Spy Service — is a service that collects and displays information about competitors’ advertising. It allows you to see which ads other advertisers are running, which sources and countries they work in, which creatives they use, and how long the ads have been running.
Simply put, it is a library and analytics tool for other people’s advertising that is used to study the market and find working ideas.
What you can find in a spy service
The capabilities of platforms differ, but most often you can view:
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advertising creatives: images, videos, and ad copy;
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advertising networks and platforms where the ad is shown;
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countries (GEOs) and languages the ads are targeted to;
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launch dates and how long the ad has been running;
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landing pages (landing pages and pre-landing pages) that the ads lead to;
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information about the offer and users’ devices (smartphones or computers).
For example, an affiliate marketer can find an ad for a dating service, see which countries it is being run in, what approach is used in the video, and exactly which landing page the user reaches after clicking.
Why a spy service is needed
The main purpose of the service — is to research the market and other people’s approaches, not to find a ready-made ad for blind copying.
Spy services help:
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find fresh ideas for your own copy and images;
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understand which offers and niches are currently at the peak of popularity;
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see which setups and landing pages others use;
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evaluate trends before spending your own advertising budget.
How spy services work
Special programs used by the service continuously scan advertising platforms, imitating the actions of ordinary users from different countries, collect the ads they see, and save them to a shared database.
The user can then search for the required ads using filters: by keywords, countries, advertising networks, or dates. The depth of analysis differs between services: some work simply as ad libraries, while others additionally show detailed impression statistics and campaign dynamics.
Important: a spy service only shows the portion of advertising that its algorithms managed to capture, so the data in the database is not always complete. In addition, the mere presence of an ad in the service does not guarantee that it is profitable: the ad may have been tested, losing money, or already stopped. You should not copy other people’s setups «one-to-one» — they are used as a reference for creating your own unique creative.
