New to MixRank? Follow the steps below to get the most out of the system.

MixRank is a spy tool for contextual and display ads. During our free beta, you can access data on Google AdSense ads running on over 93,000 different sites. You can use MixRank to see exactly where your competitors are buying traffic and which ad copy is performing best for them. You can use MixRank to watch your competitors spend money testing different ads and traffic sources, see which ones worked best, and use that data to build your own campaign.

To start using MixRank, enter the domain of an advertiser in your space on the homepage or in a search box on the top right of any advertiser report.

We’ll walk through using MixRank to build a sample Google Content Network campaign in the dating niche.

First, we need to access an advertiser report. I know WooMe is a major advertiser in the dating vertical, so I enter woome.com in the search box on the homepage.

The MixRank interface is divided into two main sections, AdSense Ads and Traffic Sources.

Let’s start from the top with the Adsense Ads Section. You can sort by all of the table headers to find the data that is most useful to you.

By clicking on the “Publishers” heading, we can sort by the number of sites this ad is running on. This can provide great insight into an advertiser’s campaign structure and show which ads and ad groups are actually getting the most traffic.

This data is exposed in more detail on the Ad Reach tab.

This tab has a handy graph that compares this advertiser’s highest-traffic ads and shows traffic trends for them. If one ad is taking off, you can safely assume the advertiser is scaling up that ad group. In this case, we see that the “Tons of Singles. No Downloads” pitch is the most effective strategy for this advertiser. If I’m building a dating campaign, I would list those same benefits in my ad.

The Best Peformers tab in the ads section watches the advertiser’s ad copy split tests, and shows which ads are running longer and getting more traffic. Here, we can see that WooMe tested two headlines, “(100% Free) Chat” and “Online Dating Chat (Free)”:

It looks like, even though it appears on less sites, “(100% Free) Chat” is getting more impressions and traffic, as seen by its better average ad position. WooMe has already split tested these two headline variations for me, and “(100% Free) Chat” looks to be the winner. Now I know to use that text in my headline for the best CTR.

That’s all for the Adsense Ads section. Let’s move on to the Traffic Sources section, which I can use to actually build out the rest of my campaign.

This section shows all of the sites this advertiser’s ads have appeared on in the past month on the Google Content Network(AdSense). There are usually hundreds or thousands of sites on this list; our task is to find the best ones we can use to get the highest quality traffic.

The best way to sort this list is by the Days Seen metric, which shows how many days in a row this advertiser’s ads have appeared on that site:

If an advertiser has been paying for traffic on the same site for weeks, that’s a really good sign that traffic is converting well for them. You can then safely target those same sites in your campaigns, because you know they are sending high quality traffic to your competitors.

I notice that WooMe is targeting a lot of chat sites with their campaign, so I will build my campaign around that same theme, targeting those exact sites.

The Uniques metric is an estimate of how many unique visitors that site gets per month. You can sort by this to find the high traffic sites that are sending clicks to your competitors.

The Avg Position metric is a unique feature of MixRank that can be tremendously powerful. It shows the average position of this advertiser’s ads in the AdSense block on that specific site over the past 30 days. For example, if we go to one of the sites on the list, onlinefreechat.com, we will see an ad from WooMe.com appear in position 5 inside the AdSense unit.

By sorting by ad position, you can see all of the sites where this advertiser’s ads are ranking well. These sites are highly relevant to the ad text presented, so dating ads targeting them will have a good clickthrough rate and Quality Score. The other reason an ad might have good position is that the advertiser is bidding high for this particular site – because it’s sending very high quality traffic.

In any case, sites with a good ad position, especially those the advertiser has been buying traffic on for more than a few days, are excellent targets for your own campaigns.

Finally, though we only display a small subset of our data in our reports to save space, you can export the entire list to a CSV file you can work with in any spreadsheet program. Just click the Export link in the top right part of any section.