Creatives, advertisers, ad publishers, and developers are the main components of paid advertising, and you’ll need a deep understanding of each to build a winning paid advertising strategy that showcases your app to the right audience. Under MobileAction’s Ad Intelligence, there is a section filled with tools dedicated to paid advertising market analysis. Here, you can track any app’s paid advertising strategies to understand the best-case scenarios in your category and build your own strategy. In this article, you’ll learn what each analysis tool is capable of and how to use them to achieve the best results.

Creative Analysis is an overview of a specific app’s advertising strategy where you can view an app’s paid user acquisition efforts, its brief performance in terms of creatives, impressions, and the media types.

Let’s take a look at what each numbered section means:

1: This is the search tab where you can search for an app to analyze its creative strategies.

2: From the “Translation” dropdown menu, you can choose to see the English translations of keywords. This can be useful when trying to see the ad names of apps that build creatives in different languages.

3: Using this tab, you can create custom alerts for specific actions you want to be notified about. For example, if any changes happen to an app you want to follow closely, you can be notified through email or Slack about that specific change.

4: This section allows you to switch between the apps you track as competitors. If you have added an app as a competitor, you can switch between these apps without needing to search for them in the search bar. To add a competitor, click on the + sign you see on this line and type down the name of the app you want to search for.

5: This part shows whether the app you selected is an advertiser, publisher, or both. If there is only one label, you’ll see that specific label. If the app is both an advertiser and publisher, you can switch between its advertiser analysis and publisher analysis pages by clicking the labels.

6: These are the filters for your creative analysis search. The “Share” button is to copy the link address of the webpage. Using the other filter dropdowns, you can filter your search by country, ad network, and date ranges. Using the toggle at the end, you can include or exclude DSPs in your search.

7: This is where you can see the chosen app’s creative analysis overview. If you click the small arrow icon under each item, you will be redirected to a more specific ad analysis tool for a broader search.

The bottom part of the screen lists the creatives of the app you’ve selected. You can see each creative's preview URL, title, media type, ad networks, first seen date, last seen date, creative duration (the total time the creative has been active), status (whether it is archived or live), trend, and impression share.

When you click on a creative, you can view its details, copy its link, download it, or save it to a collection for future reference.

Using the filters below, you can narrow down your search by media type or live/archived status. You can also choose to see only the ones you haven’t seen before by using the “Seen & Unseen by me” dropdown menu, ensuring that you do not see the creatives you have already viewed.

You can export the data on your screen as a CSV file using the “Export as CSV” button. You can also switch between grid and table views using the buttons next to it.

Advertiser Analysis provides an overview of a specific advertiser’s strategy, allowing you to track their advertising efforts. You can view an app’s ad network distribution, country distribution, languages, media types, media resolutions, and creatives.

The first part of Advertiser Analysis is the same as Creative Analysis, you can see in the Creative Analysis part of the article above what each section means.

The Ad Networks Distribution section shows you a list of all ad networks currently being used by the app to run their ads. It also includes networks that mediate ads from various sources. You can choose to see current data or historical data. The current data graph is designed as a waterfall view, allowing you to see the median sources that an ad network uses to distribute the creatives. If you choose to see the distribution data historically, you’ll see a historical line chart. You can sort the data by creatives or impressions.

Just under Ad Networks Distribution, there is also a section where you can view the list of countries where an app’s ads are available. You can list the countries based on creatives or impressions. The pie chart next to the map view shows the languages used in the app's ads. You can choose to see both current and historical data.

The graphs under the Country/Language Distribution section show the Media Type and Media Resolutions of the chosen app. You also have the chance to see the data based on either Creatives or Impressions.

The next section you see when you scroll down in Advertiser Analysis allows you to see the creatives of the chosen app. This section is pretty much similar to the Creative Analysis tool of Ad Intelligence. You can find detailed explanations above by going to the Creative Analysis part of the article.

Ad Publisher Analysis provides insights on an app’s publishing history, a list of the creatives that appear in an app as ads. You can review which ad networks’ SDKs the app has installed, how many apps are advertising through this app, and all of the details regarding ads.

This section is again the same as Creative Analysis and Advertiser Analysis, you can see detailed information above.

This section shows you the chosen app’s overview, including its publisher ranking, advertiser count, and installed advertisement SDKs (SDKs integrated into the app for advertising purposes).

At the bottom part of the page, you can see the list of ads that the chosen app is a publisher of. You can filter the list by app name, media format, or active/archived status. Just like the rest of the tools in the product, you can export the list as a CSV using the button on the upper right. The list includes the ad’s preview link, app name, ad title, media type, ad networks, first and last seen dates, active duration, status (whether it is still active or archived), and impression share. To view more of the creative and ad publisher details of a specific creative on the list, you can simply click on it.

Developer Analysis is the list of apps from an app developer, their categories, platform and types with many other pieces of information. This feature provides an overview of a developer and gives insights on the developer’s paid advertising strategy in the market.

From the search bars, you can search for any developer or app to examine its advertising strategy in the market. When you search for a developer, you’ll see all the apps of that developer, along with their names, platforms, types (whether it's a publisher (P), advertiser (A), or both), ad networks, category, unique creative numbers, and impression scores. You can filter the list by date range, country, and ad networks. If you’d like to learn more about an app of the developer, you need to click on the app name and you’ll be redirected for a more in-depth analysis on Creative Analysis.

This is a wrap of how to benefit from the analysis tools of Ad Intelligence! If you have further questions or having issues, feel free to contact your dedicated Account Manager via your communication channels or the support team via Intercom.