Introduction
Social advertising offers a gold mine of opportunity for CPA marketers and affiliates in general.
The ability to deliver ads to users across a broad range of interests and categories, along with targeted audience lists, has made social the platform of choice for many marketers.
However, those used to traditional PPC advertising platforms (like Google Ads or Bing Ads) are gonna find themselves in unfamiliar territory at first.
With Facebook Ads, for example, you’re gonna need to determine your bid strategy, create your audience lists, manage your placements and decide on your optimisation and delivery strategy before you can jump into the action.
Once you’ve got past the technical hurdles and have some familiarity with this way of doing things, it’s time to understand how to actually make money with social ads.
Here are your options:
- Option 1: Run enough volume on your own campaigns to gain sufficient test data to optimise them for your CPA targets.
This however, could be costly, and is still not gonna shed any light on the campaign data or strategies of your competition .
- Option 2: Find and analyze competitor campaigns
That’s probably the smartest move you’ve got. And yeah, it can be a monster time-consumer, not to mention – expensive.
Finding successful competitor creatives and campaign data is gonna be a difficult process.
But don’t fear, bro!
Let’s look at affiliate spy tools you can use to research competitor social ad creatives and build your own profitable campaigns with a positive ROI, right off the bat!
Read on!
Idvert Overview
Idvert is a social creatives and advertiser analysis spy tool that you’re gonna love!
The platform’s got some neat features that will help you drill down into competitor’s campaigns and discover how Cash On Delivery (COD) and knock-off advertisers are using Facebook and Google Search to drive more sales.
The platform mainly focuses on cross-border e-commerce creatives and knock-off data but also includes other advertising types, such as games and apps.
It comes with full access to data about Drop-shipping, Cash on Delivery & Knock-off products as well as Games & Apps. Their Nutra function should arrive as early as Q4 2018.
In the realm of social advertising the platform’s got a bright future as the eCommerce platform of choice for social advertisers.
What’s more, ad creatives and engagement trending stats are updated in real-time, helping you to identify the hottest products on the market right now.
Dashboard
When you first log in you’re gonna be presented with the dashboard where you can find ad samples to analyze.
Use the search function to find domains, keywords or app names.
Sort the data by category, search position, ads type, marketing objective and device, to give you results tailored to your search.
There’s also a range of filters you can apply to find the most comprehensive, latest and hottest ads, and filter by likes, shares, comments and days in effect.
Apply additional filters to the results, including time period, first seen and last seen.
All of this makes for super targeted results that will save you vast amounts of time and testing of your own creatives.
Creative Types
This platform is unique in that it shows trending COD (cash on delivery) and FP (fake product) ads.
There’s also a wealth of data on different marketing objectives such as PPE (post page engagement), WC (website conversions) and APP installs and you can search for image, video or carousel creatives.
Within these niches, products and trends change way too fast.
Idvert allows advertisers to find popular ads and trends and profit from them early on.
You’re gonna be able to spot rising products and look for patterns in creatives and landing pages that are being used in high performance campaigns.
All of this in real time!
An extra feature that we love about the tool is the ability to download creatives, including video so you can save and compare competitor ads and get your own campaigns up and running in record time.
Advertiser Search
If you know the name or URL of the advertiser you wanna look-up, pop it in the search bar.
From here you can view all the creatives the advertiser is running, along with historical data and also will be able to apply any filters you want to the search.
Click on the ad to drill down further and find stats including ad position, devices, geo location and marketing objective, along with the ad URL and landing page for the creative.
You can also view the advertising analysis, geo and interest distribution to help you design your own winning campaigns.
You’ll also find stats on the Advertiser Domain Analysis and Traffic Sources, complete with outgoing links that you can research to help optimize your own site or page.
How You Can Profit With Idvert
With so much data at your disposal, advertisers new to the platform can make use of it to get ahead of their competition in quickly.
You’ll be able to find which creatives are working for which type of deals and find products that are new to market or trending right now.
So let’s look at how you can use Idvert to make money by unlocking the secrets of top performing advertisers in your niche.
Let’s say you wanna look at watches.
Enter your search term into the search > select filters > click apply.
Scan the results and try to identify patterns in the ad copy and creatives.
