drop your credit card details. With the premium pricing plans, you’ll discover some other interesting features.
View Pricing of Native Ad Spy Tools
#2: NativeAdBuzz
Here is another powerful native ad spying tool for marketers. NativeAdBuzz covers up to 10 advertising networks. This is slightly bigger than what you’ll get from the one reviewed above.
However, their geographic coverage is just for 12 countries including the UK, US, Spain, Australia, Denmark, France, Italy, Turkey, Brazil, Netherlands, Turkey and Singapore.
From inside their database, the native ads you’ll see come from advertising networks like Yahoo Gemini, Adblade, RevContent, Zergnet, Gravity, mGid, Content.Ad, Taboola and Outbrain.
Simply by putting a competitor’s URL in the provided space, you’ll see all the ads they are running and the specific networks they are using.
Using the premium plans, you’ll be able to conduct advanced searches with specific filters like country, language, device, keywords and many more. Standard plans start at $47, but unlike PowerAdSpy free trial, you need to spend $7 to gain trial access on NativeAdBuzz.
#3: AdBeat
Coming at number three among the top native Ad spy tools is Adbeat. Based on my findings, this one is being used by big brands like Amazon, Credit Karma, Equifax, Dell and 99Designs.
More than what you’ll get from most of the spy tools in this list, AdBeat covers 90+ Ad networks across 20 countries. With this level of diversity, you’ll be empowered to discover the best ad creatives driving the highest click-through rate (CTR) as well as conversions. Remember what I said earlier about having to relay 100% on guesswork when running new campaigns or entering a different niche market?
This tool will raise the bar for you. In addition to the things mentioned above, this native ad spy tool will also help you to identify the top publishers or Ad networks delivering the highest volume of buyer traffic to your competitors.
By drilling down into campaign spending data within a target niche, setting a native advertising campaign budget will become easy. Instead of relying on guesswork or costly A/B testing, you’ll know with a higher level of certainty, what it will cost to bring in the volume of traffic needed to accomplish your goals. Where else can you get this level of native ad campaign planning insights?
As an enterprise-focused spy tool, AdBeat pricing starts at $249 per month. However, you can get a free account or request a full demo to explore its capabilities at scale.
#4: AdVault
Gain access to over 16 million native Ads across 13 different Ad networks. Slightly less than what you’ll get from other competitor Ad spy tools, AdVault covers just about 19 countries only. Interestingly, they have lots of great features that promise to increase your competitive advertising intelligence.
Some of the major ad networks you’ll gain access to their advertiser campaigns include Gravity, Adblade, Taboola, Outbrain, RevContent, Dianomi, Zergnet and others.
If you are at the stage of learning how to create a landing page for native advertising, this spy tool will give you access to lots of poor and high performing landing page examples. Moreover, the stats available for users of this platform makes it easier to see relevant patterns they can apply when building out their Ad creatives and landing pages.
One unique and interesting feature of this native ad spy tool is the AdTracker. With this feature, you can start tracking specific competitors and get notified when they launch new campaigns. How useful could that be?
Here is the thing. An interesting percentage of your core competitors are usually testing new Ad creatives and strategies across different countries and niche markets. Then the data from such tests often form the foundation of new and improved campaigns. Now you can take advantage of their A/B tests and insights gained to create your new campaigns too.
With AdVault’s capabilities, you’ll also be able to identify direct marketers as well as affiliate marketers. For this one, you have to invest $97 to get started.
#5: Anstrex
If you ever search for the best native ad spy software reviews, you are most likely going to find this tool Anstrex on every page you look into. Even though it is not one of the oldest names in the game, they are still helping thousands of marketers to become empowered for profitable native advertising.
One of the things that make this one very appealing is its wide coverage of around 38 Ad networks serving 92 countries around the world. With this level of coverage, it is safe to say that Anstrex is used by small to medium marketing teams and global brands alike.
Just pick a competitor and you’ll become able to see the native ads they are running and where the ads are running. Depending on the chosen Ansrex pricing plan, you’ll also get advanced filters to drill down even further.
I don’t know what your advertising goals are at this time, but this tool allows users to choose between push, native or both types of campaigns.
Especially for new starters, exploring the native advertising video tutorials provided by this ad spy software platform can help you to get started on a strong foundation. Based on the wideness of their coverage across 92 countries, support is provided almost round the clock. This means that users across diverse time zones can always get support whenever there is a need for that.
Please note that Ansrex free trial is for 2 days only. As for the premium plans, $59 per month is what you have to pay for gaining access. For new users considering this tool, signing up comes with a money-back guarantee which you can get within 48 hours after purchase. That’s in case you don’t like the tool.
#6: WhatRunsWhere
Here is one of the oldest names when it comes to high-level competitive advertising intelligence. Specifically, WhatRunsWhere has been around in the game since 2011. Over these years, they have gathered an interesting wealth of experience, advertising intelligence and a strong reputation too.
Some of the marketers using this tool come from big brand names like MoneyGram, ScotiaBank and McAfee. Tens of thousands of other users have also been using this tool over the years.
Among other things, WhatRunsWhere can help you gain access to new traffic sources in terms of geographic or niche markets. Take banner advertising, for instance, you can begin to discover with insightful real data, the best performing banner ad sizes in every niche market that interests you. This is better than relying on your intuition or running costly A/B tests.
Regardless of an ad network or native advertising strategy, one of the things that often leads to failed campaigns is blind reliance on outdated data sets or ad formats. This Ad spy software solves that problem by giving its users access to real advertising data updated daily.
While you are reading this WhatRunsWhere review, it is important to note that it serves five countries only. These countries include the US, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany.
Basic WhatRunsWhere pricing plan is about $299 per month. However, you can request a refund within three days if you don’t get the expected value. Like some others in the same category, you can easily filter ads by devices, (mobile vs desktop) as well as compare advertisers within a specific niche or country.
The downsides I found about this tool is that they do not offer a free trial like others. You just have to reach out to request a demo. One outstanding fact is that WhatRunsWhere is a matured suite of powerful tools when compared to other new entrants in this market.
Conclusion
Before signing up for any of the best native ad spy tools with a free trial, the one thing you have to keep in mind is your current advertising goals. It is also important to consider the size of your budget as well as the geographic space you want to target.
This will help you to determine whether you should be going for an option with a higher or lower number of countries covered.
For big brands targeting multiple countries at a time, going for the best ad spy software that serves a lot more countries will be your best option. International marketing teams from working for a single brand may also find the matured spying tools more useful. Interestingly, these enterprise-focused tools often have great capabilities for managing native ad campaigns for teams working in different countries and time zones.
On the other hand, if you are a small brand or affiliate marketer targeting a single country, your best option is to go for the low priced and affordable native ad spy tools. In the end, you don’t have to rely on guesswork, whether you are a starter or experienced marketer entering new markets.
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