There are a ton of tools out there and getting the right information to run ad campaigns can be time consuming. You research, forecast, guesstimate, and lose. When you lose you gain more data, but then the cycle repeats itself. AdClarity a media intelligence and display advertising strategy tool helps you grind down to the right data. The problem is how does it compete against the more popular ones out there?
Today, I will discuss this new tool released to market and allow you to make the decision yourself.
First, AdClarity is by a company called BIScience . They also have a toolbar called GeoSurf. I have discussed their toolbar prior on this blog post as well. I have used GeoSurf and trusted them for quite a while as they played a big role with one of my popular affiliate lander spy tool, sold last year. Now they have come up with an ad intelligence tool which definitely is up to par.
Lets walk through this a bit, I did a quick search for MensHealth.com and found the following criteria. There are several factors and numbers here. There are 216 advertisers on here, about 1127 creatives, and 67 monitoered pages. These are important to me because as an advertiser, I want to see where people are advertising on, how big the advertiser pool is, and the amount of creatives I have to compete with.
Now, I did a search as MensHealth being a publisher, meaning they are serving ads. When clicking on the mediator menu, it will show me who the advertisers are and who the ad server network is as well. I can see that MensHealth is using the ValueClick platform as well as Google Adsense, even more interesting the direct buys they are also doing with big brands.
How does this help an affiliate or an advertiser? Simple, it has data for you to analyze in one sitting.
- Look to see who else is advertising and how big the competition is on specific pages of the site
- Who are the other publishers, that is related to MensHealth or your specific vertical for more reach and scalability
- The type of creative that is being served on the website
- The number of creatives being displayed and how you can compete with those banners to stop banner blindness
- Who the ad serving platforms are and who the direct relationships the site has.
With this ad media intelligence, you can dig deep with your competitor. Now lets look at it from an advertiser point of view. I did a look up for ForceFactor:
You can see here it has about 355 publishers (advertising on 355 sites), 194 creatives, and 3 campaigns running. So those numbers are for the past 3 months. Clicking on each campaign will also break down the offer they are running even more. What is really cool is the trend graph it provides. The trend graph shows you the first time it was detected on the publisher site and how often it went up or down.
It will give you a breakdown of how popular a site is. This can give you a great overview of how well a specific publisher site is doing, allowing you to do a direct buy or do a direct buy via a mediator (ad serve network).
It also has the benefits of accessing a publisher site via different countries so you can see the type of ads running. This is done via their toolbar which can be downloaded for Chrome or FireFox. If you have ever utilized GeoSurf, then you can browse websites from other countries allowing you to view banners from Ireland for example without really leaving your US computer desk.
AdClarity definitely has a nice interface, but how does it really compete with the rest out there currently. I believe AdClarity is a bit late in the game and do not have as much data as some of the more popular ad intelligence tools out there currently. It does how ever provide an amazing breakdown of information to you the advertiser or affiliate. The interface is clean and organized, one best thing I do like again is the trend line they provide. This allows you to make good decisions on when and where to place your new ad creatives.
Thus far AdClarity looks to be a competitive tool to similar tools out there. Since it is brand new, it has placed its marked in the performance space by providing multiple ways to search the competition and find the right place to advertise. With trend analysis and a birds eye view from the advertiser side, this simple easy to use interface is something to look into.
