Edmunds monetizes with user-friendly sponsored car listings

What Edmunds Wanted

Edmunds is an American online resource for researching new and used cars, with over 16 million page views a month.

As they grew, Edmunds realized they had an untapped revenue opportunity: sponsored car listings — whereby dealerships and manufacturers could pay to promote their cars on their site. Unfortunately, trying to build it on Google Ad Manager didn't work, and they didn't have the time or resources to build the ad platform entirely from scratch.

So Edmunds turned to Kevel's ad serving APIs. They outsourced the complicated, commoditized parts of ad serving to Kevel — like reporting, targeting, and decisioning — and instead focused their efforts on ad strategy, user feedback, and front-end work.

Within a few weeks, Edmunds had launched a high-revenue sponsored car listings platform that also increased stickiness with their dealers and vendors.

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Edmunds easily adds sponsored car listings to search results

These sponsored listings blend in, providing great user experiences, while also employing pricing optimizations to maximize the ad revenue Edmunds earns.

Meanwhile, Edmunds's manufacturers and dealers love the opportunity to pay for increased visibilty.

Outcome:

• 30% growth in revenue
• Increased vendor and dealer stickiness
• Contextual and search targeting ensures relevance

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"With Kevel we built an innovative sponsored listings ad platform that put us ahead of our competitors."

– Director of Ad Engineering, Edmunds

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Server-side integration means these native ads blend in

All of the Kevel-powered sponsored listings are white-labeled and the decisions are requested server-side — giving Edmunds total control over how the promotions are displayed.

Outcome:

• Kevel-powered listings look just like standard listings
• Edmunds built this bespoke platform in just weeks
• API response times as low as 35ms, even at scale

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"If you're fine with standard programmatic ads, use Google. For everything else, use Kevel."

– Director of Ad Engineering, Edmunds

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Automation makes managing these promoted listings easy

Edmunds uses Kevel's UI and Management APIs to automate the appending of tracking pixels to each Kevel ad. This saves countless hours compared to doing it manually

Outcome:

90% automation of ad creation

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"Kevel's APIs helped us build the fastest, most innovative ad product in our industry."

– Director of Ad Engineering, Edmunds