If your line of work involves marketing and advertising, it is imperative that you always keep up with industry trends and practices. It’s easier said than done, though, especially since advertisers like to keep their strategies close to their chest and away from competitors’ reach.

Still, if you want to emulate the best practices of advertisers the world over, it would be useful to have a way to access their ad details, information, and results.

That said, you might want to welcome the idea of ad spying. In this article, we discuss ad spying and how a technology called BigSpy can help you do it.

What is Ad Spying?

Nowadays, the proliferation of digital ads is beyond what any person could imagine. There are numerous platforms to choose from when it comes to boosting ads, and there are different types of ads, targets, and objectives that you have to optimize to get the best results. 

Given all the available ad type permutations, it can be confusing to mix and match ad elements until you get the ad set that works for you. Save budget and boost ads that work by knowing what type of ads work and optimizing your ad according to that ad format.

On the surface, ad spying is all about observing the practices of your competitors and other advertisers. See how their ads performed and which advertisements you can try to adapt to your own ad sets. It may seem easy, but you’ll find out that it’s quite challenging to get useful data and insights if you do not have first-hand administrator access to their ad accounts.

What are the advantages and drawbacks of ad spying?

You have a lot to gain with ad spying. Yet, without the proper tools, the type of data you can access will be limited. To give you an idea of what you can and cannot do with ad spying, here are some of the advantages and drawbacks of this practice:

Advantages:

• You will be able to review the best practices of your competitors.
• It allows you to save money since you won’t need to experiment with your ad set-ups from scratch.
• You can review the content of your competitors and see which practices to avoid when making ads.
• It lets you see which platforms your competitors use when boosting ads.
• You will be able to see trends in advertising and mold your ad to ride on that wave. 

Drawbacks:

• You will only be able to see limited data since you do not have administrator access to your competitors’ ad accounts.
• The limited information on their ad sets may lead to wrong conclusions, which means that the budget you spent on ads with wrong practices will be money wasted.
• Just as you can have a surface-level view of their ads, they will likewise be able to view your ads and study the marketing strategy you are currently doing.

Will BigSpy be able to help advertisers have a better understanding of competitors’ ads?

The benefits of ad spying are practically endless, but there’s only so much you can do with limited information. BigSpy is one of the many ad spying technologies around. Let’s take a closer look at what BigSpy can offer to help advertisers in studying their competitors’ advertisements.

You can check what type of images and videos other advertisers use.

Facebook (which is one of the biggest platforms for ads nowadays) reported that they see 2.3 times more engagement when people post content with images.

Depending on your audience, some types of images may work better than others. Sometimes, styled images receive high reach and impressions, but there are cases when catalog images or layouts with messaging work better.

With BigSpy, you will be able to view the type of images advertisers use to see which ones work well with audiences similar to yours. From there, you can adapt the way they style and layout their images and edit their videos.

If your ad emulating the trend on images and videos worked, then it means your ad spying worked. If not, it may mean that other factors, apart from the image or video, played a big part in the success of the ad.

You will see the ad details and insights.

BigSpy lets its users view ad details you wouldn’t be able to usually see with basic ad spying. You will get to review the duration of ads that work well, the performance in terms of likes, comments, shares, and even the growth of engagement per ad on a 7-day to 30-day basis.

You can even get access to ad’s demographics— from the age range, gender, to even the localities of the people who have reached and engaged with the ads.

These details will help you have a read on what type of ad works faster. Since most necessary details are already indicated, then you will be able to more or less have a grasp on what type of strategy to employ for your ads.

You can check which ads other advertisers are tracking.

You’re not the only one doing ad spying. Most other advertisers from different industries are probably reviewing numerous ads to see what strategy they should use for their next ad sets.

With BigSpy, you can track the top ads other advertisers are looking at as well. You’ll be able to easily see trending ad sets that are catching the eye of other advertisers.

From there, you can decide if you want to ride on that trend or do something unique to stand out. The choice ultimately depends on you—but BigSpy gives you an edge since you will be able to see quickly what others are looking at currently.

Should you give BigSpy a shot?

The answer is definitely yes. BigSpy grants you access to the information you wouldn’t be able to easily see with surface-level ad spying. It scrapes information from numerous platforms as well—from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google, to even Pinterest. Gathering ad sets from all the biggest platforms and organizing top ads will make your team work faster and help you utilize your budget better.

Give BigSpy a chance and see how well it could help you stay on track with your ads.