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Native Spying - Manual Spying vs Spy Tool (19)

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Hey guys,

I'm faced with the thought that my spy tool, Anstrex, may not be doing a great job at picking up search arb ads, or at all.

But when manually spying, how do we know which ads are popping up just because it's their first day of running on high bid, or different advertisers testing the same non-working offer on different days, or if it's really a working proven offer (that is also not picked up on Spy tools)?

And as a bonus thought really, how do we search for specific ads on real feeds? searching for a specific ad can be sometimes time-consuming.

Let's get it cracking!

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When spying manually, there is literally almost no chance to find out how long an AD has been running or any other info. You would have to refresh the site 100s of times, through different ISPs or VPNs, taking notes and in a few days you might have some data. On top of that, you would have to browse dozens of sites to get a bigger picture of what is running where. And that would still tell you nothing about things like day parting, interest targeting and whatnot. It simply not possible to do this manually and constantly monitor ads that get displayed. That's the power of the spytools as they check everything automatically and they actually utilize dozens of connections, user agents, vpns etc...

Manual spying can still work to some extent, just don't expect miracles from it. You can still discover the largest campaigns this way, especially when spying on the GEO you are from, because as a natural resident you might see campaigns that are hidden from the spytools by cloaking, for example.

Spytools are not perfect either. Many people do whatever possible to hide their campaigns from them and the spytools make mistakes too. But still, spytools are your best bet when it comes to finding out what runs where

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This is a hugely important topic in my opinion...

I've never used Anstrex, but I've spend hundreds if not thousands of hours on Adplexity + manual spying at this point...

The biggest thing in my opinion is that it differs radically by traffic source.

You can get a pretty darn good idea from Adplexity what is working on Revcontent, perhaps even better than you could with intense manual spying since what ads appear on what sides seems quite unique to the site a lot of the time.

Outbrain is similar. Very good scraping from Adplexity.

Taboola though, manual spying is 100x better in my opinion (with a vpn obviously so you can change what country you're seeing ads from).

I've had campaigns that spent literally six figures on Taboola without a single ad ever showing up on Adplexity.

Also, on Taboola, if you find a good site with a solid ad widget, like FiveThirtyEight.com for desktop or MSN for mobile, you can tell a lot from going through the ads with 4 or 5 refreshes... as a 'test' campaign spending <$500 a day will likely only have its ads show up once or twice, whereas a solid campaign that's spending a ton of money will be in the top spots over and over again every time you refresh.

Also, Adplexity no longer seems to be scraping Yahoo Gemini at all, so if you run on it manual spying is your only option.

But yeah... here are some of my favorite sites for spying:

Outbrain Desktop: Sky News
Outbrain Mobile: Sky News
Taboola Desktop: FiveThirtyEight.com (but only shows up for CA/AU/US/NZ for some reason)
Taboola Mobile: MSN-specific for whatever country you're spying on
Revcontent Desktop: TheHornNews.com + NationalWeatherAgency.com (they also have Adblade widgets though so make sure you're looking at Revcontent)
Revcontent Mobile: TheHornNews.com
Yahoo Gemini Desktop: Yahoo News or Yahoo Home for whatever geo you're spying on
Yahoo Gemini Mobile: same as above

For Search-Arb especially, I think you're probably better off doing manual spying, apart from maybe on Revcontent.

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@jack_l This is the best advice on native spying I've come across anywhere!
@shishev This one's a candidate for the newsletter!


Amy


Sent from my iPhone using STM Forums

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Thanks a lot for your answers Jack, I run Taboola a lot so this is really helpful.
Since search arb camps would rarely be at the top, and probably (although a guess) their next top ads would be the direct Media buying teams of System1 and DA because they are able to bid higher, how would you treat search arb manual spying? Also refreshing it and scrolling down to some middle of the endless feed? I find it kind of difficult to "fish" for those.

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I don't think there is any other approach than refreshing over and over and checking what appear in the widgets across the websites. If there is, I'd be interested to know as well

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Yeah basically just refreshing and scrolling is the only answer... easier on mobile vs desktop...

We actually had a VA using a VPN doing manual spying like 3 hours a day for awhile recording every single search arb ad she saw in various geo's, including headline, url, etc... how many instances...

Was insanely helpful data but we failed to really capitalize on it like I had hoped.

I don't have the secret to making search arb work, but at least for spying, I think the above is the best plan.

There's some geo's like Italy and Brazil where search arb makes up a huge proportion of the ads, and if you really focus on it I think one could eek out some really strong profits.

We killed it in Italy with Funeral Search-Arb for about six months, then could never get it to work again.

