Self-serve advertising for digital assets broadly refers to any channel or medium that allows the asset owner or publisher to sell their ad space inventory without human intervention. Further, a self-serve advertising platform is what enables publishers to automate the ad sales and placement processes, which helps save considerable time and money. Direct sales that rely on sales personnel pursuing advertising partners can be rather arduous and expensive, automated processes involve zero negotiations, which may result in major revenue losses for publishers. Self-serve advertising ensures a perfect balance between manual, which brings more control over campaigns and prices to the publisher, and automated, which takes care of repetitive processes and optimizes ad inventory sales.

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What Is Self-Serve Advertising?

Self-serve advertising is a way of selling advertising space. It involves no sales representatives, no discussions, and no negotiations, and it allows publishers to optimize their entire sales process using smart automation and workflows. Whether it is regarding advertising on digital assets on the web or mobile, self-serve advertising platforms also allow for external integrations to systems like ad exchanges, SSPs, etc. They also streamline publisher-advertiser communication and offer advertisers all the tools and capabilities they need to create and manage their own media campaigns, complete with ad builders - basic and advanced, robust workflows, automated processes, etc. Self-serve advertising platforms are among the many tools that help advertisers reach their target audience whenever and wherever they need, while for publishers, they remove the need of having to hire an entire sales team for selling ad spaces, and as the need for human interactions is limited, self-serve advertising also helps open up new opportunities to reach brands and advertisers that sales representatives cannot.

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What Benefits Do Self-Serve Advertising Platforms Have to Offer?

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They Help Save Time and Overhead Costs

The interactions and approach of manual sales need to compensate for the availability of the publisher’s as well as the advertiser’s representatives and can end up being very time-consuming, regardless of whether it is for web or mobile advertising. A Self-serve platform removes the requirement of having a team dedicate a majority of their time to direct sales of ad inventory. It minimizes the time spent on these client interactions, without compromising on service quality, and also allows advertisers to build their ads and manage campaigns, helping improve the ROI.

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Streamlined Operations

Self-serve advertising can help enhance the efficiency of advertising processes by making them more streamlined through automated technologies. For instance:

• Self-serve advertising allows easy integration with a publisher’s existing ad servers to enable a seamless journey, from booking ad spaces to distribution, without human intervention.
• With self-serve advertising and a digital prepayment model, publishers can simplify their billing processes and invoice issuance.
• Get any-time-access to detailed metrics and analytics through any internet-enabled device, including web, mobile, etc. Self-serve advertising offers real-time reporting tools and customized dashboards to offer users comprehensive overviews of campaign performance.
• It also ensures that publishers have complete control over the ad inventory they open up and over the ads that are approved to be displayed.

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Improved Control Over Pricing

More than transparency regarding pricing models for advertisers, what a self-serve advertising platform offers is control over the rates of available ad spaces. Publishers can utilize predictive inventory management systems, organize ad sizes and types, etc., and allows them to set up the rate card for ad spaces from multiple options like fixed pricing, auction model, CPM, CPC, etc.

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Customized Reporting

A self-serve advertising platform provides real-time access to metrics and analytics for campaign performance, which can be used to custom-build reports and generate insights, which can help optimize future ad campaigns as well.

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Reach a Wider Customer Base

Manual sales limit your base of customers to the bigger brands, which are given higher priority. Small- or mid-sized businesses, on the other hand, are treated as a last resort in order to optimize revenue generation. What self-serve advertising does is that it opens up the publisher’s direct sales inventory to advertisers of all sizes, so it can be accessed and purchased by anyone. Though the final approval of ad campaigns still lies in the publisher’s hands, the easy access offered by self-serve platforms helps attract new customers as well.

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Self-service advertising is here to stay and the technologies that power such platforms are evolving by the day, bringing in many new capabilities and advantages for publishers as well as advertisers. Offering more room and scope for testing and optimizing digital campaign strategies on the go, along with easy access for ad placements on publisher websites for advertisers and brands of all sizes, and the cost-effective automation of advertising workflows, self-serve platforms have grown exponentially in popularity in recent times.

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