Want To See Which Ads Perform Best? MixRank (YC S11) Is A Spy Tool For AdSense | Hacker News Reader

Want To See Which Ads Perform Best? MixRank (YC S11) Is A Spy Tool For AdSense

techcrunch.com

137 pointsaorshan40 comments

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.

How did you get started on building the actual product? Did you find a technical co-founder?

Yeah! I'll write a more in depth blog post about this, but the summary is that I learned to code well enough to build a rudimentary prototype. Then I met my cofounder Scott at a Hackers and Founders meetup, showed him the prototype, and, after a few meetings, he liked the idea enough to cofound this startup with me. Some time later we applied to YC and the rest is history.

A friend of mine is working on something similar, and she actually pitched it at a Startup Weekend event in Baltimore. Sadly, the judges, I felt, didn't "get it", and missed the point in general.

If nothing else, you guys just completely validated her idea. Best of luck!

Heard of PPCBully, Google Cash Detective? They have been around for years and do the same for AdWords on search networks, scanning hundreds of thousands of ads a day.

How do we know you won't get AcquHired and shut down the service down like AdGrok?

Yes, I'm being snarky but all these talent acquisitions erode my trust that startups are in this for the long haul. Why give you my time or data if you won't be here in 9 months?

We're tackling a very large market, and have big long-term plans. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, it's a very small time investment to keep an eye on your competitors' advertising strategies-- even if you're not currently running ads it's invaluable to know what your competitors are doing.

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?

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.

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.

Good luck iL, I love the product and I'm one of those who received great advices from you, so I really wish you the best success for this. I have a question concerning facebook, and other ads network such as Microsoft's Ad Network, do you plan to support those as well? Any chance to see facebook allow this?

Congrats on the launch, Ilya. Never realized you were part of YC batch :)

How you manages scraping this much content from Google?. Which stack of development you use?

Nicely done!

Following up - one thing I would love to see is the ability to drill down and see where the top performing ads were showing. That would utterly rock.

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

I would love to know more about your tech stack? Which language, framework, tool,s libs, etc are you using?

We're self-hosting on Ubuntu with most of our codebase in Python. On the web stack we're using Apache/Python/Pyramid, and for our indexers and data persistence we're using an array of technologies.

It's a really interesting big data problem to work on, and if anyone's interested in learning more, we're currently hiring :).

Thank you. Any reason why you didn't go with a VPS, AWS or GAE? Because I'm thinking of creating a web app in Python and hosted solutions seem like a good deal.

If it weren't for our high requirements we'd be on a hosted solution. That being said, we're considering a few hosted options for our future infrastructure.

Use SSD's on dedicated hardware. Don't use EC2 unless you really, really need to spin up tons of instances.

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!

This should probably be made more clear on our site: we're currently indexing AdSense text ads, with image/flash ads and other networks coming soon.

YellowBrix, for example, is currently running search ads, but not on Google Display Network. We're confident that we're finding practically every advertiser and AdSense text ads right now, so if you're not able to find any of your competitors in our index then they either haven't tried or weren't successful at it.

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.

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.

I just tried it out and it's very useful (apart from the fact that it show my competitor exactly what I'm doing).

As far as I can tell it only works for the US market though, I always find advertising outside the US much harder and would really like the same service there. Any plans to do that?

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

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.

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 :)

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

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

Could have a conflict of interest but at least a real person:

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/eric-h-milliken/1a/bb7/522

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).

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

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

Urr ... now what?

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.

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

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

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

http://www.facebook.com/

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