7 Reasons Why Affiliates Should Use A Spy Tool
Affiliate marketers have to consider a huge range of variables when developing campaigns. While inexperienced affiliates tend to start from scratch, testing all variables is resource-intensive and time-consuming. Knowledgeable marketers, on the other hand, conduct extensive research using affiliate spy tools to understand what leading competitors are doing and hit the ground running.
At Vimmy, we work closely with a huge number of leading affiliates across multiple industries, so we understand how these professionals leverage spy tools to build better campaigns. In this article, we’ll define spy tools and provide 7 reasons why all affiliates should leverage this type of software during their campaign creation and optimization processes.
What Are Spy Tools?
In the affiliate context, spy tools are software solutions that allow marketers to identify, track, and analyze competitor campaigns. Not all spy tools are the same, but reliable platforms often provide robust features that allow you to see beyond superficial metrics.For example, a powerful affiliate spy tool will not only reveal what graphics and wording competitors are implementing, but also the program, landing page, and f conversion statistics.
Keep in mind that there are many different marketing tracking platforms, but not all of these bring features dedicated specifically to affiliate marketing. For instance, you can find platforms that monitor competitor SEO performance, but it fails to provide valuable insights like affiliate offer or landing page details.
Can’t I Just Do Manual Assessments?
Many affiliates fall into the trap of obsessing over manual assessments after understanding the concept of collecting marketing intelligence. However, there are a few reasons why this isn’t a great alternative.For starters, manual reviews take a huge amount of time, and therefore, they cost a lot of money. Spy tools allow you to see information from hundreds of competitors through a single platform.
Another common issue with manual assessments is that it’s impossible to complete enough of them to be statistically significant. So, if you start reviewing manually and compiling information, the offer you want to promote may be over by the time you finish analyzing the data.
Lastly, manually analyzing competitor campaigns doesn’t provide the whole picture. Even the most versatile affiliates will have a hard time determining exactly what program, network, or advertiser a competitor is using without help.
7 Reasons You Should Use a Spy Tool for Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is one of the most common forms of advertising and it’s used by countless businesses across almost all verticals. This means that you have the ability to choose an industry that you understand and find interesting.With that in mind, let’s take a look at the benefits of using spy tools when developing an affiliate marketing campaign.
1. Gain Insights Into Competitor Campaigns
Competitors choose unique networks, programs, images, videos, ad formats, and CTA wording, all of which influence the performance of their campaigns. Through a robust spy tool, you can have access to this information and gain valuable insights into the techniques that leading affiliates have in place.2. Compare Your Current Performance to the Competition
It’s true that comparison is the thief of joy, comparing your performance to the leading competitors can help you understand what element they have in place that you don’t and close the gap between the two campaigns. Not only this, but you can also get a good idea of how the leading affiliates in your vertical are performing and help you figure out when it’s time to find other alternatives.3. Use the Data to Create Projections
The more data you have about leading competitors and your industry as a whole, the easier it will be to create accurate projections of your performance. This is helpful because you can make plans to reinvest a portion of your profits and set a schedule for how long your ads run for.4. Build a More Comprehensive Strategy
All affiliates develop campaigns to the best of their abilities, but what seems obvious for one marketer is not necessarily so for another. By conducting research using spy tools, you may be able to identify ad formats, CTA styles, and other elements that you don’t currently have and can implement in your campaign.5. Reduce Unnecessary Losses
Remember how we said that using affiliate spy tools is better than testing? The reason for this is that extensive testing requires additional resources. Fortunately, having a powerful spy tool can help you hit the ground running and reduce the number of overall tests/optimizations you have to do.6. Develop Better Approaches
A reliable spy tool is the perfect piece of software to help you develop comprehensive strategies, depending on what you want to achieve. For example, if you want to improve conversions, you can see if competitors are using pre-landers, remarketing campaigns, and similar elements to boost their conversions.7. Identify the Best KPIs
There is no one-size-fits-all list of key performance indicators (KPIs) for every affiliate, so you need to figure out which metrics are the most valuable to your platform and keep a close eye on their performance. Luckily, a powerful spy tool can help you see what metrics reflect the success of the leading affiliates and monitor these numbers on your campaign.Features You Should Look for in Your Spy Tool
Here are some of the top features you should look for when researching affiliate spy tools.- The ability to filter ads by niche, traffic type, country, and more
- Customized searches
- Market and traffic details
- Reveal all competitor call-to-action texts
- See a copy of the program landing page
- Competitor suggestions
Popular Affiliate Marketing Spy tools
AdplexityAdplexity adult
Anstrex
SpyPush
AdPeriscope
Mobidea spy tools
