Self-Serve

Overview

What: A portal for advertisers to create, manage, and pay for ad campaigns
Used by: There are two main use cases:

High-Traffic Social Platforms/Communities:

Rather than going after direct-sold large advertisers, many brands target the long-tail: advertisers with low budgets, but in aggregate drive revenue.

For instance, rather than a single $10K deal with P&G, they go after small businesses who spend $100/month. To make this successful, these brands need to offer scale and hyper-relevant targeting, such as interest/category, search keyword, and demographic.

Examples include reddit, Facebook, Adwords (Google), Pinterest, LinkedIn

Marketplaces/Sponsored Listings:

Many sites with sponsored listings - like Hotels.com, Yelp, Chairish - already have platforms for their listers/sellers/etc to manage their organic inventory. When designing their sponsored listings program, they usually build the functionality directly into this portal versus requiring their users to talk to a salesperson and sign directly.

Pros

• Scalable Revenue - The more you can automate the buying/selling process, the fewer internal resources you'll need for campaign creation, account management, accounting, and so on
• Quick Access - Rather than the more manual process of creating Insertion Orders and deciding on campaign details, anyone could get a campaign going in hours

Cons

• Branding Compliance - If advertisers are signing up on their own, you need a way to approve ads to ensure they aren't illegal/off-brand/etc. Usually this entails hiring an approval team for reviewing each ad before it's set live
• Not a 'Build It And They Will Come' Product - While some small businesses and the "long-tail" will jump on self-serve, many won't. For this reason, many companies offer a self-serve portal for long-tail, but still have a direct Sales team for the large deals

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These cons refer to self-serve for community-based apps/sites. For sponsored listings, since the ads will consist of organic listings, one can assume they are already brand compliant.

Execution - Kevel as Backend Infrastructure

Kevel's APIs provide the tools to build your native ad platform's backend infrastructure. To that end, we offer:

Campaign Management API - Connect to your front-end to let users create, start, stop, and edit their campaigns
Inventory Management API - Use this API to automatically build new ad units, placements, and optimization rules
Reporting API - Pull all advertising data directly into your front-end for your advertisers to pull reports

Payment - Credit Card

Most self-serve platforms employ credit card processing for payments. Additionally, many still offer Insertion Orders for larger deals (see here for more info on IOs).

Payment - Debited From Account

For sponsored listings companies, it's possible you already have a payment relationship with your advertiser.

For instance, you could be an eCommerce marketplace and already have a system in place for paying out sales to your sellers. If you let users opt-into a sponsored listings program, then you could jut remove any ad spend from the revenue you'd normally pay out.

For instance, if you owe a seller $1,000 over a given month, but they chose to spend $200 in paid spend credits, you'd pay them $800 instead.

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Interested in learning more about how to build a self-serve native ad server? You can contact us here.