Best Ad Intelligence Software Shortlist
Here’s my final list of the top tools that cater to ad intelligence. Find detailed summaries of each one below.
- Poltio - Best for engaging your audience in conversation
- MediaRadar - Best for sales enablement specifically for ad tech
- Numerator Insights - Best for agile promotion tracking to maximize effectiveness
- Pathmatics by Sensor Tower - Best for data analytics across social, video, mobile, and display ad campaigns
- SocialPeta - Best for creatives that cover 69 countries and 70 mainstream channels, including games
- Kantar Advertising Insights - Best for understanding the impact of multimedia strategies
- data.ai - Best for combining market and consumer data with artificial intelligence
- Admetricks - Best for monitoring your competition’s digital advertising
- Klue - Best as an all-in-one platform with competitor, market, and buyer insights
- Apptopia - Best for decoding mobile user acquisition
- Adwisely - Best for fully automated online search ads
- AdClarity - Best for the most comprehensive ad inventory by tracking over a million brands daily
As the need for business intelligence grows, solutions that address more targeted concerns are becoming the norm. One type of technology that focuses on helping your marketing and advertising team gain insight into your consumers is ad intelligence. Using this tool, you can monitor, track, and analyze consumer behavior, evaluate your campaigns, and enhance ad performance.
Designed to help you optimize digital advertising spend, ad intelligence allows you to make more informed decisions based on real-time data of consumer behaviors and interests. Ad intelligence software can help you find the right prospects and create effective marketing campaigns across different mediums, including social media, print, and television commercials.
What Is Ad Intelligence Software?
In short, ad intelligence software helps marketers gain valuable insights into customer behavior while optimizing their spending through detailed analytics about ad campaigns, including website visits from ads, cost-per-click, number of clicks and impressions, and cost-per-view.
Overviews of the 12 Best Ad Intelligence Software
Ready to take a deeper look at the best ad intelligence software solutions available today? Check out an overview of each tool, a few standout features, and pricing information. I’ve also included a snapshot of how the tool works, along with a few pros and cons to guide your decision.
1. Poltio - Best for engaging your audience in conversation
As a customer engagement platform, Poltio uses interactive content and previously engaged data to provide potential consumers with more personalized shopping experiences across every channel. With solutions for user engagement, segmentation data, lead generation, and insight creation, this platform provides answers to enhance user acquisition.
Why I picked Poltio: What made this platform stand out was how you could create a custom communication channel to enhance your communication with users and start an actual conversion. You can add to your email marketing strategies and increase the depth of your engagement as consumers spend even more time with your brand.
Poltio Standout Features and Integrations:
Standout features include embeddable widgets that you can put on your website or a mobile app, live dashboards to track real-time results from ad placements and landing pages, and webhooks support that allows you to set goals that trigger events.
Integrations include Google Tag Manager and Webhooks Relay.
Pricing: From $40/month for 1,000 engagements
Free Trial: Free plan available
Pros
- Many UI customization options
- Flexible workflow structure available
- Great customer support team
Cons
- Complex admin interface for advanced features
- Limited AI capabilities
2. MediaRadar - Best for sales enablement specifically for ad tech
This ad intelligence tool is a cloud-based enablement platform that’s designed to support ad agencies and sales professionals who sell advertising space or operate advertising agencies. With MediaRadar, your team can streamline the sales process with in-depth market analysis that can help you determine who to reach out to and what to say.
Why I picked MediaRadar: The reason this platform made my list was that it offers solutions for ad tech, helping them to see the full programmatic landscape. You can stack your rank leads to uncover brands that purchase ads programmatically and discover which native platforms or DSPs they’re working with.
MediaRadar Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include Instant Competitive Analysis for insights into which brands your competitors work with and Spend by Line Product Breakdown that shows a detailed hierarchy of a brand’s digital budget.
Integrations include Comscore, Elan, Google Maps, Google Suite, LinkedIn, MagHub, Okta, Ping Identity, Salesforce Sales Cloud, and Yelp.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: Free trial available
Pros
- Helps you target specific regions
- Very user-friendly interface
- Single-page views for potential leads
Cons
- Some data inaccuracy
- Won’t get data on smaller companies
3. Numerator Insights - Best for agile promotion tracking to maximize effectiveness
As a cloud-based marketing intelligence platform, Numerator Insights helps your organization find data related to buying trends and customer insights from various sources, including media consumption habits, demographics, and psychographics. This platform is designed to analyze customer purchase journeys and determine the effects promotions have on purchasing.
Why I picked Numerator Insights: A unique feature from this platform and the reason it made my list is called Numerator Promotions Intel. With this tool, you get print, digital, and store-level data granularity that shows you how consumers are navigating inflationary pressures, rising prices, and promotional offers.
