Try out my new project, I'm outing all your campaigns (Free beta)

Would you pay for a competitor spy tool like MixRank?

  • Yes, I would pay for this in its current form if it wasn't free

    Votes: 10 14.7%

  • Yes, I would pay for this if you added more features or data

    Votes: 21 30.9%

  • No, I would never pay for this, all of this data is publicly available anyway

    Votes: 37 54.4%
  • Total voters
    68
machinecontrol

machinecontrol

юзверь
Nov 8, 2007
942
23
0
San Francisco
Hey guys,
For the past year or so I've been working on a competitor spy tool for display ads, specifically Google Content Network.

We're now launching a free beta version, and I would love for you to try it out and get your feedback, and learn how to make this technology even more valuable to affiliates.

The site is live at Uncover your competitors' online ads | MixRank.

Our main idea with this tool is to sort through the junk and actually filter out the best performing ads and traffic sources. So when you look up an advertiser, you can see which high traffic sites they're advertising on, where they have a good ad position in the AdSense block, monitor their split tests to see which headlines they tested and which ones got more impressions, etc.

Here's a sample report you can look at to get a sense of what we're trying to do:

WOOME.COM Report | MixRank

Personally, I've found that this data is most useful for quickly setting up large PPV campaigns, doing direct media buys on highly relevant sites in your niche, and running placement targeted campaigns through AdWords.

We were just covered by TechCrunch, so you can also read more about us here:

Want To See Which Ads Perform Best? YC-Backed MixRank Is A Spy Tool For AdSense

Questions:


How is MixRank different from other competitive intelligence tools?
We're only tracking text ads targeted at US visitors right now on the Google Content Network(Adsense ads). Image ads+other networks are coming soon.
So if you're interested in seeing ads that appear on search or other display networks, you should use other tools.

But if you're interested in looking at Content Network data, which you can use for AdWords campaigns, media buys, PPV, etc, then I think we have the best tool on the market.

In this business it's all about the data, and I think we have more data than any other tool on the market by far- over 250,000 advertisers, 93,000 traffic sources indexed daily, and more than 2,000,000 ads. Which means you can find unsaturated, cheap traffic sources that aren't picked up by other sites.

We're also innovating by tracking metrics like ad position and traffic volume to sort through the noise and actually show you where your competitors are getting their most profitable traffic. We'll be adding some pretty amazing features along these lines in the next few weeks.

Why are you making this data public instead of using it for your own campaigns?
Affiliate marketing is a high cash flow business, but it doesn't create lasting value the way selling software does. With over 250,000 advertisers in our database, we can't possibly be competing in every niche. We believe that, in the long term, we can create more value for the company and our investors by selling this service to advertisers rather than running campaigns ourselves.

Can I trust you? Will you steal my campaigns?
We're funded by Y Combinator, considered one of the world's most prominent technology investors. They wouldn't have put their money and reputation behind us if they weren't 100% sure they could trust us to run an upstanding and trustworthy business.

Why is MixRank free?
We're free during a short public beta period while we still have some bugs to work out and a limited feature set. Don't worry...there will be plenty of upselling to the paid version once we come out of beta.
 
  • Like
Reactions: joevis


Wow, glanced through that Techcrunch post and didn't recognise your real name. Congrats on the ycombinator funding and techcrunch plug, you're l44t in nerd circles.
 
well I went to the site and typed in some sites and id say 90% of them had no results. So Im guessing you guys are still adding new stuff or maybe the sites i put in don't use adsense.

Either way when i did find a url with some ads its stuff I can go check on url sites myself and also I noticed that some ads were old. For example a ufc ad for an event that had already pasted. So I have no idea how old these ads are and if they are even running anymore. Also I don't know where you're getting the stats for how a certain ad is doing compared to another.

To be honest I don't see why anyone would use it that much.

What sets it apart from all the other tools like it out there?

And why would I want to risk losing my money based on your data when I can go do the research myself for free (if you decide to require payment, which there is no real value to this to require payment).

