In the online business world, getting attention or visitors to our websites is becoming more and more difficult. By that I mean, the right kind of visitors, visitors that are relevant and that will most likely be interested in our products or services. This type of online marketing as you all know can be done in a variety of ways, the ultimate goal being to drive traffic to your site.
You can get traffic, from search engines (provided it is properly optimized), from social channels, from content curation sites, from video distributions channels, and yes, from paid advertising. The latter, paid advertising is actually a great form of getting traction, building brand awareness and attracting visitors to our websites, as in comparison to the other forms of promotional campaigns, is the quickest. Although “quicker”, the key of paid advertising is not only to be effective but most importantly to be able to apply the “MiniMax” method. This method is nothing more than minimizing the investment cost and maximizing its return.
Yeah, all this is a lot easier said than done. For a marketing campaign to perform at its best, you need to have the skills, and spend a great deal of time analyzing a bunch of stuff to make it succeed. In short, you need to gather enough media intelligence to help you make the right decisions.
Take the display media ecosystem. The choices are endless. Which publisher will you choose, what type of creatives will perform well, which location would be best to run your campaigns, and should you decide to use a mediator, which one would you choose? Short answer to all these questions is not easy, so the more intelligence we can gather, the better.
This is where AdClarity comes into play. AdClarity, simply put can be defined as the “intelligence engine” to gather competitive data to help you make the best decision when running your display marketing campaigns. The tool provides you with so many information, including, the location your competitors are targeting, campaigns they are running, which publisher and “middle man” they are working with, traffic sources, and lots more. Having these type of information can help you pinpoint which campaigns are running successfully, on which sites, location, the whole shebang.
A quick look at what AdClarity can help you with as an advertiser or a publisher.
From an Advertisers Perspective
Finding relevant publishers is not an easy chore. With AdClarity, you can discover new publishers, see what your competitors are doing, analyze specific campaigns, etc. Essentially, you can do the following:
- Analyze the inventory that performs well for you, and help you with media discovery by locating similar performing inventory.
- Discover your competitors’ plans to see the type of messages they are sending, see their creative designs, and find their successful business partners.
- Analyze which creative designs are most popular and effective.
From a Publishers Perspective
If you are an affiliate marketer, sell ad spaces, etc., this part of media intelligence is just awesome. Would it not be nice if you can take a peek of which advertisers, mediators, networks, creatives, etc., that your competitors are using? Making use of this tool, allows you to:
- Analyze your networks and advertisers and reveal those partners to you for an increase share of the pie
- Find new business opportunities by looking at your competitors’ advertisers
- Cut out the middleman of your clients by discovering your mediators’ top clients and traffic sources
- Receive alerts from entities that you choose – current information about your competitors, advertisers, mediators, and chosen campaigns will be sent to you daily.
How Does AdClarity Work?
The users interface of AdClarity is actually very user friendly and does not have those complicated buttons you have to click to gather the information you want. As a matter of fact, you can start by simply putting in a keyword, an advertiser (e.g. Apple, TravelZoo, etc.), or go through the categories and see what it reveals. This one I actually like…
Here’s a quick step by step presentation on how to use the tool.
Insert a keyword or the name of an advertiser. In my example, I will “spy” on TravelZoo. As you can see on the image, it gives me already a lot of choices. I’m choosing travelzoo as an advertiser.
From there, it gives me immediately a lot of information to digest. In an instant I know that TravelZoo is running 141 campaigns in the US, using 498 publishers, 19 mediators and 116 creatives. On the table, you can see, the landing page, specific campaigns, etc.. Mind blowing!
Drilling down a bit more, I click on the first campaign, This is suppose to be the biggest they are running at the moment. Click and bam! Now you can see more intelligent data. It gives us information about the actual campaign, best performing publishers (you know what to do with info, right?), keywords, creatives, etc.. BTW, I don’t know if you noticed that red bubble saying contacts? Yep, that’s a good way to start .
Let’s take a peek at the best performing creatives, shall we. Bam, we see the images being used and hovering on an image reveals info that certainly would be of great interest..
Want to see more? Watch the video as I go through the interface and gather intelligence using the category search feature. This is obviously just an example as there are lots more ways to use the software.
Discover
What you can find out about your competitors, also what YOUR COMPETITORS can find out about YOU!
http://youtu.be/I4PcnADVEOQ
Pros
One of the advantages that making use of AdClarity’s service is to be able to explore information related to display advertising in one “dashboard”. While there may be other tools out there that can help you, I‘m pretty much convinced that it won’t be as less time consuming. Main key takeaways of AdClarity includes:
- Provides you with more visibility and transparency of the display media eco-system
- Allow publishers, agencies and mediators to identify new business opportunities
- Give the user a competitive advantage
- etc.
Cons
AdClarity for sure requires a lot of resources, manpower for support and constant updating on their software. For this, access to their service is a bit steep and may not be for an average user, or for those who have a very small display marketing budget. Their pricing is hovering the $300 per month mark, and that is sadly not for everyone’s pocket (However, if you want to test it out before spending a lot of money, you can spend $1 to try it for a day.) Nonetheless, if your budget for display advertising is reasonable and would like to make sure that your campaign gives you an adequate return on investment, then you may consider using AdClarity’s media intelligence software, to get a head start over your competitors.
That’s it! What say you? Cost aside, do you think that this tool is something that would fit well in your marketing tool arsenal?