How GeoEdge Helps You Spy on Advertisers

Posted By Hollis Thomases on Dec 22nd, 2011

At Web Ad.vantage, we’re always reviewing the latest online marketing tools and technologies (we live for demos & 30-day free trials!) that offer competitive advantages and help us do our job better for clients.

We recently took GeoEdge for a spin. GeoEdge is a tool that works with publishers, media buyers and advertisers to track display ads. We love sharing new discoveries and hope this review is helpful.

What does GeoEdge do?

For any website/URL of your choosing, GeoEdge will track all display advertising that is being trafficked through the site. It can simulate virtually any geographic location and a wide selection of devices to show you exactly which ads are being served and how they appear. GeoEdge has a worldwide proxy network with proprietary servers in 75+ countries and 25 UK and North American cities. Customers enter a site URL or ad tags, and it monitors that site from all over the world, capturing and analyzing banner ads served.

How does GeoEdge work?

First you install the GeoEdge toolbar, which lives inside your browser. From the toolbar’s menu, you first select a location (starting with Country, then drilling down into state/province, and even further drilling down into city, if desired), and then visit the website or specific URL you want to view. GeoEdge simulates the selected location as if you were really there in order to show you the same ads that someone browsing the website from the actual location would see. You can also simulate the ad viewing experience on different mobile devices by selecting them from a dropdown menu of supported devices. So for example, if you wanted to see which ads someone in France using an iPhone 4 visiting Gizmodo.com is being served and how those ads appear, you could use GeoEdge to do exactly that!

The GeoEdge dashboard offers even more ad data, and can track ads for a given URL over time. It gives you a streamlined view of all the display ads being served organized by size/specs, plus additional information such as landing page URLs (which you can easily click through to visit). During our hands-on time with the tool, we were able to view websites as they appear (with content, ad placement and campaigns) on more than 20 handsets in various locations around the world.

GeoEdge also enables you to research the competition’s mobile market campaigns (as well as their SEM strategies), monitor ranking in remote locations, and optimize keywords. Not too shabby!

What We Liked

Competitive analysis: being able to see what banners and content are being served on which sites, by which advertisers, and where the ads click through to.
Ability to validate global ad campaigns to confirm they run as planned, and research which channels and categories are most successful.
Knowing who is bidding on different ad placements.
Ability to simulate a wide selection of mobile devices to check if ads are displaying properly (or not) on small and varied screen sizes.

Other ad platforms like MediaPlex, Atlas, and Doubleclick all provide reporting as well. Reporting from a neutral third party would be a solid complement to self-reported analytics, at least as far as display ads go. It will be interesting to see if (when?) GeoEdge or others are able to provide a similar peek into all other types of ad formats, especially video.

Bottom Line

We found GeoEdge to be a very valuable tool for online media planning & buying, as it gives you a good understanding of the advertising landscape for any website. For any website, any country, any device, you’ll be able to see the “lay of the land”, so to speak, when it comes to the site’s advertisements.

Tools are great (we love ‘em!) but at the end of the day, nothing can replace a knowledgeable digital media partner who knows what to do with them! If you’re seeking an advertising partner with media planning expertise and a proven track record of performance, give us a call at (410) 942-0488 or fill out our online RFP. We’d love to hear from you!

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