Adbeat Review – Using Your Competitors’ Ads To Improve Your Own

Digital advertising spending worldwide is projected to reach $335 billion by the end of the year. The industry has grown truly massive. It’s how the biggest tech names like Facebook and Google actually make their enormous profits by capitalizing on their massive userbases. 

As marketers, it’s why we pay to get our ads featured on them so we can capture some of these users and drive them to our websites. 

The average business spends about 10% of their revenue on marketing. No matter how big or small your company is, you want these dollars to go farther. 

This is exactly what Adbeat promises to do. The idea is you can turn your competitor’s ad strategy into your own resource database. With it, you can see their success, failures, and everything else you need to take away from their approach to enhance yours. 

Here’s the good news—Adbeat does offer a free basic plan that offers solid insights into your competitors—and any other site you want to research. The bad news is all the really cool things it can do don’t become available until you’re on a minimum $399/monthly subscription. 

Even at this level, many users on this plan still say it’s not enough for their needs and that only the Enterprise plan, which starts at a custom (aka too expensive to list the publicly) price has what they’re looking for. 

Overall, everybody can benefit from the free Adbeat free plan. But be warned that you’ll have to have a large budget for any of their premium plans to make sense for your marketing needs. 

What Is Adbeat?

Adbeat’s goal is to become the most comprehensive competitive intelligence tool in the world. Every piece of data on the platform is intended to be both accurate and actionable. To do this, Adbeat pulls together huge amounts of data, insight tools, and customizable reports into one easy-to-use package. 

Adbeat is a part of the growing competitive analysis trend. All of these solutions share a few things in common, including crawling millions of web pages to collect information on keywords and PPC.

But Adbeat’s easy interface sets it apart. After harvesting data, Adbeat combines everything into a visual report that depicts key information like estimated competitor ad spends and traffic volume for each publisher. Along with this, they provide an impact this has on you, how much traffic ads generate, pay-per-click costs, and more. 

All of this knowledge not only helps you design more effective campaigns, but also trains you to spend your ad budget more wisely. 

Adbeat’s major partners include Yahoo, Amazon, Salesforce, BuzzFeed, Ancestry.com, along with many other large agencies and brands. 

Adbeat Features

• Competitive Analysis
• Reports 
• Trends 
• Track ad placements
• See ads in 26 countries
• View publisher placement URLs
• Landing pages
• Insights 
• Data Import/Export
• Business intelligence
• Analytics
• Monitoring 
• Filters 

Getting Started With Adbeat

Signing up for Adbeat’s free plan is really easy. All you have to do is confirm your email address and set a password to get started using the software. 

Right away, you’ll be taken to your dashboard. Type in the name of a site you want to research. Within a few moments, Adbeat will load a variety of insights about the publisher, including their profile, which includes information about their ad strategy. You’ll also have access to “Advertiser ads,” which includes copies of their latest ads and basic data about them. 

If you come across any ads you like and want to revisit later, you can save them to your “Ad Locker.” 

That’s about all you can do on the free plan. To get access to what you really want to know about your competitors, including their ad spend and more, you’ll need to upgrade to the Standard Plan or higher. 

Adbeat Pricing

As mentioned, Adbeat isn’t cheap, especially since they recently eliminated the $99/month Intro plan. For this reason alone, Adbeat is not really a tool for solopreneurs or SMEs. 

This software is targeted towards agencies and large brands who may be spending thousands or even tens of thousands/month on ads. For them, the cost of $250-$400 is just a drop in the bucket, particularly if it can unlock a much higher ROI on ad spend. 

With that said, if you do a little extra digging on the Adbeat website, you’ll find the special plans that make Adbeat a little more affordable—Google Only and Google + Mobile. If you don’t need access to all the other ads networks and the full Adbeat features, these are a great value. 

Otherwise, here’s what you get with the two main Adbeat plans: 

• Standard Plan – 1,000 results per search, 90 days of data, filter ads, reports, 
• Pro Plan – All standard features plus unlimited results per search, 1 year of data, compare advertisers, see Direct Buys.

Main Adbeat Features

You use Adbeat to gain insight into your competitors with the following features: 

1. Advertiser Profile 

From the search bar, you can track any advertiser from your dashboard, and Adbeat will put together a profile that includes key information like: 

• Ad Channels
• Standard Ads
• Native Ads
• Landing Pages
• Ad Creatives

In addition, Adbeat will pull up similar advertisers and an overall ranking compared to advertisers in a target location. 

