Retail Media has seen major advancements in self-service, machine learning driven optimisation and automation in campaign management. Yet many ad operations teams still rely on data exports and manual workflows to provide deeper insights to advertisers.
Advertisers are continuously increasing their spending across on-site platforms that provide them greater control and deeper insights than the majority of larger platforms. While beneficial to their business, this comes at a high cost to the ad operations team who are tasked with accommodating increasing advertiser demands and optimizing monetization of their existing inventory.
Kevel provides the fundamentals to analyse your advertisers performance, the yield management tools to optimise your inventory and the AI tooling to accelerate deep-dives.
Kevel helps you take the step from the current of manual work, to automated guidance and reliance on AI intelligence to act on new insights and opportunities.
Reporting fundamentals; Keep your advertisers on track
Your advertisers are spread thin, with an ever increasing amount of platforms and tools to utilize, they struggle to keep on top of each channel they leverage. Your platform has their attention, but are they maximizing their opportunity?
Keeping your advertisers on-track, through visibility of untapped opportunities and tailored recommendations to optimize their advertising spend, enables your advertising program to provide a service level that sets you apart. In our experience, ad programs that provide a mix of self-serve and white glove services are the ones that have the strongest relationships with their advertisers.
Kevel provides the necessary insights, from the key performance indicators to measure your advertisers success, to the tooling that enables you to pin-point when campaigns require optimization to improve delivery and ROI, that enable your team to provide guidance to your advertisers (understanding the dynamics of campaign settings and performance).
- Scheduled reports: Provide continuous reports to your team (sales, support, ad operations) on the performance of advertisers, campaigns, and placements.
- Investigations: Create custom reports with deep-dives into specific issues found within an advertisers campaign to pin-point campaign optimization.
Your ad operations team is often engaging with a number of advertisers throughout the day, with limited time to investigate each situation that arises. And increasingly, advertisers are no longer satisfied with data readouts and static reports. Advertisers expect your team to bring answers, providing clear guidance and actionable steps for them to take to improve their outcomes.
Kevel provides automated reporting to ensure those consistent touchpoints with your advertisers are detailed, in-the-moment investigations tailored to meet established goals. Built to enable quick and clear analysis to easily surface and relay optimizations to unlock new budgets.
Yield management; Maximize your revenue per pixel
Yield management is not just about showing what value is being created (business reporting), it is also about helping your ad operations team maximize the value of each impression and action. With finite amounts of inventory and competing internal goals for each pixel, maximizing value from available inventory is becoming increasingly important.
Kevel provides “Site insights” where the common question of ‘are we on track?’, and ‘what is our revenue forecast?’ can be easily answered. This capability also enables your team to exercise yield management as an operational discipline, moving from the occasional check to the weekly monitoring meetings, category and placement reviews, and quarterly optimisations strategies. A critical tooling to enable the best practices to establish a mature yield management program.
Dashboards are fun and helpful, but the decisions are what matter:
Supply & demand
- What inventory goes unsold?
- Where is too much inventory? (advertisers not meeting goals)
- Which placements are cannibalizing each other?
Pricing
- What inventory are we selling to cheaply? (price elasticity of bids)
- Should we increase placement/category floor prices?
Advertiser performance
- Which advertisers are not meeting desired pacing?
- Which advertisers are often meeting budget caps?
Kevel provides both the yield management tools for media use cases (guaranteed delivery, maximizing sold inventory) and retail media use cases which have more complex dynamics as search queries, demand, seasonality, stock availability, all influence your ability to get the most out of your placements.
Investigations; From dashboards to dialogue
Kevel provides an MCP ad-server, which is meant to fast-track deeper investigations often performed manually by your ad operations team (e.g. analyst), a resource often already stressed for time. When complicated problems arise, resolving them often requires a great deal of time and manual effort to bring all the right information together and explore different explanations.
Today, this often includes the following steps:
- Export Data
- Load into BI tooling
- Build dissection tables
- Join data sets
- Explore dimensions
- Interpret and decide on action
Leveraging Kevel’s MCP can streamline this into:
- Pose the question
- Iterate, and refine your question
- Explanations with potential actions
Where an AI tool can easily investigate multiple dimensions simultaneously, across highly complex data sets (e.g. all opportunities for an ad to serve, auction competition, seasonal demand), each dimension for an analytical person adds additional workload.
AI is not there to be another “chat model” to engage with your reports but rather as a tool to provide value as an analytical partner.
This brings several benefits to your ad operations team:
- Democratizing advanced analytical tasks, enabling your sales, support and even advertisers to engage in complex analysis and understanding without the need of an analyst.
- You can follow the thread. An initial question can be iterated on with each follow up question getting closer to the root-causes, where complex analytical tasks often require very clear upfront requirements.
- You can surface relationships you did not think of. AI can make independent decisions to explore other relationships that may affect the root-cause, giving you new paths you may not have thought of, in an easy to understand way.
All of this enables you to provide a higher level of service to your advertisers with stronger insights and, above all, helps you shift from simply describing what's happening, to shaping and relaying the guidance your teams can provide to ensure your advertisers succeed.
Kevel provides up to 107 different end-points that your agents can talk to that perform both basic tasks and analytical tasks. We expect this to drive change across the analytical function, where teams are often bogged down with too many operational demands to support sales and customer service functions. With Kevel’s MCP, teams will have the bandwidth to focus on the deep-dives that truly require their skills and expertise.
Existing Kevel customers are already using the Kevel MCP to migrate campaigns from legacy systems, audit running campaigns, bulk update ads and troubleshoot issues (e.g. a misconfigured A/B test).
Kevel provides three different pathways for your team to get engaged with conversational analytics depending on available resources and needs:
Unlike Display, that often has straight forward directions, Retail Media brings many more dimensions into consideration (search demand, seasonal demand, stock availability). Where previous targets such as high fill rate, high CTR, don’t equate anymore to direct revenue gains.
We expect as the agentic domain develops, questions currently requiring highly specialised knowledge and intense investigation will be easier and more accessible to address by a larger part of your team.