Best results we had were:

CA/US Senior Living
AU Senior Living
CA Credit Cards/Poor Credit
AU Funeral
Italy Funeral
US/CA Dating
France Dating
CA Dental Implants
US/CA Used SUV's

We also absolutely killed it for awhile on Yahoo Gemini with search arb, but then just started getting flooded with 'bot' widgets and it fell apart... worth a try though if you're focused on search arb, although just getting an account with Yahoo Gemini is like pulling teeth...

I think Outbrain has some good opportunity for search arb too...

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Yo that's a pro tip.

Worth trying for me but once I get my profits up, probably above 400$/day.
What's the cost of that?

Just wondering, the amount of appearances she would record would be - after every refresh she would document that as a new appearance for the same ads?

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A good VA on OnlineJobs.PH costs about 5$ an hour/$200 a week/10k a year. You could definitely find one cheaper but that's a level I'm comfortable with, what I would estimate 80k is for an American, so high enough that their going to be super grateful and not have the constant urge to find a higher-paying position. That's for like a perfect English speaker, computer-savvy, etc. Statistically likely to be a twenty-something female, though there's guys too who are really good. Check out John Jonas's videos on YouTube - he's the owner of OnlineJobs.ph - really cool dude.

And then yes, every instance of an ad appearing would be marked down... including all headline variations... etc... so duplicates would just get hashes next to them...

But she would switch sites/geo's every 20 minutes or so... so never more than a few refreshes in a row on any given site...

We also had her upload campaigns, and do headline/image requests on the System1 dashboard.

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Hey @jack_l

Do you have any idea how can I spy manually after mobile ads?
For desktop I've some chrome extension but not sure how to do it for mobile ads.

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Curious about this as well. I would like to spy ads on Android (and see where my own ads are running), but I have an iPhone

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I also have an iPhone , do you know how to spy manually there?

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@sd31677 and @sportex - naw no secrets really... if you have an iPhone and want to spy on Android I would just buy a super cheap android...

I don't think there's that big of a difference in mobile vs android on native though (although I could be wrong)...

Most important thing in my mind is the VPN you choose... as you want one that will give you access to tons of different geo's, and which actually works...

I like ExpressVPN the most personally... but there's some free ones that are okay too...

Also is good to have because it allows you to test your own campaigns in other geo's and make sure nothing is 404'ing, taking too long to load, etc.

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I just ask it in general since I've never made any manual spying on Mobile, just on desk.
So in practice , should I download some VPN application like the one that you gave as an example in order to be able to spy on another geo's native ads with my iPhone?

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Have you guys tried some "agent emulator/switcher" extension or plugin? Worked pretty well for me when I needed it

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Yep download ExpressVPN. If I remember right you can use it for both your desktop and phone... and then use it to spy on both so you see what ads are running on what device in what geo...

Only thing I would mention - make sure you don't have any Ad Platform dashboards logged into while using it on Desktop... if I understand right some of these platforms like Bing and YouTube will be more likely to ban your account if you log in with a VPN... and I wouldn't be surprised if it was the same with Taboola/Outbrain/etc.

Actually - another protip - if you set your mobile browser to 'Desktop Mode', you can see all the ads targeting Desktop anyway...

So for instance go to MSN-Fr-Fr or MSN-CA-EN or whatever geo you want to spy on, and then spy on the ads showing when your on mobile, then switch your mobile browser to 'Desktop Mode' and you'll get the Desktop version of the site, and all the ads targeting Desktop users

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Hello guys!

I was thinking ... I am expert in crawling / scraping. I was CTO of a project that we sold on January that was doing more than 400 million requests to Google Play / Appstore per day. I was interested in starting with search arbitrage, so maybe @jack_l we can develop something cool and make profit from that. We can pretend that we are in any country using some service providers with local mobile IPs and scrape the ads. We can ever go one step further and click the ads and see what links are appearing, so you can laser-target the ad copies to improve the CTR on the landing.

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Very cool man - I will admit I am in awe of folks like you who can do all that behind the scenes tech stuff... I spy manually but I couldn't code a scraper if you paid me a million bucks lol.

Anyway I'm actually totally out of the search arb world now and just concentrating on a couple really specific verticals on native, however if I dive back in and or do anything similar I'll hit you up!

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Hey just looked at this again... was going to add that I wouldn't neccesarily put too much weight on how high an ad appears on the page... more just the consistency with which you see it... the Taboola SmartBid will likely bid all over the place based on a million factors, so consistency of seeing an ad is the only real way to tell how much someone is spending (versus placement of ad on page).

On Outbrain and Revcontent its way more manual though.. I remember on Revc I would literally have battles with other affiliates where I'd raise my bid on a site by 2 cents and move into the top spot... then a day later they'd suddenly be in the top spot... then I'd raise my bid again by two cents and I'd be back in the top spot lol... but on Taboola its more like Facebook where the SmartBid is taking a couple dozen different variables into account, so it might show your ads low on MSN Mobile at 11 am to one user, but right on top at 1 pm to another user, etc..

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