App Spying for Noobs (7)
Launching a new campaign this week and decided to spend some time spying to see what was going on out there. I'm on a budget so I thought I'd do it the old fashioned "real" way by logging onto some apps in this case to see what ads come up. Although in the end I think I did more TRYing than actual SPYing but I'llshare my process and thoughts that might be helpful to other Mobile Spying Noobs like myself.
The concept of Spying is easy. VPN into another country, download some games/apps and see what ads are showing consistently in that country. And plan accordingly. My experience was not that. It was more along the lines of spending a lot of time gathering very little data on ads but a whole lot of data on what doesn't work. I spent 6 hours one day and 5 hours the next. I kept thinking "Will THIS work?" "Will I get it THIS time?" I experienced the reality of what IAmAttilla talked about in his Spying guide. It's not easy and takes a patience and endurance to keep looking but if you keep at it you'll figure it out. Here are the challenges I experienced.
Doing a VPN into another country doesn't cut it because Google Play wants you to download apps via the App store, which is linked to your email, which is tied to your country. If you try and set it up on your cell phone it will also ask you for a cell number which obviously you're not gonna have. Also if you've downloaded anything (Highly Likely) you'll need to go into the App Manager and clear all the data from the Google Play and any other applicable apps otherwise it will default to the linked account. And don't forget to turn off your GPS. I don't know which apps pull data from GPS, but it seems like a good idea if you want them to think you're on the other side of the world. These aren't difficult, but it takes a while to find each of them.
Since Google Play wants you download apps using the Google Play App I chose to create a new email for the country I wanted to them to think I was in although doing this didn't actually solve the problem. I still couldn't download apps from other countries. After more searching and testing I found that Hola has a VPN/browser combo with a cute flame icon that has an unlock feature that lets you get in and download apps from Google Play specific to another country without going through Google Play. That was the only way I could get some of the apps listed on the top 10 list that were not available in the US. Once I got the games/apps that was step 1. So I turned on the VPN, killed all apps not related to my task at hand, cleared the cache and data on the apps I was using, VPN'd into the foreign country I want to spy on. I start opening apps and the first ad that pops up is for the Pizza Hut down the street (wtf).
I wasn't sure what to do since everything I knew was turned off except my cell signal. I don't know if you can turn that off with software so I decided to turn it off manually by yanking the card out of the back of the phone. Once I did this I saw several english adds and then my first add with random letters I couldn't read. (finally!) But I was back to pizza hut in a very short time. And I was surprised when I clicked on ads and found a reference to the temporary gmail account I had set up for the other country so I obviously hadn't done enough cleaning/clearing or else it's picking it up from somewhere else. Also the coins I won by watching ads on Talking Tom for instance were still there after I had closed and deleted the cache on it. No idea where that was stored.
This was where I started thinking about the ROI on my time so far and decided to focus it on creating banners and testing. Spying takes time and effort and I don't know if it's the best way to get data (or if it's even the best data to get!) but this should help who wants to try Spying the old fashioned way. I haven't quite figured out how to make it work for me yet, but I was at least partially successful so that's a start!
That's enough of a drag to put me off app spying forever.
The upside is that if you find something that works, it has these extra layers of protection from the affiliate community. The mobile web is generally much foggier when it comes to seeing exactly what ads are showing and where.
Plus, even if you take the steps listed above, you're not going to know whether the device itself is part of the targeting.
How significant is iOS vs Android, or different versions, or carriers, or even different browsers?
Spying might give you some signal of what's happening creatively, but it won't give you an instruction manual to replicate the success.
Yes very true! And it wasn't meant to be a discouraging piece of coarse, but more of a reality piece on the challenges you may face when you're headed into Mobile Spying, and the more info you have the better prepared you'll be! You also learn the interworking of ads apps and phones and if you stick it through I think you grow as an affiliate as well. All good things 
You can make it a little easier by FIRST downloading and installing the apps/games and only after that connect to VPN and open the apps/games.
Thats true if the app/game is available in your country, but if it isn't you'll need to use Hola to get it.
Spying with HMA on my android worked with a second gmail address (my business gmail) that didn't have any previous play store activity purchased/downloaded etc. Fired up the second email after beating my head w my primary and voila ! I was in mexico play storefront ! (I think my primary email wouldn't work even after clearing the cache etc because of the credit card /payment info listed to that account)
Gosh just brought 6 months of HMA and ran into this exact problem 
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