Numerator Insights Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include OmniPanel for a diverse consumer panel to provide holistic insight into consumer behavior and cross-category data that can show how unique ad types affect purchasing behavior across every channel.
Integrations include DocHub and Salesforce.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: Free demo available
Pros
- Provides multi-channel purchasing data
- Self-service flexibility and customization
- Very speedy data delivery
Cons
- Templated approach can be restricting
- Pricing can be higher than competitors
4. Pathmatics by Sensor Tower - Best for data analytics across social, video, mobile, and display ad campaigns
This marketing intelligence platform is designed to help agencies, publishers, and brands answer digital advertising questions across social media, display, mobile, and video to seize new opportunities for engagement. You can outsmart your competition, find creatives that resonate, and analyze trends all in one place.
Why I picked Pathmatics: This platform caught my attention because it’s designed to help you better understand what types of eye-catching visuals and ad copy resonate with your target audience across a variety of digital spaces. Pathmatics Explorer allows you to view messaging, sites, landing pages, and size for each creative and see how tactics differ across networks.
Pathmatics Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include competitor evaluation of marketing campaigns and analytics of trending ads that help you design better creative strategies.
Integrations include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, X (formerly known as Twitter), and YouTube.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: Free demo available
Pros
- Easy to read data visualizations
- Custom reports to create new strategies
- Very simple to learn and use
Cons
- Limited search data
- Limited product detail information
5. SocialPeta - Best for creatives that cover 69 countries and 70 mainstream channels, including games
SocialPeta is a leading advertisement spy and analytics platform that’s designed to provide marketing and creative strategies for both publishers and advertisers. SocialPeta focuses on cost and ad intelligence, audience insight, ad creatives, and advertising strategy to enhance your operations.
Why I picked SocialPeta: This platform stood out because it was one of the few that highlighted ad placement in mobile apps and games. SocialPeta offers global analytics for apps like Unity, Facebook, and Google, as well as China-specific analytics for downloads like TouTiao, BiliBili, Tencent, and Alibaba.
SocialPeta Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include insights into Facebook ad costs with top countries‘ benchmarks of CPC, CTR, and CPM, as well as a database with access to multi-dimensional analysis on over five million global advertisers.
Integrations include Alibaba, Ameba, Baidu, BiliBili, Facebook, Google, Naver, NetEase, Twitter, and Unity.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: 3-day free trial available
Pros
- Easy to understand analytics
- Ad formats with global access
- Database of top-performing competitors
Cons
- Cost could be more competitive
- Some features only available for Facebook ads
6. Kantar Advertising Insights - Best for understanding the impact of multimedia strategies
This ad intelligence platform focuses on analyzing what brands are saying and spending across a variety of media channels in order to provide you with timely insights that deliver a competitive edge to your strategies. Use Kantar Advertising Insights to identify your share of voice and set your advertising direction.
Why I picked Kantar Advertising Insights: One reason this platform made my list was its focus on robust analytics for multimedia strategies. With Kantar Advertising Insights, you can quickly access an analysis of competitor investments, spend, creative messaging, and media mix trends.
Kantar Advertising Insights Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include data visualizations to make number-heavy information more palatable and easier to understand and detailed campaign performance analysis of your competitors’ ads.
Integrations include AdClarity, Admetricks, Acxiom InfoBase, BiScience, Excel, OMI, PowerPoint, Qualtrics, and TGI.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: Free demo available
Pros
- Dashboard is very easy to use
- Lots of customization options
- Insights are quick and detailed
Cons
- Agile but without depth
- Data interpretation requires training
7. data.ai - Best for combining market and consumer data with artificial intelligence
data.ai strives to be the industry’s most trusted insight and analytics platform for mobile apps. As an ad intelligence tool that delivers a complete picture of the mobile landscape, data.ai can provide you with what you need to acquire, retain, and engage customers while prioritizing your roadmap, optimizing ROI, and entering new markets.
Why I picked data.ai: This tool made my list because of a feature called Total App Revenue. This tool focuses on in-app purchases that show you AI-powered estimates of your revenue vs. competitors’, insights into the top monetizing ad platforms, and comprehensive intel on any competitor’s monetization playbook.
data.ai Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include data.ai ConnectPlus to track critical data on app downloads, revenue, and usage, as well as an insights generator for competitive benchmarking.
Integrations include Gmail, GroupMe, LinkedIn, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, and Snowflake Data Share. data.ai has API connector availability.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: Free plan available
Pros
- UX/UI is easy to understand
- Offers intuitive navigation
- Customized plan options to address your needs
Cons
- Limited reporting customization options
- Added cost for every additional feature
8. Admetricks - Best for monitoring your competition’s digital advertising
Admetricks is designed to be the ad intelligence tool you want to estimate ad spend, interactions, reach, and frequency in order to strategize based on competitor behavior. With this tool, you can find out where and how much other brands are investing in digital ads through predictive algorithms that track campaign impressions, trends, and ad spend.
