Top 9 Digital Marketing Tools to Know Your Competitor’s Tricks
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As an affiliate marketer you need to stay on the tip of your toes, remain guarded, and throw super fast punches to be able to beat your competition.
The fact is, marketers face countless challenges and fierce rivals when trying to scale their business with advertising campaigns.
With that in mind, gaining a competitive advantage is extremely important, and modern digital marketing tools can be a hand from heaven – just what you need to get that extra push and boost your marketing efforts.
And what do these tools provide?
An insight into your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, so you can adjust your approach and optimize your campaign for better outcome.
What exactly are digital marketing tools?
The term “digital marketing tool” is super wide and could refer to many different things. But what we are here talking about are tools for competitive research that allow you to identify and analyze your competitor’s moves and advertising strategies.
Competitor research tools, also known as spy tools, allow you to observe your rivals close up – through access to real-time and historical advertising data that can be super helpful in terms of improving the most crucial aspects of your campaign.
Best digital marketing analytics tools in 2024
Below, you will find a list of the very best digital marketing tools we believe can provide the information you need to build a superb campaign. We give you the top 9 best digital marketing tools for your advertising espionage endeavor.
#1 AdPlexity
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 100+ million ads | Native, Push | $149 – $249monthly |
AdPlexity has become one of the leading digital marketing automation tools for spying on your competitors. It is a reliable service (11 years of experience) if you’re looking for innovation and cross-channel surveillance.
This platform gives you an opportunity to filter competitors by different categories, and it offers six specified plans, with an emphasis on the soon-to-come TikTok and YouTube surveillance programs. If you’re patient enough, you will soon get an insight into the most profitable campaigns within these social networks.
AdPlexity offers to save you money and time by:
- Searching ads on the basis of keywords (placed on ad or landing page)
- Revealing your biggest competitor’s ads and showing how they are performing
- Finding ads on a specific publisher’s site – to get a clue on what type of ads they run
- Filtering ads by affiliate networks – to meet their best-performing advertisements
The network claims you can eliminate creative fatigue by accessing millions of visuals and creatives that drive conversions. And the feature that stands out is their landing page duplication and integration option with LanderLab. With it, you can take any lander, edit it to your taste and make it into a converting powerhouse.
#2 Semrush/AdClarity
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 650.000 ads | Social media, Video, Display | $169 – $349 monthly |
With Semrush, you have two options. You can go with either one, you won’t make a mistake:
#1 Advertising research option you can access within the Semrush dashboard, with a regular account
#2 AdClarity – the advertising intelligence app that’s a bit more advanced in terms of getting you thorough ad campaign insights
The first one offers to monitor your rival’s ad spends, their ad copy (to get an understanding of what triggers conversions), and PPC activities. But also to analyze your competitors in terms of their usage of Google Ads and top-performing keywords they include in advertisements (this is clearly one of the best SEO tools for digital marketing as well).
AdClarity, on the other hand, is all about extensive reports. It showcases thousands of ads in all three categories (display, social media, and video ads), allowing you to understand what your competitors are focused on.
Here’s what you can get with AdClarity:
- Access to competitors’ key performance campaign stats
- Their social media approach and ad strategy
- Your competitor’s most popular messaging and visuals
- Their investment scope and most valuable traffic sources
It is capable of comparing up to 10 selected domains or groups of domains you created, and it analyzes both desktop and mobile ads.
#3 AdSpy
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 157+ million ads | Social media | $149 monthly |
If you’re looking for the best AI tools for digital marketing, AdSpy is definitely the one to consider. It represents the biggest database of Instagram and Facebook ads you can search through while looking for insights on how to run your own social ad campaign.
What’s especially great about AdSpy is their:
- Demographic pinpoint feature – AdSpy can accurately tell you what market an ad is trying to target based on the age range, location, and audience gender
- Fast interface – affects overall efficiency and improves search time
- Multiple search options – this allows you to monitor your competitors in more than one way and to cover all the aspects of their social campaigns
You can do the search any way you want – by the text in the ad, ad network name, offer ID, landing page technologies, social media comments, even by the type of social media post reactions. Their database contains more than 157 million ads in 88 different languages.
#4 PowerAdSpy
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 350+ million ads | Native, Social media, Google | Free trial available Paid account: $69 – $399 monthly |
PowerAdSpy is yet another supreme tool to rely on when needing to spy on your competitors. And it’s also focused on social media campaigns – Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, and Instagram, it covers forums, but also Google and Native ads.
More than half of their users reported a reduction in their A/B testing volume within two months of using the tool, and 70% of them have an increase in their revenue thanks to implementing new strategy solutions based on PowerAdSpy insights.
Note: You can use their add-on in the form of Facebook extension and get immediate data on competitors’ targeted ad stats.
With PowerAdSpy, you can:
- Segment the social ads based on their position (News Feed, Side Location, etc.)
- Visit live ad posts and cross-check their real-time engagement
- Do the ad search based on keywords, advertisers, or domain
- Bookmark the ads and move them to your personal ad inventory
- Get help with deciding on the best CTA for your niche
And with this spy tool, there’s a free trial to see if it meets your needs – you will get it for 3 days, 100 searches, and 1000 ads.