And if you can't collect a payment off this how would you make money off it? I think the only viable way for you to make money off this is to require some sort of subscription, but I don't see the value there. It's new, just started up and honestly I don't see whats so different from any other spy tool.

just my 2 cents. good luck.
 
Thanks Harry, it's about time affiliate marketing got some tech cred.

erifdekciw said:
well I went to the site and typed in some sites and id say 90% of them had no results. So Im guessing you guys are still adding new stuff or maybe the sites i put in don't use adsense.
Click to expand...

Our coverage of content network campaigns is pretty comprehensive, so we would pick up pretty much any advertiser running on display. I'm guessing most of the advertisers you entered were on search only, for which there are already lots of tools.

erifdekciw said:
Either way when i did find a url with some ads its stuff I can go check on url sites myself and also I noticed that some ads were old. For example a ufc ad for an event that had already pasted. So I have no idea how old these ads are and if they are even running anymore. Also I don't know where you're getting the stats for how a certain ad is doing compared to another.
Click to expand...

The ads we currently show are from the past 30 days. So, you're right, it's probably not a good fit for advertising things like one-time events (although you can sort by "last seen" to find the most recent ads). But it is a good fit for building campaigns for affiliate offers, where the same approach works pretty consistently.

erifdekciw said:
What sets it apart from all the other tools like it out there?
Click to expand...
We're different from existing tools in two ways:
  1. We have more data from tracking almost 100K publishers daily. In this business, that's what it comes down to- having data your competitors don't have access to.
  2. We're trying to algorithmically identify the best ads looking at ad position, traffic volume, relevancy, etc. As far as I know, no other tool does this in a comprehensive way. This is just the beginning(which is why it's free). We're going to be building in much more sophisticated algorithms to identify patterns in ad activity and trying to build a model to predict how an ad is going to perform on a given traffic source using historical data.

erifdekciw said:
And why would I want to risk losing my money based on your data when I can go do the research myself for free (if you decide to require payment, which there is no real value to this to require payment).
Click to expand...
You can definitely do the research for free, or even write a script that does something similar in a more basic way. But why would you want to? Don't you have better things to do that manually visiting thousands of sites every day and noting who's advertising on them?
It's a matter of comparative advantage and leveraging your time most effectively.
It's just like any other keyword tool.

erifdekciw said:
And if you can't collect a payment off this how would you make money off it? I think the only viable way for you to make money off this is to require some sort of subscription, but I don't see the value there. It's new, just started up and honestly I don't see whats so different from any other spy tool.
Click to expand...

It will be a subscription service soon. We wanted to start with a free beta to get as many people trying it as possible, to get feedback like yours, find the weaknesses and learn to address objections and articulate the value proposition better.

Thanks for the feedback, it's really valuable, seriously.
 
harrymouni said:
Wow, glanced through that Techcrunch post and didn't recognise your real name. Congrats on the ycombinator funding and techcrunch plug, you're l44t in nerd circles.
Click to expand...

The name was familiar to me as well. Couldn't place it at first. Then I remembered reading posts off your blog a few months back.

Congrats! Best of luck with the project.
 
Holy shit dude! I was reading about your startup earlier but didn't make the connection. Congrats on the positive PR from techcrunch and getting into YC, that's serious street cred in the VC world.
 
Looks amazing. Any idea on pricing points and a launch date? Telling all my friends about it.
 
Killer tool, mate- signed up.

Best of luck with it- I know how much work goes into a platform like this, and you are to be applauded.

Kudos.
 
Thanks for all of the congratulations guys, you're awesome. I'll need to post a boobs thread in gratitude soon.
JoseArmando said:
So they invested about 20k?
Click to expand...

We've raised about $170K so far from Y Combinator, Yuri Milner, and Ron Conway. We'll probably be raising a larger round in the next few months.
 
You are about 2 months late on this one. Adbeat, and whatrunswhere have already released a product like this. Maybe if you didn't suck at affiliate marketing, you wouldn't have to create a spy tool to make money in this industry. That's my opinion of your garbage product.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top Bottom