Is There A Way To See How Your Competitor Is Advertising Online?

Is There A Way To See How Your Competitor Is Advertising Online? We have a competitor who is doing a lot of banner advertising at a bunch of different sites. Is there any method we can use to see exactly what sites they are advertising on? Thanks in advance.

 

AdRelevance is a gold mine for monitoring competitors and potential customers (if you sell advertising).

 

What exactly can that service do for me...and what is the cost. Thanks Chicage you are always a help.

 

It will tell you who's buying what where. It's not "cheap". I would suggest contacting them directly for pricing/demo info. You didn't mention budget so I just tossed out the best package I'm aware without consideration for cost.

 

just look at their backlinks

 

this is also good advice.

link:CompetitorURL

will show you many of the pages linking to your competition. chances are (for commercial sites) a good number of those are ads.

 

Google will provide only partial back links so might not be 100% true picture..

 

doesnt work too well....i know tons of sites my competitors advertise at and none show up....also many sites use weird URLs for ads for the tracking so those wouldnt show up either,

 

do link: www.websitename.com on MSN for a better indication of their backlinks as Google only reveals a few.

 

what he said. if you use all three major engines (msn, yahoo, and google) you will find most of the inbound links.

 

The original poster was not asking for ways to find links, they wanted ways to find advertising info. Links are only 1 form of advertising. Link commands won't tell you that competitor XYZ bought $100K in banner ads from site ABC.

 

AFAIK, this is pretty impossible to do accurately!

 

Unless you use the right software....

 

im not sure that i ever suggested doing this would find ALL advertising.

i said it would find most links, which are, as you said, "1 form of advertising."

i think this is pretty clear in my posts:

 

Doesn't matter what you use, its next to impossible. Most ad networks redirect anyway. And if you do any sort of large volume RON ad buys, you'll know they get resold to other ad networks several levels down resulting in about 5-10 different redirects. No way to track all that even if you knew which ad networks were being resold to.

Now ofcourse, you can always find ads that are hard coded or hard linked by checking for back links.

I've served over 2 million impressions on the adsense content network via adwords this month so far and even I have no clue which sites my ads have been appearing on. I know a good chunk of them from referral tracking. But all? Impossible!

 

I was just clarifying as the thread was turning into a "here's how you find links" thread which is not what the original poster was looking for.

Have you ever used the software I linked to?

No software can report back every single impression/ad a competitor has purchased. What it can do is give you an idea of who has what kind of budget and where they are spending it at.