Kevel

Perfect for a marketplace looking to add an internal promotions feature

Kommentare: Adzerk provides an ad-engine-as-a-service, along with budget tracking and analytics and all the rest. It plugs in perfectly to permit marketplaces to create their own promotion and boost features without needing to build their own ad server. And you can track impressions and clicks and then generate reports for your own users through Adzerk as well. Since everything is accessible via the API, even the creation of new advertisers and ad programs, we were able to build our feature to be completely self-service for our users. Adzerk allowed us to quickly create a new revenue stream and immediately paid for itself.

Vorteile:

Most ad engines are built to place blobs of HTML in iframes or similar constructs. They're fine for display ads around the internet, but useless if you're trying to create your own internal advertising and promotion system. Adzerk provides a well-documented, unopinionated API that is happy to return JSON objects instead of HTML, permitting you to easily make use of it internally to create your own white label feature. It fill exactly the gap that we needed and has plenty of additional functionality (more complex decision making rules, bidding models, etc.) for potential expansion and refinement down the road.

Nachteile:

The object hierarchy and terminology can be complex and confusing. Figuring out how to map your own data model and use case to Adzerk's can take a little while and a bit of experimentation. They were quite responsive to our requests and questions during the setup and integration period, which helped us overcome this issue.

Easy API-based integration, well built platform, great engineering support!

Kommentare: At TouchTunes, we run music promotions and ads on a network of over 65,000 digital jukeboxes in bars, restaurants and other social venues across North America and Europe. Patrons can also be the DJ and control these jukeboxes by installing the TouchTunes mobile app on their iOS and Android phones. Downloaded over 8 Million times to date, patrons can receive free credits to play the jukebox, notably from promotional music campaigns. We needed an ad platform that would allow us to integrate quickly and seamlessly with these various devices, at the API level, and that would scale to handle the typical peak traffic on busy Friday nights. The Adzerk team has been a great partner during integration, understanding our special use cases, recommending various implementation options, and always just a Slack message away answering engineering questions in real time!

Vorteile:

Adzerk's APIs allowed us to do almost everything we needed. This made the migration from our previous ad platform super easy. The APIs are well documented, unlike any other competitors evaluated. The web Management UI is simple, responsive and gets the job done. Changes are reflected in near real time in ad serving. Same for reporting. From discussions with their engineers, their backend is built to scale and it shows, their ad serving APIs are incredibly fast.

Nachteile:

It would be nice to have permission levels on the web Management UI. The Management UI has a Creative Template feature allowing you to create addition input fields for a creative. This is great, I wish they had more options to validate user input (dropdowns, min/max, regex matching perhaps, etc).

Intriguing idea for a software platform but doesn't deliver performance

Kommentare: Unfortunately we received minimum benefits although it was a great concept.

Vorteile:

I like the technical approach to being able to place your own ads and manage them on your website. The interfaces set their business model apart in terms of independent setups and administration of ads.

Nachteile:

Unfortunately it just doesn't deliver in terms of performance and uptime. We can't afford for it to not do this consistently.

Adzerk Review

Kommentare: We've worked with the Adzerk team from the beginning - I cannot believe it's been 10 years! I've known the reps from as far back as his days with The Lounge network. He leads a team of true professionals that are knowledgeable, attentive and puts out a great product that's always growing and adapting to the market.

Vorteile:

Ease of use and unmatched customers service. The team is very responsive to any questions or concerns that we've had over the years. The product is solid.

Nachteile:

I really don't have too much from a negative standpoint that I can think of. A limited client side UI would be helpful for some of our clients though.

Great API and reporting tools, great for custom-built solutions/marketplaces, but slightly buggy UI

Kommentare: Pleasure to work with. When issues arise they're resolved quickly. They're constantly improving their product.

Vorteile:

- Great API that has become much more reliable since we started using it years ago - Very reliable delivery, even when the management console is down, the ads continue delivery - Amazing reporting tools, including realtime stats - Easy-to-use and extend JS library - Responsive and thorough support team

Nachteile:

Discrepancies between UI 1.0 and 2.0 sometimes make work difficult. Various errors without explanations are difficult to understand and work around.

GREAT TEAM!

Kommentare: Super positive experience with Adzerk. The platform is MUCH easier to use / navigate than the behemoth enterprise platform we used previously. And the Adzerk team is AMAZING!