Look for common themes in the results and think how you can apply these to your campaign.
Some of the common concepts to the ads are the use of emojis and audience participation to increase user engagement on the campaign and attract more clicks through to the landing page.
A couple of the ads focus on free items and campaigns where you only pay for shipping.
That’s a dope way to grab attention.
Take notes!
The images are all high quality but they don’t necessarily state that this is the product the buyer is gonna receive.
One thing to note is that for COD ads, you have to remain careful what you claim in your advertising copy.
For example, imitation products are not allowed on Facebook, especially if the creative is gonna claim they’re the real thing.
If you were to display products in your creatives that claim to be the genuine article, you could be risking suspension of your account.
However, in the examples above we see advertisers who are potentially selling these sorts of products.
Did you see what they did? They don’t sell a claim that puts them at risk of an account suspension.
Creative Detail Page
We’re gonna go into bigger detail here so you get a wholesome picture of where you’re at with COD social ads.
Let’s follow on of the Gadget Magic’s ads.
If we click through the ad from within Idvert, we are presented with all sorts of additional info about the creative.
Beautiful, right!
We see the ad is displayed as a news feed placement for Australia, the United States and the UK.
The objective is displayed as clicks to website and the advertiser has set 3 age groups to test the best performing audience.
This is super valuable campaign data to use when creating your own audience lists!
The image also features a like button with 999 likes, indicating social proof for the product.
You can then click through to the landing page to see the sales page for the product.
For this ad, we see a highly relevant landing page, featuring the product as described.
You can also view stats about the engagement of the ad, traffic sources and how it performs by looking up the advertiser’s domain analysis panel, as in the case on Lonlon.me below.
This data can additionally be used to find out hidden strategies advertisers are using in their campaigns as you’ll see below.
COD and FP Data
This, in our opinion, is where Idvert really shines as a social ads spy tool.
Due to strict advertising regulations and terms of service regarding making false advertising claims, this coveted style of advertising can be difficult to get right.
You don’t wanna run the risk of having your campaigns fail the approval process, or worse still, get a ban on your account.
So how are advertisers using social search to display cash on delivery and knockoff products?
Easy! Let’s go back to our advertiser search for the answer.
This time we’re going to search for watches, but with the COD filter checked.
Let’s apply the ‘Latest’ filter and view the results.
You’ll notice the ads have the COD symbol displayed so they can easily be identified.
Here’s an attention grabbing ad from Best-Online:
It’s billed as 60%, uses catchy emojis in the copy and includes an image of the product.
We can then find the URL of the landing page and open that in a new tab to see how the advertiser approaches the page design and call to action.
Here, the product is prominently displayed with a buy now button.
Let’s run a blank search with the FP filter checked and view the results.
If we click on an ad further down for shoes, we see this creative.
It looks normal enough, but when you look at the advertiser’s Facebook page, there’s no mention that they are selling shoes.
Could this indicate they don’t want to announce that fact?
In some instances you may even find the landing page is similarly cloaked, either by geo targeting or other methods, to display differents products to people in different locations.
This can help when it comes to finding your own opportunities and finding ways to target your page to the right person, while avoiding unwanted attention.
It can be used as a way to fly under the radar if the products you’re promoting are less than genuine.
You may find, in the case of some affiliate marketers, the brand page doesn’t directly sell the product but instead captures customer data or sells related products from other pages of the site.
In these cases, advertisers are taking care when selling products that may be in violation of Facebook guidelines by not selling the genuine article.
These advertisers may also be seen as taking advantage of news events and current trends. They create ads that aren’t directly related to the product sales page, but nevertheless get a good amount of clicks without making any false claims.
If you do decide to use any of these tactics, make sure to always cover yourself by reading the fine print, but remember it’s also totally OK to use external events as hype for your own ads, provided there is some relevancy.
Of course, we would never recommend to do this in your own campaigns, but the strategies you can find others using can serve as a guideline for finding your own methods.
You noticed how the names of the brands from our examples are left out, right?
Well, that’s totally on purpose.
It allows the advertiser to avoid detection when it comes to disclosing the true intent of their campaigns.
This ability to screen COD and FP data certainly has its upsides.
