Kevel

Kevel is an API-first ad server and retail media platform for companies that run ads on their own inventory, sold as SaaS priced by ad request volume.

Kevel lets a retailer, marketplace or app sell advertising on its own pages, apps and stores while keeping its customer data and ad revenue in house. Adzerk, Inc. builds it, starting in 2010 as Adzerk and trading as Kevel since December 2020. The approach is control: no proprietary lock-in, a modular setup that starts simple and grows with the business, and retail media advisers working beside the customer's own team. Kevel Ad Server is a suite of APIs for ad decisioning, campaign management, reporting and catalog ingestion across on-site, in-app and in-store inventory. Kevel Audience gathers first-party data into a single customer view and builds segments to target on site or off site. Kevel Console is a white-label interface where advertisers create and manage their own campaigns. KRX, the Retail Media Exchange, brings in outside demand through a mediation layer the retailer controls. Kevel AI spans the set with AI Yield Forecast, AI Custom Relevancy for bringing your own model, AI Segment Builder and AI Campaign Management. Kevel is built for retailers launching a retail media network and for marketplaces whose merchants want to promote their own products. Fintech apps turning transaction data into an ad business, and delivery and travel apps with audiences of their own, use it the same way. It fits companies with engineers comfortable building on APIs and with advertisers of their own, since Kevel supplies the technology while the customer keeps the demand. Dollar General's media network and the ad engineering team at Edmunds build their ad products on it. It is sold by quote after a call with Kevel's team, as SaaS priced on the number of ad requests rather than a percentage of media spend. A retail media team sizes its inventory and likely fill rates with Kevel Forecast before selling, then books flights with dates, goals, targeting and frequency caps. The Decision API returns each chosen ad as JSON, so sponsored listings and native units render in the customer's own design. Email ad tags carry the same campaigns into newsletters, and programmatic fill takes the placements left unsold. Data Shipping then sends impression, click and conversion logs to Amazon S3, Snowflake, Google Cloud Storage or Databricks for the retailer's own analysis.