It’s quite amazing with some of the tools that are available for free to marketers these days. Remember when you had to scour the web to find what you were looking for, or even worse, have to pay a hefty fee to use high end management or search tools?
A recent site that I came across is called Moat Ad Search, which allows you to perform a search for any and all banner ads that are floating around the web. The site is free to use, and all you need to know if the domain of a competitor or site you want to promote.
Let’s take a look at their main page first.
As you can see, the main page is quite straight forward. Put in your desired brand or .com address into the search box and Moat will pull up all of your banner results. Below the search box you will see recommendations and recently seen ads. This is a great area for getting ideas on what type of banner campaigns you can look up, or what other people are searching for.
Now let’s take a look at Moat in action. After going to the main page, I put in Mate1.com, which is a popular dating web site. After clicking the submit button, I was sent to a page full of wonderful banner ads in multiple sizes. This would be a great resource if I wanted to promote Mate1 through an affiliate network, but they only had a few banners to choose from.
You can click on any of these banners for an instant download to your computer, or keep searching around for different sizes and competitors. Moat is an excellent and free resource for looking at what banner ad campaigns are available, while also getting ideas on ways to create new banners and grab attention for your own campaigns.
