Introduction to Kevel Console

Kevel Console is Kevel's omnichannel advertiser self-serve UI. It gives media owners a way to put campaign management and reporting directly in the hands of their advertisers across both onsite and offsite channels without requiring a managed-service workflow at every step.

For advertisers, Console provides a single place to create and manage campaigns, monitor performance through consistent reporting workflows, and iterate quickly on their own terms.

Why advertiser self-serve?

Advertiser self-serve unlocks meaningful scale for media owners by removing the bottleneck of ad operations teams from routine campaign setup and measurement tasks.

This model is valuable across many media business types, but it is especially well-suited to retail media and commerce media networks, where the volume and variety of advertiser relationships make managed service difficult to sustain:

• Media owners need to support a large number of advertisers with varying levels of sophistication
• Advertisers want to iterate and optimize faster than a centralized ops team can support at scale
• Onsite and offsite spend increasingly need to work together under a single reporting view
• Reporting consistency is foundational to advertiser trust and retention

When advertisers can see their own data, adjust their own campaigns, and act on insights without filing a ticket, the relationship between media owner and advertiser becomes more durable and more scalable.

Console is customizable to your use case

Like the Kevel Ad Server, Console is fundamentally configurable. Media owners shape Console to reflect their business model and the advertiser experience they want to deliver through their Console Business Manager.

Customization spans several dimensions:

• Branding – Tailor your Business Manager's colors, logos, URL, and login page to match your brand. Campaign type appearance and connected channel display are also configurable. See Custom branding for details.
• Channel connections – Control which channels are available to which advertisers, and which campaign types are permitted per channel.
• Campaign controls – As the media owner, you define the types of campaigns advertisers are able to create.
• Performance metrics – You choose which performance metrics advertisers see in the Dashboard and in campaign lists, ensuring they see what's relevant to their business without exposing data you'd prefer to keep internal.

Operations in Console

Console includes reporting for all self-serve campaigns created through the platform, giving advertisers full lifecycle management over their activity:

• Create – Launch new campaigns directly within Console
• Read – Monitor performance through configurable reporting views
• Update – Adjust live campaigns without ops team involvement. On a placement that needs approval, new campaigns and certain changes wait for the media owner to approve them before they take effect
• Delete – Remove a Draft or Paused campaign that has no statistics. Once a campaign has statistics, Console no longer offers Delete, so pause it instead

Media owners can also restrict specific advertiser users to read-only access, allowing those users to view campaign performance without the ability to make changes. This is useful for stakeholders who need visibility but shouldn't have edit rights.

You give each advertiser user one of three roles:

Console does not invite media owner users. Add them in the Ad Server UI. See Invite advertiser users to Console.

Reporting configuration is granular:

• Metrics are set per Business Manager
• Media owners control which performance fields are visible to advertisers

This ensures advertisers get the insights they need, while media owners retain control over measurement, data visibility, and the overall platform experience.

Find your way around Console

Console has one sidebar, on the left. Its items depend on your role, on whether you are in a Business Manager or an advertiser account, and on what the media owner has turned on.

Side navigation

• Create. The button at the top. In a Business Manager it is labeled Advertiser and adds an advertiser. Inside an advertiser account it is labeled Create and opens a menu for creating a Campaign, an Ad and the other items the media owner offers. Read-only users do not see it.
• Main items. Dashboard and Campaigns appear by default. The media owner chooses whether Ads, Banners, Campaign sets, Review manager, Wallets and other items appear. Read-only users see only Dashboard and Campaigns.
• Bottom of the sidebar. The advertiser you are working in, the Business Manager switcher, Settings, Billing and Support. If you can reach more than one advertiser, click the name at the bottom of the sidebar to open the advertiser list. Media owner users get the Business Manager switcher: see Switch between Business Managers. Admins see Settings, which opens the settings for the account you are working in. In an advertiser account, its Users tab manages the advertiser's users. Media owner users see the Users tab only if they are organization admins. Billing appears when the advertiser has a payment account.

The Campaigns list

Open Campaigns to see every Campaign in the account you are working in. Media owners in a Business Manager also see an Advertiser column.

• Search and filter. Use Search to narrow the list. The status buttons on the right of the toolbar filter by All, Draft, Active, Paused, Completed and Error. In a narrower window they become a dropdown. Filters sets conditions on most columns.
• Columns and order. Columns and Density change what the list shows, and Console saves those choices, and any sort you choose, in your browser only. By default the list opens with the newest Campaign first, 25 to a page, and you can switch to 10 or 50.
• Row actions. The More menu offers the actions that suit the Campaign's status, such as Duplicate, Campaign details, Edit and Campaign ads. Statistics has its own icon in the row. It becomes available 24 hours after the Campaign starts, and only for Active, Paused and Completed Campaigns.

To show ad health in the list, see Ad Status in Campaign List. Use a window at least 1,024 pixels wide to see the full list.

Console for managed service workflows

Self-serve is the primary model Console is designed around, but it is not the only one. Media owners whose ad ops teams manage campaigns on behalf of advertisers can use Console in a managed service capacity, with no change to the underlying platform.

Because managed service and self-serve operate through the same UI with the same tooling, Console gives media owners flexibility to support both models simultaneously, or to transition advertisers from one to the other over time. A new advertiser might start on a fully managed basis, then gradually take on more campaign ownership as they grow comfortable with the platform.

The distinction between managed service and self-serve in Console comes down to user permissions, not separate configurations or products. In a managed service workflow, the media owner's ad ops team holds full edit access and operates campaigns on the advertiser's behalf. Advertisers in this model can be given read-only access to their own reporting, which keeps visibility into performance without the ability to make changes, or can be kept off the platform entirely until a self-serve transition makes sense.

The Console entity model

A Console Business Manager is the top-level organizational unit in Console. As a media owner, you can operate one Business Manager or many, each independently configured.

Each Console Business Manager has its own:

• Branding and visual customization
• List of connected advertisers
• Connected channels, such as Meta, Google and Adform
• Configuration rules governing campaign types, available metrics, and access controls

Understanding the Business Manager as the core unit of organization in Console makes it easier to plan how you structure your advertiser programs, especially if you operate across multiple brands, geographies, or channel strategies.

Where to go next