Why I picked Admetricks: One unique tool from this platform is the Adjusted Valuation Model (AVM). This is the artificial intelligence model that Admetricks uses to train predictive algorithms for the most accurate breakdown of ad spend, campaign impressions, trends, and rates in the digital ad market.
Admetricks Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include intelligence on ads in over 19 countries, 24/7 monitoring of ad types and devices, and shareable reports via email.
Integrations include Kantar Advertising Intelligence and Nielsen Ad Intel. Admetricks also offers an open API for custom integrations.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: Free trial available
Pros
- Admetricks training center offers learning courses
- Platform is very easy to use
- Simple to configure and customize
Cons
- Only provides a general view of brand investment
- Needs frequent updates to keep up
9. Klue - Best as an all-in-one platform with competitor, market, and buyer insights
As an AI-powered competitive intelligence solution, Klue is built to help CI teams and product marketers collect, curate, and deliver insights on competitor behavior in order to empower your sales team to win more deals.
This platform focuses on enabling every part of your organization to benefit from competitor information with dynamic insights informed by both internal knowledge from your team as well as external competitive data.
Why I picked Klue: This platform caught my eye and made my list because it offers customizable dashboards for every member and team in your organization, including CI, sales, executive, marketing, and product teams. Klue transforms data into insights that appear on your dashboard to ensure you’re informed of all possible next steps.
Klue Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include sales cards that make intel analytics simple and easy to understand, collaboration boards that centralize insights about a competitor, and a mobile app with the same functionality as the desktop version.
Integrations include Gmail, Gong, Highspot, HubSpot, Intercom, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Showpad, and Slack.
Pricing: Pricing available upon request
Free Trial: Free demo available
Pros
- Extremely customizable software solution
- Lots of automation capabilities
- Great customer support for onboarding
Cons
- Initial setup can be time-consuming
- Delay in intelligence gathering lead time
10. Apptopia - Best for decoding mobile user acquisition
This web-based marketing and ad intelligence platform is designed for mobile app developers. Apptopia provides essential data points on all ranked mobile apps to identify emerging trends, performance statistics, and consumer interests through revenue and download data so that developers can optimize their app to take advantage of every one of these insights.
Why I picked Apptopia: This tool stood out to me because, in addition to focusing on competitors, it also takes a deep dive into your potential target audience. Apptopia looks at shoppers to see how geography, ad networks, and media type affect their spending habits and behaviors. With this information, you can tailor apps for the location, demographics, and channels of your ideal customer.
Apptopia Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include Alpha Intelligence, which monitors core revenue drivers to deliver growth trend data sooner, and Bloomberg Terminal App, which integrates with Bloomberg to help you uncover new opportunities.
Integrations include AWS Data Exchange, BigQuery, Chartio, databricks, Mode, Salesforce, Segment, Snowflake, Spark, and Tableau.
Pricing: From $79/month
Free Trial: Limited free reports on competitors are available
Pros
- Analytics are simple and easy to read
- Information is accessible and searchable
- Intuitive navigation and UX
Cons
- Some errors in usage data
- Clunky exporting functionality
11. Adwisely - Best for fully automated online search ads
This ad intelligence platform strives to make digital ad creation more accessible to ecommerce store owners and their marketing managers. With the ability to create automated prospecting and retargeting ads, Adwisely works to provide you with automation tools and guidance that ensures you’re spending less time making and managing ads.
Why I picked Adwisely: This platform made my list because it does much of the hard work of digital ad creation for you. With just a little bit of information about the product or service you hope to advertise, Adwisely creates ads for multiple channels, tests them, edits them, and monitors progress to continually optimize ads for the current market.
Adwisely can create, run, and optimize ads for Google, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), and YouTube.
Adwisely Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include automated ad campaign creation with ready-to-use templates and bid optimization and monitoring 24/7 to save you money.
Integrations include BigCommerce, Google, Meta for Business, Shopify, and WooCommerce.
Pricing: From $49/month
Free Trial: 7-day free trial available
Pros
- Simple and easy to learn
- Intuitive navigation through the app
- Guided ad creation for multiple platforms
Cons
- Creates a new ad account instead of using what you already have
- Learning phase for ads can eat up your budget
12. AdClarity - Best for the most comprehensive ad inventory by tracking over a million brands daily
This ad intelligence solution is one of the leading cross-channel analytics platforms in the digital media industry. With AdClarity, you have access to data on a million brands in real time that can help you uncover insights into the actions and decisions of your competitors through display advertising, social media campaigns, in-app ads, campaign landing pages, and video advertising.
Why I picked AdClarity: This tool is so valuable because it considers the most advertising platforms of every solution on my list. You can review insights from search and display ads, mobile ads, video ads, direct ads, and premium ad placement from nearly any competitor. AdClarity provides you access to data from 52 global markets, 180 million ad creatives, 35,000 ad platforms, and 56 million programmatic events.
