

Want To See Which Ads Perform Best? MixRank (YC S11) Is A Spy Tool For AdSense - aorshan
http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/30/want-to-see-which-ads-perform-best-yc-backed-mixrank-is-a-spy-tool-for-adsense/

======
il
I'm one of the founders of MixRank (we're in the YC S11 batch). If you guys
have any questions you can post them here or send them to the email in my
profile.

The part that TechCrunch left out was that the idea for MixRank started as an
Offer HN post(remember those?) where 150 startups asked me for marketing
advice: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839163>

I realized that I was giving the same basic suggestions over and over again,
and wanted to productize and mass produce strategies for building successful
paid traffic campaigns- which usually involves doing market research and
figuring out what's currently working in the marketplace.

~~~
robryan
With this and other keyword spy like tools I always wonder whether they are at
any time likely to get blocked by google. Do you guys have any assurance from
google that what you are doing is allowed?

~~~
il
Getting shut down by Google is always a possibility, but I think the chances
of that happening are very remote.

Similar keyword tools for search have been operating at scale for years
without any trouble.

I think the reason Google puts up with this is that they know that it's very
hard for new advertisers to build successful PPC campaigns.

And, ultimately, the end result of people using our software is that they will
build larger campaigns that run longer and end up spending more money on
Google.

~~~
robryan
Yeah I use pretty much the same logic for my business, pretty much all through
the API although we might have to scrape ad sense down the track, the stats
reporting side at least depending on if the api is easier to use now or not.

Google can be counterintuitive with ad related stuff though, went to a great
deal of trouble to support OAuth with adwords but as of yet are still missing
report downloads which pretty much makes it useless for the vast majority of
applications.

I guess when it's business against business, spending more money because of it
is always a win for Google. They have shown more and more of late though they
are prepared to put user experience before profit by banning low quality ads.
I guess in terms of business against business it would take some major
advertisers to oppose it before they went down the same kind of path.

------
smilliken
Hey everyone, Scott here from MixRank. Ilya and I would love to hear any
questions or feedback (or feature requests!) HN has.

~~~
shafqat
I tried a bunch of my competitors but for each one, it said "No Active Ads
Found." Although I _know_ they have ads running on Google. For example, try
Yellowbrix.com.

If this actually works for the competitors I want to track, this is an awesome
product!

~~~
il
We'll be implementing keyword search soon, but for now, a good hack is to:

1\. Search some of your main keywords on Google.

2\. Look through the organic results and find organic results pages running
AdSense.

3\. Search the display URLs of advertisers placing AdSense ads on those sites
in MixRank.

~~~
dools
This isn't working for me. I've tried searching "cushy cms", and "web design
sydney" and then copying the displayed urls for each of the top ranking google
ads and pasting them into the search bar but I'm not getting any results.

------
rgrieselhuber
Congrats on the launch guys! I love the new name, the product looks great and
the writeup on techcrunch provided really good coverage.

------
dotBen
From what I can see, this is just for AdSense based PPC. Is AdWords analysis
in the pipeline?

Also, can anyone tell me the attraction of AdSense (for the advertiser) over
just using AdWords as I've never found the former to perform as well as the
latter.

------
jcampbell1
I don't know whether to love you or hate you. You have exposed what works for
me, and also my competitors. I'll be using your service, but hope it never
gets traction (with my competitors :)

------
ericmilliken
This is cool, I use Google adwords for my law practice. I think this new tool
is going to save me some money. Thanks

~~~
gmichnikov
This is (I think) the most amusingly transparent comment I have seen on HN in
a while. Not a bad thing; made me smile.

user: ericmilliken created: 38 minutes ago

~~~
smilliken
Notice the last name :). I shared the link earlier and my brother took
initiative to comment, unfortunately without full-disclosure. Sorry about
that. (In his defense: he's been on the private beta for a while, and we've
used the tool to build some very effective campaigns for him).

------
glesperance
Am I the only one to be surprised that so much of this info is made publicly
available by the ad sense network?

------
dools
_"Thanks, your email address is confirmed and your account is now activated."_

Urr ... now what?

~~~
il
Now you can do a search from the search box on the homepage at mixrank.com.
Sorry for the confusion...we still need to tweak the UX.

~~~
dools
Even just including the text you've got in this comment verbatim on the
confirmation screen would suffice :)

------
omarchowdhury
Will there be future support for intelligence on image ads on the Content
Network?

~~~
il
Yes, absolutely! Image ads are one of our top priorities and coming very soon.

------
123456789
<http://www.facebook.com/>