Vorteile:

What I like most about Adzerk is the employees. Everyone I have worked with on the support team has been incredibly helpful, patient, and attentive.

Nachteile:

Not a perfect fit for our eeds but they seem to be adding feature enhancements frequently.

Adzerk - a great ad server partner

Kommentare: Adzerk has allowed us to focus our time on building the business side of our company. We have plugged in their ad server with a unique configuration and saved a lot of time and effort doing so, confident that portion of our tech stack is in good hands.

Vorteile:

Adzerk's stack is easily customizable, allowing you to set up your configuration to fit specific business needs. Overall, a very reliable product led by a great team.

Nachteile:

Some reporting features that include looking at segments of a campaign are currently unavailable for reporting. Other than that, Adzerk has it covered.

Simple to set up campaigns and great customer support, but prefer the old UI

Kommentare: I have had a good experience with AdZerk thus far as they have met most of our needs.

Vorteile:

Setting up campaigns is pretty simple once you get used to using it. I preferred the old UI, so I still use it most of the time. The look and feel was much more aesthetically pleasing and easier on the eye. I also like the dashboard and the hierarchy makes it easy to drill into flights and creatives within campaigns. The support team is excellent in that they are very responsive, clear and helpful.

Nachteile:

They do not have an easy way of hooking up programmatic solutions to their platform. The minimum number of impressions needed to do so is astronomical.

Excellent & Reliable Tool for Custom Solutions

Kommentare: Adzerk has exceeded expectations in meeting all of our needs so far, no real complaints. Give it a try!

Vorteile:

This console delivers rock-solid reliability in ad delivery, never had an issue with ads not being delivered once. It suits our purpose well and is headache-free, which is what I look for in any software products that we use. Oh yeah, it's also EASY to use. That's the best part, it just works, and it works well. They are available for Slack support chat which is a great thing in this day and age.

Nachteile:

UI has a few bugs, some have been worked out, some have not. They aren't really that debilitating at all, but they are there and I have to list something here :)

Adzerk is exactly what my client needed: API-first ad serving.

Vorteile:

When we found Adzerk, it was the perfect fit for what my client needed. The team at Adzerk worked with us to answer all our questions and helped us get going-- thanks Dylan! My client is delighted and impressed with their new advertising capabilities.

Nachteile:

The old UI was difficult to get to what you needed. The new UI was recently released, but this is still the area that could use most improvement.

Flexible solution but needs to be more future thinking

Kommentare: Overall we have had solid customer service from the Kevel team and maintain a strong relationship. I do wish that the team has been faster with product improvements though, there have been features that we have been requesting for years that are table stakes with other platforms (eg. avails ) so I would love to see the team move faster in the future

Vorteile:

I think Kevel is great at providing tools to help build custom ads and custom ad experiences. This versatility is key in helping publishers create very unique ads that can help protect a user experience or provide a very high quality ad experience on publisher properties. From an API perspective there are many powerful tools available for engineering teams to access again providing great flexibility in what a team is able to create

Nachteile:

While the platform is very powerful it is lacking in usability non engineering users (such as trafficking teams). Many features such as advanced reporting and creative template creation are not available in the UI and require additional work to access through accessing APIs and log level reporting. Supporting the software requires continuous engineering support so its important for teams to plan accordinly.

Adzerk is a pretty solid digital ad serving platform overall

Kommentare: I use Adzerk every day, and my overall experience with Adzerk is good. Adzerk has helped us accomplish our advertising goals, and I look forward to continuing to use Adzerk. As we continue to grow as a company and expand our digital advertising offerings, Adzerk has continued to meet our needs.

Vorteile:

The product is easy to use and setup. Implementing different ad types and sizes was easy on our four company websites and in our email newsletters. Creating and managing campaigns, flights, and creatives is easy once you figure out where things are located in the system. There are plenty of options that can be configured on campaigns. The different APIs could be very useful in custom applications. We haven't used the APIs yet, but I foresee us using them in the future for custom applications.

Nachteile:

Inviting users to view their ads in the system needs a little more work in my opinion. I have had multiple users complain about the reporting part they have access to not working very well or lacking features for reporting. I know a nice feature would be a metric for the viewability (did someone see it on the screen) of an ad in an application. I know some of clients ask for this metric, but we don't have it to give to them.