This basic information excellently summarizes the basics you need to get a sense of the who, what, where, why, and how of your competitors’ strategy. 

2. Advertiser Ads 

With Adbeat, you can also see all of the ads your competitor has published for a set amount of time. The idea behind this is simple—it gives you a first-hand look at exactly what they’re doing. 

It also provides some additional useful information like the type of ad, sales, and recent trends. This is not only helpful for advertisers but also content publishers looking to create new ideas for their own platforms.  

3. Ad Locker 

With Ad Locker, you can take everything you discovered in your ad research and save the best examples in one convenient place. 

This is one of the simpler Adbeat tools, but it’s really helpful for keeping all your ideas and materials organized.  

4. Competitive Benchmarking

With an Enterprise plan, you can unlock competitive benchmarking. With it, you can not only see your ad spend over time but your top competitors all from one easy dashboard. 

You’ll also be able to filter by device type to get the granular data you need to bring back to your own campaigns. 

5. Publishing Tools 

Adbeat brings marketing and publishing tools into one easy-to-use interface. One of the other cool features on the higher-tiered plans is Top Publisher. This shows you the publishers where your competitors buy the most traffic from. 

You can use this information to spend your budget more effectively by using publishers with proven track records of success. 

Likewise, content publishers can use this information themselves to find the best places to seek not only advertising partners but backlinks as well. 

Who Is Adbeat Best For? 

We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the excellent Adbeat enterprise features. The pricing, enterprise features, and their major partners are all signs that this tool is made for larger brands and affiliate marketers with matching-sized budgets. 

It is among the best competitive analysis tools out there, and it’s so easy to use that anybody on your team can use it and learn from its insights. 

The free tool is a nice option, and it’s a great way to get a quick glimpse into a competitor strategy. But you won’t do much more than scratch the surface with it. Overall, smaller companies and solopreneurs will be better off looking at one of Adbeat’s competitors. 

Is Adbeat Worth It? 

If you’re spending $5000+ a month on ads, then absolutely. This tool isn’t just worth it, but incredibly affordable. And this is where you’ll see the most love about Adbeat, especially successful affiliate marketers. 

These are people who have used the Advanced and Enterprise level tools to “crack the code” and find the best ways to leverage competitor data to enhance their own strategies. 

The one plan that makes the least sense is the Adbeat Standard Plan for $249/month. This is such a large price to pay for only a handful of features. You’ll be better off with one of Adbeat’s competitors, going with a Special plan, or upgrading to a higher tiered plan. 

Simply put, the Standard Plan isn’t worth it for most marketers, no matter your budget size. 

Pros

• Deep competitor insights 
• Easy to use 
• Free basic plan
• Great way to calculate ROI on ad spend
• Includes both advertising and publishing data
• Cover a large number of ad networks 
• Include similar advertiser feature
• Decent non-US market coverage depth

Cons

• Best features aren’t available until most expensive plans
• Interface doesn’t update often 
• Standard plan is very limited considering the price
• Site doesn’t have many onboarding materials 

Adbeat Alternatives

Adbeat is by far not the only spying tool out there. If you’re looking to do competitor research and a whole lot more, it’s hard to beat the broad functionality of SEMrush. 

While there are many SEO ranking tools and platforms out there, such as SE Ranking and AccuRanker, SEMrush is a suite of SEO tools and one of the most popular platforms out there for enhancing search engine rankings. Plus, you can also use it for competitor research. 

With SEMrush you can: 

• Analyze competitor ad budgets and keywords
• Monitor ad copy 
• Discover new Google Ads competitors
• Localize your campaigns

The functionality may not be quite as robust as Adbeat, nor is SEMrush quite as easy to use. However, plans start at $99/month, and that also includes access to a ton of other top-ranked SEO features making SEMrush a better option for medium-sized agencies and firms. 

If you want an option with truly rock-bottom pricing, you can also look at the Competitors App. It’s easy to use and has these features: 

• Unlimited domains
• Unlimited users
• Track keywords
• Social media and web page monitoring
• New social and Google ads 

Competitors App can’t show you information on ad spend, but it overall giving you most of what you need to know about your competition’s strategies. And with plans starting $9.90/month, it’s a much more realistic solution for smaller companies and solopreneurs. 

Adbeat: The Verdict

If you have a high monthly ad spend, then Adbeat can help you increase your ROI and stretch your budget much further. But, if you’re a smaller marketer or freelancer, this great tool is likely going to be too pricey for you to ever benefit from.