Today, digital marketing is the key to a business’s success. But digital marketing in itself is a tricky business. If not done correctly, it will not yield the expected result.
A gap gets created of what has been expected from running a haphazard digital marketing campaign and the final outcome, which in the long run ruins the company to its failure.
An IITian of Kharagpur from the 2017 batch, Gaurav Kumar’s experience of working at an eCommerce brand helped him identify such gaps that both brands and agencies feel while running ads – which is why he created a platform to automate all aspects involved in digital marketing campaigns. Kumar, the founder & CEO of AdSpyder, thus began his entrepreneurial journey to bridge that gap.
In an interview with Insights Success for its edition of ‘Best Of 5 SaaS Companies To Watch’, Kumar tells us how AdSpyder is thriving towards helping businesses across various industries craft a smart network of tactical digital advertisements that fosters their aim of continuous growth and development.
The excerpts of that interview are given below.
Describe AdSpyder in detail.
AdSpyder is a SAAS-based ad intelligence platform that provides insights into millions of online advertisements from all over the world. The platform covers multiple advertisement metrics, generates visualisations based on those metrics, and offers several filters for a hassle-free user experience.
AdSpyder currently supports Google Search ads, Facebook ads, Google Ecom ads, Bing ads, Ecomm Ads from Flipkart, Amazon in total. At present, AdSpyder supports 11 platforms to showcase ads from. The portal has a ten million+ ad copy library and covers ads from 50,000+ websites and 100+ sources.
AdSpyder provides advertisement-related data that matters the most. And it is not about just analytics; AdSpyder ensures you have the necessary metrics and numbers in hand to craft the best advertising strategies.
What made you venture into the industry you are catering to?
My experience of working in the eCommerce field has provided me not just an overview but an in-depth understanding of possible requirements required to bridge the gap between the product and the marketing. During my work on different eCommerce websites, I have seen many potential products failing to make an impact in the market due to improper marketing strategies.
This provided me with an opportunity to create AdSpyder, a tool that helps you monitor ad insights of top-performing competitors in the market.
What kind of offerings do you provide to your clients?
AdSpyder is a service that provides over 100 million ads with keyword searching, competitor analysis and campaign details. The user can sort the library by date or location to find what they need most conveniently for their business needs and scale up their ROI.
What kind of challenges have you faced while entering the industry you are catering to?
Ads are not just regular posts that have been shared by the brand. Ads are entirely different sets of creative that are not available on your social profile. The accurate date on ads being run is very important. The data needs to be up to date with the current promotion of the brands as well as data must be available for the user based on the keywords.
Researching and collecting such data has been one of the crucial challenges I faced and overcame.
How was AdSpyder affected in these pandemic times, and what were the steps you took to curb the damages while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees?
Our business was not much affected by the pandemic. During the pandemic, eCommerce saw a rise in the graph, with most companies taking the digital route to sell their products. This also increased the competition for most of the sectors. And the solution to this was an online tool that provides competitor ad insights.
Therefore, the impact of the pandemic on AdSpyder has been very minimal, gaining maximum users from sectors like EdTech and healthcare who used our platform to run ads on the scale.
We started identifying industries that are going to get benefitted from the pandemic, and we started putting a lot of focus on that only.
What would you like to advise the young generation of entrepreneurs?
Focus! This is one mistake I believe is the reason for the closure of many start-ups. Every founder should have a clear cut focus on their KPI, putting revenue on top and work in that direction only.
If you are focused on serving the right customer, everything will fall in place.
Where do you envision AdSpyder to be in the long run, and what are your future goals? How do you plan to embrace the changes happening in your respective industry?
We want to scale our business to $1MN ARR by next year.
We want to build a company that cares about its employees. I genuinely believe that if you love your employees, your customers will love you too.
Change is inevitable, and we are always prepared for that. Though we don’t keep an eye on competitors, we challenge ourselves to build a better product to make our customers happier.
What is the current industrial scenario of the industry you are catering to?
As per US Census Bureau, total e-commerce sales for 2021 were estimated at $870.8 billion, an increase of 14.2 per cent. This shows that maximum sellers are moving to digital space. There are several factors to consider. Strong ad spending growth is expected to continue in 2022. The U.S. ad market is forecasted to exceed $300 billion and the global ad market over $700 billion. This will bring in more competition in eCommerce and digital selling. As a result, this brings out more opportunities and possibilities for AdSpyder to grow.