User friendly with exceptional client service

Kommentare: I have loved Adzerk since the day we implemented their system. It was miles beyond the original technology our business had been using prior and the customer service is absolutely outstanding. Patient, Kind (regardless of the complexity of your question), Knowledgeable and most importantly VERY quick to reply to support inquiries. We are big fans.

Vorteile:

We mostly utilize Adzerk for our standard display advertising campaigns. What I love is how easy it is to upload and duplicate assets as well as how clean the interface is aesthetically. The conversion tracking feature has been very helpful in client win-back and renewal meetings. We appreciate how simple of a setup a campaign/flight can be as well as some of the more intricate options that are available for those more difficult, heavily targeted campaigns. The UI is easy enough to accommodate a newer Ops hire and offers more in-depth optimization tools for the experts. The extensive knowledge base has also been an extremely useful resource for everyone in between in an ever evolving space.

Nachteile:

For the sake of mentioning a Con for validity, there a few small glitches that I know are being worked on as we speak. One example in particular is having to pad each individual flight by a certain impression percentage each month to be certain they fully deliver via the reporting tool, even though at the campaign level the status bar indicates we are pacing correctly. Again a very minor issue with a manageable work around in place.

AdZerk For Your Business!

Kommentare: The customer service team really goes above and beyond to ensure that your issues are resolved quickly and effectively. This has been extremely important to us as we are a small team and having additional resources available to troubleshoot and resolve matters has proved invaluable.

Vorteile:

I like the many options for how to manage your inventory. Daisy chain ordered, header bidding, optimized - there are different selections that help monetize best for your business needs. Also, there are a lot of customizations you can make within the campaign setup and header code that provide unique solutions.

Nachteile:

I find it a challenge to run responsive tags such as Adsense or others within AdZerk. There isn't an ideal way to do this which is less than ideal as the alternative is to run these tags hardcoded which limits your ability to manage inventory within your ad stack and overall sales forecast.

Kevel has been great to work with! Customer Support team is phenonmenal

Vorteile:

It had all the features we required for our business and met the goals for implementation w/ a 3rd party ad server. It was very hard to find something that aligned with what we needed. The API docs were well written which helped speed the integration.

Nachteile:

There are missing features like the ability to count unique users in the analytics. We also had to write our own metric tracking. There was no out of the box library for capturing impressions on an ad, so we had to write our own scripts to track ad impressions (still used their API to capture the data point)

Full featured product with great customer support

Kommentare: My experience to date has been pleasurable. I know if there is anything that doesn't line up with my expectations, there is a great support team to help work through it. Response times via email were never more than a day, and if further discussion was necessary, it was easy to schedule a phone call (often including time to speak with lead engineers). At times there was a little extra heavy lifting. Whereas a feature may already exist with another platform, we had to define requirements and hope it can be completed. In most cases I would say this process was a mere speed bump in development. The time implications were offset by the ability to have a say in the resulting product, and potentially customize to our specific needs.

Vorteile:

I liked most that the support was very personable and timely. Additionally, Adzerk were very open to new feature requests when certain functionality that we needed did not exist.

Nachteile:

The product seemed to often live in the shadow of larger products (/product i.e. dfp/gam). Documentation and features may have lagged a bit behind ad servers with a larger user base, or engineering resources.

Great Product

Kommentare: Great people who have worked with us over the years answering questions on how we can improve our ad serving using their products.

Vorteile:

It's one of the best products for non programmatic ad serving. You have the ability to fully customize your ad response to complete your user experience which allows for you to have completely native ads. If you know what you're doing in the ad space it gives you something you won't be able to do with DFP/GAM. The more creative you are, the better this product will be for you. I highly recommend it for any team that does a direct sales or performance based advertising.

Nachteile:

There are two cons and one is easily something you can overcome. The first is if you strictly use their UI, it can be a challenge, but you have the ability to do everything via API if you prefer. The second is if you strictly intend to use this product programmatically you won't be experiences the real benefits but in no means will you be going wrong.

Easiest and Fastest way to Implement your own Native Ad Server

Vorteile:

When starting Spoutable we looked at many different Native Ad Servers as a Service companies. We are still very happy with our choice years later. It was very fast to get up and running. We have since integrated with other platforms and Adzerk is still the easiest to integrate with. The support has been great. They continue to update their platform with new features. It just works.

