Promotion tool

BigSpy for social and display research

BigSpy is an ad library people use to browse social and display creatives that have already been collected from the market. You can learn how an idea is framed and which format carried it. You cannot learn whether that idea made money, and you cannot learn what your account would earn if you tried something similar. Maxlead does not own BigSpy. BigSpy does not own Maxlead. They are separate products. The connection, if you make one, is your own test.

Maxlead is a CPA performance network that has operated since 2015. After your publisher account is approved, public offers are available. Other offers remain closed until you apply and an admin approves the request. Each tracking link is issued on the offer and includes your publisher id. You can pass s1 through s8 for the source, the creative, and the placement. Those values show on the conversion report and the performance report. A global postback covers the account. An offer postback covers one campaign. Tokens include the click id, the payout, the status, the offer, and the sub IDs. The dashboard shows clicks, conversions, earnings, EPC, and CVR. Approved earnings are paid every week. Pending and rejected conversions are not treated as cash.

A spy tool does not show your EPC, and a spy tool does not approve you for an offer. BigSpy is that kind of tool: a library of other people’s ads. Your EPC is earnings per click on the clicks you sent through Maxlead. Your approval is the status of your account and of the offer request. A saved social ad changes neither.

What you can learn: angle and format

Angle is the way the ad approaches the problem. A bill-savings offer might be angled as a checklist, as a local question, or as a short story about a household. A software trial might be angled as a comparison or as a single feature. Format is the container: a square image, a vertical video, a carousel, a static display banner, a short caption under a photo. BigSpy is worth opening when you want examples of those two things in social and display, because those channels are where a lot of visible creative lives.

Take notes in your own words. “Square image, one sentence, the action is a form” is a format note. “The headline asks about a fee the person already understands” is an angle note. Both notes are portable. You can ask whether your offer is allowed to use a plain question in a square image on social, or a simple banner on display. You are not required to reuse the photo, the face, the logo, or the exact sentence. You should not. The file belongs to whoever made it. Your ad has to be something you have the right to run, aimed at an offer you are allowed to run.

Social and display teach different lessons, so do not mash them into one swipe file. Social creative is often personal in tone and sits next to organic posts. Display creative is often smaller and has to work without a caption. An angle that needs three sentences will fail in a display unit even if it looked fine in a social library. An angle that only works because a face is recognizable is not an angle you can ethically or legally lift. Write down the structure. Leave the asset behind.

Look at the match between the ad and the page it opens, when the library shows a page. A format lesson includes that match. If the ad promises a story and the page is a hard form, you have learned what a mismatch looks like. You have not learned that the mismatch converts. You have learned a pattern to avoid unless the offer you run is built the same way and explicitly allows it.

What you cannot learn: their conversion rate

You cannot see their conversion rate. A library does not sit inside the advertiser’s report, and it does not sit inside yours. An ad can be collected because it was served, not because it was profitable. It can stay visible while it loses money. It can be a brand campaign with no CPA action at all. It can be a test that was paused an hour after the crawler saved it. None of those situations are labeled in a way you can trust as a payout result.

You also cannot see their EPC. Even if a spy screen shows a guess about reach or time in market, that guess is not earnings per click, and it is not your earnings per click. A spy tool does not show your EPC. There is no path by which another account’s revenue is assigned to your publisher id just because you viewed the ad. CVR works the same way. CVR on Maxlead is approved conversions divided by your clicks. Their clicks are not your clicks. Their approvals, if they had any, are not your approvals.

Do not backfill the gap with a story. “This ad has been up for a long time, so it must convert” is a story. Longevity is not a rate. “This format always works on social” is a story. Format is a container. The offer, the country, the claim, and the audience decide whether the container earns. The only rate you should put next to a budget is the rate you measure after a test.

The same limit applies to comments, likes, and shares when a library surfaces them. Engagement is not an approved conversion. A post can be shared because it is funny, alarming, or untrue. None of those reasons pay a CPA. If you optimize for the reaction you saw in the library, you can buy clicks that the advertiser rejects. Rejected conversions are absent from the weekly payout on purpose.

The library does not approve you

Finding a social ad for a product does not mean that product’s offer is on your Maxlead account. It does not mean a similar offer will accept social or display. It does not mean your request will be approved. A spy tool does not approve you for an offer. Approval is either the public status of the offer after your account itself is approved, or an admin decision on a request you submitted. BigSpy is not part of that decision.

