As a marketer you want to stay on top of the competition and also know what they are doing. Data is an important part of our industry and organizing the immense data that is out there can be a pain. In the past I have been using multiple tools to help with my online advertising career.
Lately, I have been more accustomed to use GeoSurf with my marketing needs. Recently they just upgraded their toolbar and I want to let you know there is a huge improvement on their platform. It isn't just a proxy server anymore but it gives you stats!
There are 2 parts which I want to talk about and discuss. First is GeoSurf upgraded their toolbar and it is called GeoSurf Plus. The first part is the ability to get stats on the advertisers on a website or page. This push button tool is amazing because you literally just push a button and it provides you with amazing information about that page and its advertisers.
For example I went to weather.com push the GeoSurf Plus button and received information about their advertisers, screenshot below:
This tells me what is currently on this page. It just gives me good information about this particular weather.com page, stating there are 186 unique creatives, 39 campaigns, and just 30 advertisers. If I want to find out more about each advertiser and their creative, I simply click on More Insights.
Once I click on more insights I get more indepth data:
This section dives into some amazing data for example it will tell you who the main advertisers are and their share on the page as well as their creatives. Think of this like MixRank or WhatRunsWhere, a banner display tool.
Another aspect about GeoSurfs tool bar is it categorizes the campaigns it sees. So let say you want to do a dating on weather.com or tmz.com. GeoSurf Plus tells you the share percentage. This helps you determine if there is competition or if it is even worth it to advertise on such site.
Even knowing what he most popular category to advertise on these sites is priceless. It will also break down similar sites as well. You can find more places to advertise this way. There are a lot more functions this toolbar has, for example it even gets the creatives of the advertisers. I believe it only stores the last 7 days creatives as I can not change the date range. Even then it gives me a good idea of how to position my banner ads strategy.
The other feature I like is the Mediators, I assume these are the ad networks that are allowing publishers and advertisers to advertise. Though they are not by particular network it does have the referring url links or the redirected links. For certain, it does have Google Exchange network on there. Some of the links are a bit confusing and does not let me know the direct ad network but it is still interesting to see where these ads are coming from.
The other function I want to discuss is mobile. GeoSurf is a premium proxy toolbar. Right now this is the only toolbar that will allow you to view a website in its mobile form (if it has a mobile version) by simply just clicking on a drop down and choosing your tablet or mobile phone.
As you can see GeoSurf breaks this down into brand and models, making it easy for you to chose. In the background you can see the mobile version of weather.com and how it would look like on an iPhone 4S. The best part about this is you can find out if your landing pages are mobile friendly. A more better use for this is seeing if your affiliate offer are also mobile friendly.
A lot of users are using their phone to check email and even clicking on ads. How does your offer look like when it is loaded in an iPhone or even yet an Android phone? This nifty toolbar makes it a bit easier to view how landing pages and offer pages will look like.
The best feature of the upgraded GeoSurf toolbar is the GeoSurf Plus for sure. Having the ability going to a website seeing a banner and then clicking a button to see if others advertised on this particular page is powerful. Display advertising spy tools are rapidly growing and this is one tool I really enjoy having.