Nachteile:

It doesn't do 'everything' in the ad world. Its focused on native and it does that really well. Its not a video player or video ad server or meant for traditional display advertising. If you are looking to build a full stack its a very strong piece of the puzzle but its a piece and not the whole puzzle.

Great ad serving capabilities and fantastic customer support

Kommentare: Overall, Kevel has helped us build out our advertising capabilities, and the customer service team has helped us learn and improve on how we serve our ads.

Vorteile:

We use Kevel to serve ads on on multiple sites. Having one platform for all of our advertisers, campaigns and reporting is a huge benefit. The user interface has a small learning curve, but once you understand how to use it, it's very easy to navigate. This is the first time we've used an ad server, and the team was friendly and helpful as we got it set up. The ongoing support is also great, and the team helps us solve problems quickly.

Nachteile:

There's more to be desired with Kevel's reporting capabilities. Reports don't allow for much customization, and scheduling reports can be tricky. There are also some more basic metrics we track that are not accessible through the platform - we typically have to download reports and perform calculations on our side.

Easy to use with great customer service

Kommentare: Adzerk allows us to serve customer digital ads on our website and make money from them. It has allowed us to move previous print customers to an online platform.

Vorteile:

Adzerk is easy to use. I am able to teach non tech minded staff how to create digital ads in Adzerk quite easily. I find the customer service is great, I get a reply to my question usually within the day. Our developers are often impressed how easy it is to ad serve from Adzerk onto our site.

Nachteile:

I find the help document a bit hard to follow at times, it could maybe be written a bit simpler for people like me who aren't very tech minded.

Kevel Review

Vorteile:

- Easy to use, fully customisable ad server that can be modified to fit business needs - Simple to set up flights/campaigns that can run for long periods of time. It's also really easy to duplicate and amend campaigns - Online guides are full of information to support day-today queries - Any campaign changes are viewable in real-time on our app - Support staff are always extremely helpful and quick to respond to any queries - Great for conversion tracking. Results are regularly used with clients to demonstrate strong ROI

Nachteile:

- We had a few issues with impression and click tracking, however the team worked efficiently to resolve

Quick set up and excellent engineering support

Kommentare: We onboarded Kevel to provide an ad serving platform for our team. From the start of scoping out the possibilities of the tool, Kevel provided sufficient support, demos and follow-up material to make our decision easy. Support didn't stop after we signed the dotted line, we have ongoing catchups with the Kevel team and are very happy with the service provided.

Vorteile:

From the point of running a proof of concept test, it was easy to integrate with our existing systems and moving over to Kevel's fully supported product was minimal effort on our side, which made for a smooth, effective rollout.

Nachteile:

There were some minimal bugs with custom products we set up in the tool, however these were not crucial to our daily productivity, such as previewing an ad banner when clicking on a campaign flight level. This was available on the creative level anyway so didn't hinder performance and was fixed swiftly from the Kevel team.

Easy to use when dealing with multiple ads or campaigns

Vorteile:

Ease of use when juggling multiple campaigns, creatives, times, etc. Setting up a basic campaign, flight, or multiple creatives in one zone was very easy once everything on the backend was implemented properly.

Nachteile:

The software itself is more complicated when wanting to implement more targeted features. Granted, this would also have to do with how your own data was implemented with the software.

Fantastic platform, reliable and easy to implement.

Kommentare: Overall we love this platform and use it daily. Our main reason for using Adzerk is the ability to serve ads in emails which is not doable with most other ad-servers. This ability has greatly improved our email marketing approach and has made a major impact on our ability to dynamically drive sales with shorter lead times.

Vorteile:

The platform UI is intuitive, the performance is reliable and the implementation is very straightforward. The account team and technical support group are very responsive and readily available. We serve over 250,000,000 impressions per month without any issues.

Nachteile:

The reporting capabilities are workable but could use additional features.

Kevel has made a world of difference for us

Kommentare: Kevel has helped us solve one of our greatest business challenges, we're very grateful for the tool and excited to continue to build on it.

Vorteile:

The Kevel support team has been extremely helpful as we integrated with our system, and the ability to serve digital ads across our network of publishers has been incredible. The insights we receive and our ability to customize ad campaigns are great.

Nachteile:

There is some basic information that isn't accessible without parsing the log data which is inconvenient but not the end of the world.