Read the offer before you build anything. Country first. If the ad in the library is aimed at a country the offer does not list, you do not have a campaign, you have a mismatch. Source second. Social is not display. If the offer allows one and forbids the other, follow the line that is written. Some social placements are treated as incentive, misleading, or brand-restricted. If the rule is unclear, ask the account manager. Then read the action and the claims. An angle you liked in the library is usable only if the offer allows that claim.

The preview page on the offer is for reading the advertiser’s page. Do not send social or display clicks there. Do not send them to a URL you copied out of the ad library. The click destination is the tracking link, with your publisher id and the sub IDs for this test. That is how the click exists on your account before the visitor reaches the advertiser.

Test your own traffic

Pick one angle and one format. Write the ad yourself, or use the creative the offer already provides. If you are making a display size, build the size the placement asked for, and keep the claim honest. If you are making a social post or a paid social ad, use the placement the offer allows, not every placement the ad account happens to offer. One test. A second format can wait until the first sub ID has a result.

Label the link. Set s1 to the source, such as social or display. Set s2 to the campaign. Set s3 to the angle name. Set s4 to the format, such as the placement or the pixel size. A new angle gets a new s3 even when the format stays the same. If you recycle the sub ID, the performance report adds the new idea to the old idea and you will credit the wrong one. s5 through s8 can hold a country code or a date if you need them. Keep the values short.

Launch small. Confirm a click appears on Maxlead with those sub IDs. Then let the test run long enough to read, without feeding it extra budget every hour. Look at clicks, conversions, and whether the conversions were approved. Earnings follow the approved payout on the offer. EPC and CVR on that row are the numbers that describe your traffic. They will not match a number you imagined while browsing BigSpy, and they do not need to. They need to be yours.

If you also run a tracker, pass its click id through a sub ID and set the postback to that tracker. Global postback for every offer, or an offer postback when this social or display campaign should report somewhere else. The postback goes out when the conversion is approved or rejected, not while it is pending. It carries the tokens you placed: click id, payout, status, offer, and the sub IDs. It does not report into the ad library. The library will not update itself when you get an approval.

Honest ads after a library session

A library session nudges people toward louder claims, because loud claims are easier to notice in a grid of ads. Resist that. The offer’s allowed wording is the ceiling. Do not add a result, a celebrity, a fake interface, or a guarantee because those elements were common in the grid. Common is not the same as permitted. Your commission is not a benefit you can promise the visitor. If the offer pays you on an approved lead, the visitor is completing an action, not collecting your payout.

Social platforms have their own ad rules on top of the offer rules. This page is not a compliance manual for those platforms, and it is not legal advice. You still have to satisfy both layers. An offer that allows social can still be disapproved by the platform for the way you wrote the ad. A platform approval does not override an offer ban. When the two conflict, do not run the ad. There is no payable version of a forbidden claim.

Display has the same double check. The banner can be a perfect size and still say something the advertiser rejects at conversion review. Build the file so the sentence is true for the page the tracking link opens. If you need many sizes, change the layout, not the claim, and keep the size in its own sub ID so you can turn a weak unit off.

How to read the result

A good test answers a narrow question. Did this angle, in this format, in this country, on this allowed source, produce an approved conversion on the tracking link? If yes, you have a row you can watch. Compare approved earnings with what you spent at the traffic source. Maxlead does not hold that media invoice. EPC will not subtract it for you. If the approved earnings do not cover the spend, the angle was interesting and the campaign was not profitable. Stop or change one variable, and give the change a new sub ID.

If the row is clicks without approvals, the library lesson was incomplete. The angle attracted a click and failed the action, or the traffic was the wrong quality, or the offer capped, or the claim drifted. Do not go back to BigSpy for a louder version of the same claim. Reread the offer. Talk to the account manager if you cannot see which rule you missed. Then decide whether a second test is even justified.

The weekly payout is the cashier for this work, and it pays approved earnings only. Do not scale a social campaign because a pending number moved. Wait for the status. Rejected volume is information. It is not revenue, and it should not be averaged into a success story you tell yourself while you browse the next page of the library.

A practical order of work

Use BigSpy to study angle and format on social and display. Write the lesson without copying the file. Ignore any urge to treat the ad’s visibility as a conversion rate. Open the offer on Maxlead and check country, source, claims, and whether you are approved. Build one ad you have the right to use. Send it through the tracking link with a new sub ID. Test your own traffic. Read EPC and CVR on your dashboard. Set a postback if a tracker needs the click id and the status back. Take the weekly payout of what was approved, and leave the ad library out of the tracking path.

BigSpy can make a blank page less blank. It cannot approve the offer, and it cannot show your EPC. Those stay on Maxlead, with the publisher id on the link and s1 through s8 telling you which angle you actually tested.