You can find what’s popular or trending in different markets and how video, world events and other strategies are employed in COD ads to grab the users’ attention.
Spying like a pro is gonna unlock the secret to creating your own successful campaigns and making huge ROI.
Go for it!
How to Increase Conversions by Following Successful Ad Strategies
It’s time for you to learn how to establish emotional connection with visitors through user stories to increase conversions.
You’re gonna see these types of ads in competitive niches such as dating or weight loss.
Always be careful not to promote a product that will cause your ad to fail to pass the strict verification guidelines. It’s a slippery slope and the smartest way to get around screening is to use legitimate products and creatives, as in the case of Gear Rangers.
Tactics like this are used by affiliates to attract attention to their offers. You’re gonna learn a lot if you sign-up for a free trial with Idvert and spy on your competitors.
You’re gonna be shocked at the tons of data you’ll get at disposal to create profitable campaigns.
And the best part? You can scan the ads for the methods used to make it easy for the visitor to click through to the landing page.
Does the ad include any calls to action in the copy or emojis to encourage users to click, or does the image itself contain a graphic such as a button or a download symbol?
Does the advertiser create scarcity with their copy?
Is it time-sensitive? Time sensitive offers for example, have long been known to work well in advertising and by creating ads with limited supply or availability, you can create an air of exclusivity. This always results in an ad which can attract a higher CTR.
The information you’re gonna tap into is gonna blow your mind!
It’s common to see different ad types in creatives, such as video or stories, so make sure to diversify the ad types in your own campaigns if all signs point to this.
There’s a lot of different ways you can use the platform – from searching domains, to researching advertisers or keywords that will help you identify competitors. You can event find creatives and add them to collections of favorites:
Favorites can be used to find historical ads from advertisers you follow and keep an eye on the development of their campaigns.
You’re gonna be able to manage your favorites from the User Center.
User Center
Go to the dashboard and move over to the user center, where you can also find messages, history and popular ads.
Follow websites in the same way as ads and review these whenever you like.
Finding popular creatives in your niche and identifying which creatives are being used by advertisers makes Idvert a winning tool for affiliates looking to take their social advertising strategy to the next level.
Pricing
The free trial has limited access and allows only 5 searches and detailed reviews.
However, you can purchase a monthly plan for $199 per month.
This gives you the opportunity to build unlimited collections of favorite ads and websites, access the full-version database as well as the detailed ad analysis and advertising strategies, Black hat, COD and FP data.
Need a helping hand? Say no more!
As your best wingman, we’re giving you the Black Friday’s special offer!
Conclusion
Idvert is an amazing tool for gathering incredible amount of insight about not only your eCommerce campaigns, but also your competitors’
With full access to data on Drop-Shipping, Cash On Delivery, Knock-off products, Games & Apps, Nutra, this platform cannot possibly be overlooked by anyone doing eCommerce social advertising.
The reporting and creatives data is perfect for pros and newbies alike.
Analyzing the insights is gonna point to trends and help you refine your own strategies through knowing what your competitors do.
With the many advantages of Idvert all conveniently packaged in one place, it’s a tool that you’ll find yourself using often for gaining a competitive edge and maximizing your conversions.
Anyone who is serious about scaling their social advertising is gonna find the competitive intelligence and creative insights on the platform something they simply can’t do without.
It’s the ultimate game-changer!
With real-time updating of ad creatives and engagement trending to help you find the latest winning niche or newest products, Idvert is a must have!
Information is power, bro! Use it and profit!
Karina Bielawska
Key Account Manager
Fascinated with business management, sales, motivation and the psychology behind the behavior of customers, Karina was destined to be part of an Affiliate Marketing network! She became a member of the Mobidea Crew in 2015. As an Account Manager, she's got the chance to experience the things she values the most. Her Gemini nature requires constant dynamism, freedom and development and that's why she thrives in the wide field of Affiliate Marketing and MarTech, which really is a never-ending adventure, just like life itself! As a result of her background in Management, Karina is remarkably logical, straightforward, and practical. She's crazy for diversity and loves experiencing new things! Flamenco? Programming? Hitchhiking? Opera singing? She's all in!
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