Manual Spying

Nowadays most people (me included) use Adplexity to spy competitors or to get landing pages.
The big advantage of using spyservices is that you get many stats about the campaigns.

You can see for how long they run, on what networks, if they receive high or low volume and so on.

All these things you can´t see from manual spying.

There you can only see what´s running.

But nontheless manual spying is better in some cases.
I found some very good landers through manualy spying that I never saw on Adplexity.

But manual spying won´t work for all your campaigns.
Carrier billing offers are harder to spy on because there you mostly get redirected when you don´t use the targeted carrier.

You can use services like Geo Edge but here I will show how to spy manually only with WiFi connection.

The Toolkit

To spy manually you need few things.

– Browser
– User Agent Switcher
– VPN
– Open in Multiple locations

Browser is clear, of course you need it to browse online.
In my example I will use Chrome because it´s the most used browser but it will work with any other browser as well.

Then you need a plugin to change your User Agent.

That way you can appear to be on a different operating system or a different browser.



As you know, some campaigns only target specific browsers or so.
When you change the User Agent you can spy on such campaigns as well.

Then you need a VPN to check campaigns from different countries.

And last but not least you need a browser extension to open an URL multiple times at once.
I use this Chrome extension for it -> Click Here

You only need it for one of the two methods I show you.

Ok, let´s start with the easier method.

Method 1: Spying With Smartlinks

This is a pretty easy method.

Just connect with your VPN to the country you want to spy.

Then set the User Agent changer to the User Agent you want to use.

Now grab a Smartlink from one of your CPA networks.

But it´s better to use Smartlinks from networks that are focused on Smartlinks than just using global redirects or so from networks.

When networks are focused on Smartlinks you often have better quality there compared to networks who just use Smartlinks to monetize remnant traffic.

When you have set VPN and User Agent open the “Multiple URLs” extension, put in the Smartlink 20-25 times and open the URLs.

Then you can check what kind of landers and offers you see there.

The more often you see something the better are chances that it´s working.

When you see good landers just download them.

Also check what verticals you see most for your targeting.

Method 2: Spying On Placements

This method is about spying on actual placements from your trafficsources.

Here the problem is that on most trafficsources you don´t see the actual URL from the placement.
Mostly you only see placement IDs and don´t know the real website.

But there is a trick you can use to get real websites where the pops from the trafficsources are shown.

Go to PublicWWW, it´s a source code search engine.

Let´s take Propeller Ads as an example.

On PublicWWW I just put “afu.php?zoneid=” in the search field.
Then you see many results with websites who have Propeller Ads pops.

You can also use “afu.php?zoneid=123456789” (change 123456789 to your desired zone id) to search directly for specific zones.

Won´t always work, sometimes the websites don´t appear at all.
Sometimes you can only see the whole URL with premium account.

But it´s worth to try it.

You can also put only “Propellerads” in the search field.

Then you see many more results and can check if they websites run Propeller Ads yourself.

For this just visit some of the websites and search the source code from the website.

In Chrome just press CTRL + U to see the websites source code.

Then press CTRL + F to search the source and search for “propellerads”.
When you find it the probably have ads from Propeller Ads.

You can also put “native.propellerads.com/” in the search filed to find websites that show Propeller Ads native ads.

When you search for “ntfc.php?p=” you can find websites with Propeller Ads push ads.

For PopAds

To find websites with Popads code you can put “PopAds%20CGAPIL%20A” or “popads-verification-” in the search filed

For Popcash

When you put “popcash.net/pop.js” or “cdn.popcash.net/pop” in the search field you can find websites who run Popcash pops.

Of course you can do it with many other trafficsources as well.

Just put the name of the traffic source in the search field, visit some of the websites and search the source code for ad code, use the ad code in PublicWWW to find more websites.

Sometimes you can also search for specific placements but mostly it´s better to find general websites running pops or other ads from the trafficsources.

Another way is to just sign up as a publisher on the trafficsources.

That way you can get the actual ad code they use and search on PublicWWW for that code.

I hope you enjoyed this little tutorial and I hope it helps you for your manual spying.