Spy services are the pain and the hatred of modern media buying. An all-seeing eye, an indispensable tool for beginner affiliates and seasoned gurus alike. Today I’ll tell you about AdHeart — a spy service built around ad products from Meta, the extremist organization banned in Russia.
AdHeart — Why and How?
Do you really need it explained why spy services exist? Are you sure you’re in the right place? Any media buyer, even the greenest junior, knows the answer: to analyze other media buyers’ creatives and build up your own approaches and combos. And to be honest: steal the creative, run it through a spinner, rip off the landing page, and pour traffic in peace.
Media buying is a cruel business, no place for pussies here!
The mechanism behind the service is dead simple: it eats up every ad that runs on Facebook’s products, grabs the photos and videos, and memorizes the texts and links. All of it goes into one giant database with a handy search bolted on top. At the time of writing, the creative count was dreaming of catching up to a billion, and there were pushing three hundred thousand apps.
Working With Creatives
The core of the service is search. Open adheart.me, go to the “Creatives” section, and take a look at the form.
The most important search parameters:
- Search by creative text and headline. Useful for finding a specific offer by keywords or title.
- Search by geo and language. Best used with a specific country for a product offer, or a specific language for offers not tied to any particular location.
- Content type. Video, photo, or both.
- Launch time and creation date. No point digging up old junk — better to look at something fresh.
Interesting and useful in specific cases:
- Search by link. You can dig through a specific affiliate network domain, or pull all of an affiliate’s creatives by their personal UTM tag.
- Domain or IP. Lets you dig up every domain parked on a given server, and basically expose an entire small team’s whole run.
- Placement platform. Facebook and Instagram are, as always, the most popular by far. You can ignore the rest.
- App platform. Word is iOS creatives are better, because more money gets put into them.
- FB page. Lets you find every creative from a specific fan page. The easiest way isn’t to type it in by hand, but to click the matching button on a creative you already like.
- Application. Useful for gambling and betting — lets you instantly find creatives built for running through a specific app.
Looks completely useless:
- Domain zone. Some people think certain domain zones are especially popular. In reality, the zone has no real effect, and there’s no point limiting yourself to one.
- Format, button type, and lead form. Won’t bring you much benefit, just add unnecessary restrictions.
As an example, let’s see who’s running the Visulan offer in Poland. To do that, we use the keyword “visulan” in the full-text search, set the geo to “Poland,” and the launch window to the last 15 days. We get a stack of ready-made creatives, some of which still lead straight to the ProfitPay network’s site storage.
The next step is simple. Take the creative, take the link, take the text, tidy it up a bit, and start running it. It’s not my place to teach you how to pour traffic — you’re doing just fine without me.
One interesting tool is results analytics. Start by searching just by the offer’s name. Then, with analytics, you can see where it’s being run from the most, which countries are the most popular, and which sites are pouring it.
Working With Applications
This is where everyone pouring on gambling and betting gets happy. The service lets you search for creatives by the apps they’re being run through. Go to the “Applications” section and enjoy.
A small life hack: to stop some random TikTok from cluttering up the app list, you need to filter properly. The simplest option: set the last month in both the “For the period” and “First appearance” blocks.
A small thing, but a nice one. Click the number in the “Creatives for the period” column and get a ready-made list of gambling creatives that were run on this app.
How Do You Protect Yourself From a Spy Service?
You can’t.
Yes, seriously, you can’t. Were you hoping for a magic pill here? There isn’t one, and there can’t be. Remember the golden rule: if a regular visitor from your target audience can see something, a spy service can see it too. Creatives — no question about it, they sit on the ad networks’ side. Your landing pages are still worth fighting for, but the results are shaky at best.
You can use a solid traffic filter with a properly tuned setup — AlterCPA One, for instance. It’ll cut off any server proxies a spy service uses. But their bots will just as easily come in through mobile or residential proxies, because those present themselves as regular client devices.
Filtering bots by User-Agent? Don’t make me laugh! Spy services clearly aren’t built by clinical idiots. They’ll use a realistic user agent from whatever Chrome or iPhone is most common out there.
JS checks? Captchas? On-site actions? Congratulations, you just killed off part of your traffic. And they still opened and looked at everything through Headless Chrome anyway.
Can’t Beat Them? Lead Them!
Let’s be honest with ourselves, straight up. We lost the battle against the SPY industry. Now the only thing left to do is launch fast, target smart, trim costs wisely, and run traffic to solid advertisers. And yes, your good creatives will get stolen — that’s a fact.
So here’s the smartest move: register on AdHeart yourself and be the first to grab the creatives! To sweeten the deal: promo code AlterCPA30 gets you a nice discount for three whole days. Missed the bigger discount? Then AlterCPA works forever.