AdClarity Standout Features and Integrations
Standout features include mobile ad data collection with over 10 million opt-in human panels and AdClarity API for customized solutions, including dashboards, data feeds, and data exports.
Integrations include OneLogin and SimilarWeb Pro.
Pricing: From $169/month
Free Trial: Free demo available
Pros
- Has one of the largest data collection networks
- User-interface is simple and accessible
- Great customer service and support
Cons
- No CPC or CPM data available
- Pricing structure can be a bit expensive
Other Options
There are so many ad intelligence tools available that I just couldn’t complete my list without a few honorable mentions. Check out these other options to discover the platform that may suit your needs:
- Similarweb - Best ad intelligence platform for analyzing competitor advertisements
- PowerAdSpy - Best for understanding your competitors’ social media strategies
- Adbeat - Best competitive intelligence that helps you spy on other companies
- AdQuality by IronSource - Best for in-app tracking of your advertising content
- AdMobiSpy - Best for monitoring multi-channel campaigns to map relations
- Anstrex - Best for helping you build winning native advertising campaigns
- Moat by Oracle - Best for helping you verify campaigns across mobile, digital, and CTV
- iSpionage - Best for converting new leads by driving targeted traffic to your site
Selection Criteria For Ad Intelligence Software
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best ad intelligence software for this article:
Core Functionality
Every advertising intelligence tool must have some essential core functionalities to make it useful for marketing and advertising teams, including:
- Monitoring
- Analytics
- Optimization
- Automation
Key Features
To ensure your intelligence solution delivers on the above functionalities, I checked that every platform on my list had the most important key features, including:
- Campaign monitoring: You must be able to track ad performance in real time to check click-through rates, cost-per-click, impressions, budgeting, and other key metrics for your campaign. Look for campaign monitoring that tracks from launch through to completion.
- Audience insights: If you want your advertisements to draw the right people to your product or service, you need to gain an understanding of who your audience is and how they interact with your ads. Insights help you explore demographics and identify trends that lead to better engagement.
- Performance analysis: Comparing the performance of your ads across various campaigns and networks can help you figure out which combinations deliver the best results. Trends and behaviors will change over time, so constant analytics can help you spot new opportunities or weaknesses.
- Spending optimization: Wondering where you should be spending your money? This feature is designed to help you control and manage your budgets based on the limits you set yourself. Analyze the cost and effectiveness of various keywords, campaigns, and channels to get a good look at the big picture.
- Reporting and dashboards: Custom reports and dashboards can deliver bite-sized data that’s easy to understand in convenient locations that ensure you can quickly track progress from every campaign. These tools can generate reports on demand or automate dashboard updates for your convenience.
- Competitor analysis: Tracking competitors’ ads is a big part of understanding your market and getting your share of it. Track competitor spending, audience targeting, keywords, and creative additions to stay ahead and adjust your campaigns as needed.
Usability
Most marketing intelligence tools offer a lot of functionality as part of their services. With so many features to learn, it can be a slow process to implement and customize your platform. While I looked for those solutions with intuitive navigation and friendly user interfaces, some platforms just have a steep learning curve. For those, I made sure they offered robust customer service and training.
Software Integrations
The thing that makes ad intelligence so powerful is the data — so software integration with the tools that collect all your data is essential. I’ve included the most popular integrations for each platform in their summaries above — specifying native integrations, plug-ins, and other types of connectors.
Pricing
Because there is so much variety in the features and functionality of ad intelligence software, cost can range anywhere from just a few dollars a month to thousands of dollars a year. There are some services that offer free forever plans for the limited needs of small businesses or solo entrepreneurs and some plans that are specifically built to manage massive amounts of data for enterprise organizations.
People Also Ask
Wondering what else you should know about advertising strategies and digital marketing before shopping for an intelligence solution? Check out my answers to the most common questions here.
What is ad intelligence?
What are the benefits of ad intelligence software?
Who uses ad intelligence software?
Other Revenue Operations Software
If you’re looking for other business intelligence tools to round out your tech stack, I have a few more overviews that can help, including:
- Business Intelligence Software For RevOps
- Revenue Intelligence Platforms
- Sales Intelligence Software
- Lead Intelligence Software
- Cloud BI Tools
- Sales Analytics Software
What’s Next?
After reading and researching every tool on my list, you might already have your own list of the top two or three platforms that may work for you. I would recommend signing up for free trials and getting demos to gain a better understanding of how each ad intelligence platform can support your business.
And if you’re looking for more insights into revenue operations, I’m always here to help with plenty of overviews and articles about different types of tools. You can also sign up for the RevOps Newsletter to get expert guides about industry trends straight to your inbox.