Note: iPyxel did not receive monetary compensation for writing this review. It’s purely our own opinion.
Recently we were introduced to a new competitive research tool for Facebook called Social Ad Ninja. We’ve been using this tool for a little while now and figured it was time to share our findings with a brief review. Ahead, we’ll share with you what Social Ad Ninja has to offer followed by what we liked about Social Ad Ninja, what we believe was lacking, and what we hope to see in the future. Follow along…
A Brief Glance
When you first log in to Social Ad Ninja (SAN), you’re brought to the home page which includes some of their most recent updates and a list of the latest ads to show up in their tool. You can click into these ads to check out things like how new they are, and which type of profiles they appear in. But considering that they’re new, there’s not really a lot of information you can pull from these ads. Luckily, this site has more than just that to offer.
User Profiles
There are currently 195 profiles within the SAN system. Of these profiles, 46 have US locations wherein 26 are males and 20 females ranging from ages 14-65. Below is a quick overview of the types of profiles available.
Some profiles also include special user interests within the profile, but a majority of those are displayed in just US profiles.
Ultimately, if you’re looking to see what kind of ads are being shown to 55-yr-old female users in Finland, you would just click on “show” which would then bring up a list of ads that get shown to that profile, giving you something that looks like this:
What Each Ad Will Tell You
After you’ve selected a user profile, revealing a list of ads that get shown to that profile, you can then click on any individual ad to learn more about it. After clicking into an ad, SAN tells us a bunch of useful information like the Ad link, Ad link type which indicates whether or not the ad is for a sponsored story or fan page, the number of URL redirect links, the Days the ad has been alive, and the Other profiles that have seen this ad, thus indicating who else this ad is targeting.
All of this information will quickly come in handy when you’re trying to determine whether or not an ad you’re looking at has the potential to be successful and whether or not you can take anything away from it.
Bookmarking
While an ad may be new, or is likely to run for a very limited time, you may want to save this ad to come back to it later and observe whether or not it performs when given more time to run. Luckily, you can do this by just clicking on the “Bookmark” button towards the bottom of the page, and the ad will be saved to a list which can be accessed at any time by just clicking Bookmarks tab at the top of the page.
In the Bookmarks tab, you’ll get a brief overview of all the ads you’ve bookmarked to date, allowing you to follow the progress of each ad through its lifetime.
Shining Bright With Ad Search 2.0
In the event that you weren’t impressed with SAN before, this is where things really turn around. Clicking on the Ad Search 2.0 tab brings you to this:
In this page, you can select any number of search parameters ranging from gender, age, marital status, location, ad link type, days alive, number of redirects, and profile interests. You can also narrow your search parameters even further by searching for certain keywords in ad titles, body copy, and ad links. One thing to note about this search feature is that when you click on multiple parameters on the left, what you get is an intersection of those options as opposed to a union.
Our Thoughts
What’s any good review without some praises and critiques, eh? This is what we thought about Social Ad Ninja.
“Hitting the Mark”
Considering the easy-to-use interface combined with the ability to pull out crucial information on a wide variety of ads across a wide variety of demographics, the way in which this tool executes its job is like that of a Ninja: fast and efficient. We liked that you could view which other SAN profiles were viewing the same ad, and that we could bookmark any ad we liked with a quick snapshot of each ad. We also liked how easy it was to look for ads shown to a number of different profiles while being able to search for particular keywords in those ads. This way, we found exactly what we were looking for right away as opposed to sifting through the pile of ads.
What to Look Forward to, What We’d Like to See
As I mentioned above, while Social Ad Ninja doesn’t have as many profiles and countries as other tools, they are making attempts to expand their reach and even have a section where users can suggest target profiles. There, users can vote on existing profile suggestions or create their own. Alongside that, you can be sure that the team at Social Ad Ninja is working to catch up to their competitors around the clock, as they appear to be adding a new country about every week or so along with 2,000 new ads each day. Aside from more profiles though, we hope that soon there will be something indicating the average position of each ad, giving us further indication on the success of what we’re looking at.
All-in-all, we’re not sure on what other features Social Ad Ninja is currently working on, but we get the feeling that they won’t be hitting the brakes anytime soon. So far, its proven to be a useful tool and we hope to see more of Social Ad Ninja.
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