How Spy Tools help affiliates make money

Affiliate marketing is a rapidly changing industry, where you should always be on the alert: Google algorithm changes, data privacy issues, new regulations. At the same time, there’s still an increasing flow of creative minds who are eager to make high profits. Some affiliates become threatened by a high number of competitors. But look, competition is actually good for you. It’s a kind of indicator that you’re in a profitable niche. Besides, treating your various competitors with keen interest will prevent you from making wrong steps on the way of earning commissions. 

Whether you are an affiliate marketer, promoting different offers or a brand manager who is trying to put your company at the head of the pack, it’s equally important to know which ads are better and where to perform them. How to get this data when there’re thousands of counterparts’ campaigns in front of you? The easiest and most efficient way to make competition play by your side is to use spy tools.

Spy tools show you the choices your competitors have made to promote their offers: from traffic sources to creatives and paid keywords. Knowing this information simplifies the whole process of affiliate marketing, no matter how professional you’re. Any quality tool is a saving grace for newcomers that drives them on the well-trodden road of success. At the same time, they’re irreplaceable instruments for experienced marketers who are willing to increase their profits in a short time. And no wonder that the value of spy tools rises at times when affiliates lose grip or decide to master another vertical.

Is it possible to be a successful affiliate marketer without using spy tool?

It’s definitely possible. You can find affiliate marketers who reach their goals with no tools and advice. But in these ways, we will most likely deal with a highly professional affiliate, a real pro in particular vertical. Or just someone with great luck.

To be sure you know how to beat your competitors, you should explore the following:

    • Their products features
    • Pricing, quality
    • Unique selling points
    • Traffic sources they use
    • Creatives
    • Online marketing methods and affiliates specifics
    • Successful and non-successful marketing strategies.

So, are you ready to check all these manually? If yes, our hat’s off to your endurance.


We personally could not have stayed away from these helpers and decided to uncover the whole truth about spy tools for affiliate marketers. To form an unbiased opinion, we did some tests with tools that spy on particular ads formats.

Now you would probably have a reasonable question, why we chose them and what kind of values can such spy tools bring to affiliates? Let’s see, how they may help:

1. Generate novel ideas and campaign strategies

No matter how long you’ve been working in this industry, there is bound to be some new creative approaches to promote offers that you might have missed. As a spy tool will help you to see how other marketers promote similar products in similar verticals, you’ll be able to keep up with markets and your niche and sub-niche trends, and practice new creatives you may not have ever thought of.

2. Reduce your ad-spend

When using a spy tool, you will see what kind of ads your competitors are promoting for the same or similar offers. You will get the whole information about

– all ads your competitors are promoting,
– competitor’s best ad combinations,
– competitor’s ad split tests,
– publisher sites that worked well and bad for your competitors,
– time frame in which your competitor performed ads.

This valuable information will protect you from spending budget on inefficient tests and ad mock-ups. Spying tool will help you to confirm or deny hypothesis about your offer promotion with no spendings.

3. Reduce time to achieve positive ROI

If there’s anything more valuable in affiliate marketing than money, it is time. If you decide to check your hypothesis with split tests, you deliberately put yourself in a losing position. You have to wait for several days to gather relevant data and make enough experiments with different angles and creatives. It can take you days or weeks via testing, while it’ll be minutes to hours looking through the results of your competitors’ hard work via spy tool. 

As a matter of fact, with the right approach, you may improve your campaign’s performance in less than 1 day. As to particular services, we remained impressed under the performance of each one we checked. But we particularly want to highlight Anstrex spy tool.

Anstrex spy tool – is a tool for advertisers, content creators, direct sales marketers, and affiliatesIt specializes in spying on native and push notification ads. 


Here are some of Anstrex Spy Tool’s top features that make them stand out among others:

  • It provides you with more data than any other tool

In Anstrex Spy Tool you’ll find 15 Million Ads from hundreds of thousands of publishers in 92 countries. It’s integrated into 38 ad networks. Here you’ll find ad campaigns in any vertical, any language and in any country. You will be able to rip landing pages that your competitors are actively using right now, you can almost jump right to the same playing ground that they are in.

  • Advanced Filters & Searching Probabilities

Most spy tools utilize dropdown filters, which means you can only choose one at a time and you will have limited combinations. Anstrex has advanced filters that utilize Boolean Logic. This means you can create an unlimited combination of AND and OR filters so you can zero-in on the exact ads that you are looking for. You can search based on a combination of keywords, category, ad network, language, affiliate network, and country.

  • Unparalleled Data Insights

Anstrex, in our opinion, has one of the most accurate data analytics from the creative all the way to landing pages. Whether it is the assignment of the ad-networks or determination of high ROI list of publisher’s site, the accuracy of landing page URLs (even for cloaked landers) for that matter, Anstrex is phenomenally superior.

spy tool

  • SimilarWeb and Alexa Integration

If you want to know where your competitors get most of their traffic from, you would likely use SimilarWeb and Alexa or other tools that will provide with this information. But to get the full specter of data you’ll also have to pay for them and spend much more time on searching for the information and integrating it in the dashboard. 

  • Let you download and Deploy Landing Pages

As we may see from reviews, it seems to be everyone’s favorite feature of Anstrex. It allows you not only view your competitor’s landing pages, but easily download them as well.

You have two options on what to do with these downloaded pages. You can edit them manually in your computer or you can use Anstrex’s very own WYSIWYG editor. With Anstrex’s editor, you can even change all the outgoing links (including affiliate links) in one click. You can then upload it directly to the server that you link with Anstrex.

So, how to get the most out of your spy tool?

First, don’t make a common mistake and just copy & past successful campaigns of your competitor’s. Surprisingly, but such a strategy may bring you 0 profit or one that is far below your expectations. Just because you’re using ads and landing pages that work for someone else doesn’t mean your audience will like them. Look deeper into data your tool gives you and try to understand what are the real reasons for your competitor’s success. Then you can use these insights to plan your own strategy.

In case you decided to copy the successful promotional approach, try to improve it a little bit, add your own twists and innovations. And remember, you probably won’t profit immediately. Give it time and keep an eye on the statistics your ad tracker gathers for you.

To get this valuable tool you should be ready to spend some money on the subscription. Though, it’s clear that this investment is minimal compared to what you will save over your campaign’s lifetime. As to prices, they differ from $49 to $299 per month. We advise you to start with a simple and clear plan that has core functions. Later you may upgrade your subscription if you see the need for this.

If you want to try these tools and see how they are in action, we recommend you to try Anstrex and leave the links to their products:

 Enjoy!

 

Posted by
Ira Bystrova

Content Specialist at RedTrack.io - a cloud-hosted ad tracking and conversion attribution solution that helps to consolidate data across various media-buying channels and turn insights into actions.

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