#5 BigSpy
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 1 billion ads | Social media | Free version available Paid account: $9 – $248 monthly |
For all of you in search of the best free digital marketing tools, here it is – BigSpy. Clearly, the free access to ads via this platform is not unlimited, but it sure can help you with your campaign performance if you find yourself to be a newbie. There are paid options as well for more advanced searches.
All the BigSpy features to count on:
- Extensive search – by keyword, CTA, ad type, country, format, industry, date, etc.
- Tailored tracking experience – to analyze performance based on specific preferences
- Real-time niche insights – to discover new ideas supported by social proof and up-to-the-minute data
- Automated ad intelligence – empowering you to optimize ad spending and maximize profitability
This is yet another social media ads-oriented tool that covers the 9 biggest social networks in 70 countries and regions around the world, and includes a massive database of 1 billion ads.
#6 NativeAdBuzz
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 5+ million ads | Native | Free trial available Paid account: $47 – $97 monthly |
This is one of the best spy tools that focuses on native ads. It’s also one of the most affordable ones on our list, and yet it comes with a 7-day free trial you can use to explore all the options. It gives full disclosure on native ad campaigns and saves you hours on thinking and developing the right campaign approach.
With NativeAdBuzz, you can:
- Filter and compare more than 5 million ads
- Create an ad library so you can quickly reference them later
- Stay up to date with the latest advertising trends
- Gain access to the private NativeAdBuzz mastermind forum
In case you want to learn how big brands use native advertising, and what content techniques B2B and B2C marketers embrace to explode their revenues, this digital marketing tool can be of great help.
You can search and filter their ad database by 12 filters, some of which are keywords, landing page, the number of times the ad was seen, country, device, redirects, etc.
#7 AdBeat
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 8+ million ads | Native, Video, Display, Interstitials | Free version available Paid account: $249 – $399 monthly |
Among reliable and well-praised digital marketing reporting tools, there’s another one that stands out. We are referring to AdBeat – a platform capable of turning raw advertising data into valuable competitive insights.
This spy tool crawls millions of pages every single day while detecting and analyzing millions of ads. All that so you can spend your advertising budget smartly and invest it into a campaign that’s likely to succeed. The crawlers it uses are very advanced (they are based on 40+ data centers).
AdBeat showcases the ads from 15.000+ advertisers and publishers, and for each ad, it can reveal:
- Traffic sources
- Used keywords
- Ad spendings
- Ad copy and landing pages
- What publishers’ sites the ads were displayed on
- Your competitor’s most profitable publisher
The tool allows you to create custom reports, make comparisons, and set alerts when the specific advertiser launches a new campaign.
#8 SpyPush
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| 500.000 ads | Push, Native, Popunder | $49 – $99 |
Here, you will find four separate tools designed for each specific ad type, but you can also purchase a combo of tools and get access to SpyPush’s entire database covering push, popunder, native, and adult ads.
Note: Please remember that adult traffic is strictly prohibited on the PropellerAds network.
What SpyPush has to offer:
- Complete ad campaign reveal – creatives, copy, coverage
- Ad tracker and ad network analysis
- Easy landing page download
- List of all profitable campaigns of your competitors
- The coverage of 8 largest ad networks (including PropellerAds)
The tools cover 95 countries and have super easy interfaces. There are four ways to do the search – by keyword, advertiser, language and OS, and you can get an insight into how long the campaign was on as well as to get a preview of similar ad campaigns.
#9 AdMobiSpy
| Database | Type of ads | Price |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | Google, Popups, Social media | Free trial available Paid account: $49 – $599 monthly |
The last one on our list of best spy tools is AdMobiSpy, which is yet another legitimate option when looking to understand how your competitors work. They are monitoring 14 ad networks (again, PropellerAds included), and covering up to 70 countries, depending on the type of ads you are searching through.
AdMobiSpy offers:
- Quick and easy search through 15 filters (keywords included)
- Download option for both ads and landing pages
- Mapping relations – to showcase the correlation between ad and website
- Campaign strategy comparison for different GEOs
This service does not have a huge database of ads like the rest of them, but they do provide relevant info. AdMobiSpy crawls around 1500-2000 new ads on a daily basis, and offers insight on ad networks and trackers used in a specific campaign (aside from the expected like copy, creatives, coverage, campaign duration, views).
To conclude
Even though the usage of spy tools might seem wrong – from a perspective of “spying” being considered as a secretive action, something one should not be doing – it’s not.
These tools are designed to help each and every affiliate, advertiser, or media buyer get an opportunity to learn from their competitors and elevate their campaign strategies. They do not compromise privacy, they just help you gather information that is not confidential.
It’s almost impossible to imagine serious marketers not using at least one of these digital marketing aids. However, bear in mind that these tools are just that – tools. They are not to be relied on completely when defining your campaign approach or fine-tuning your tactics.
Your knowledge and past experiences should be the leading ship.
Now let’s dive into analysis and kick start winning campaign.
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