## 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:_](https://dev.kevel.co/v1.0/docs/promoted-posts)

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:](https://dev.kevel.co/v1.0/docs/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

> 📘
> 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](https://dev.kevel.co/reference#campaign-api-overview)** - Connect to your front-end to let users create, start, stop, and edit their campaigns

**[Inventory Management API](https://dev.kevel.co/reference#inventory-api-overview)** - Use this API to automatically build new ad units, placements, and optimization rules

**[Reporting API](https://dev.kevel.co/reference#reporting-api-overview)** - 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](https://dev.kevel.co/v1.0/docs/direct-sold) 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 just 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.

> 📘
> Interested in learning more about how to build a self-serve native ad server? You can contact us [here](/content/contact/index.html).

Updated 24 days ago