Ad Shuffle

Review of ad serving solution Ad Shuffle in both agency and publisher environments when compared to Google/Doubleclick’s Dart and Microsoft’s Atlas. 

Ad Shuffle

Every now and then over the years I would pick up a small client who could not afford a full fledge agency but in need of someone who could deliver an end to end digital solution from website development to deploying search and display media campaigns.  Clients of this nature are rarely financially worthwhile to engage with but they often provide the opportunity to test new ideas, low cost technologies and strategies in a more controlled environment. 

Since I could not readily afford to utilize an industry standard platform like Google’s DFA (Doubleclick) or Atlas I need to find an ad serving solution with a low entry cost.  At the time Open X did not offer spotlight tags to track conversions and many of the other low cost serving solutions I had already utilized over the years with often less than stellar results. 

Then I stumbled upon a new ad server called Ad Shuffle, which offered competitive pay as you go packages.  All of these years later I feel somewhat proud that I was their second client and have referred them numerous times to other agencies which now utilize their technology. 

Having worked with Atlas, Double Click DFA and DFP, Google Ad Manager, 24/7 and about a dozen other ad servers I had a pretty good working base prior to Ad Shuffle.  But unlike most large-scale ad servers I was utterly surprised at the low learning curve in mastering this server.  I managed to figure the basics out with about 2 hours and felt confident enough to deploy my first campaign within about 6 hours of use.  For the less experienced I would probably say the learning curve might take a week or two to master. 

By comparison most other ad servers have learning curves, which range from several weeks to months before one starts to really feel comfortable.  I often say that truly master Double Clicks Dart you need to utilize consistently over 6 months and after a year you can typically troubleshoot any issues like a pro – but that is still a large time investments and one of the reasons traffic managers are so valuable to agencies. 

In terms of functionality Ad Shuffle offers pretty much all of the same functions and features you would expect in ad servers costing significantly more including incredible customer support.  Features such as ad libraries, spotlight tags, client and account separation, billing/invoicing features plus the ability to integrate third party data sources for advanced targeting are all there. 

But there are some other unique features such as the ability to have multiple landing pages, which can be auto-optimized, based on how the various landing pages perform vs. just optimizing against the creative or publisher site.  This is actually one feature lacking in many other ad servers. 

In addition Ad Shuffle is both a single platform, which can be utilized as both a publisher ad server and an agency ad server with separate interfaces from within the same login.  Yet tags between the publisher side and agency side can be shared making it easy to traffic ad tags between the two sides a simple and effortless process. 

For online media publishers looking to expand their service offerings into traditional digital agency services this offering means that media company can focus on selling inventory on their site will at the same serving as a client (agency?) buying and planning media across other sites and while offering the deeper reporting to the media company that publisher ad servers often lack. 

In short Ad Shuffle is probably one of the most interesting tools for online publishers in building new revenue streams beyond just selling space on their own site. 

Ad Shuffle by comparison also has a seamless workflow solution, which is incredibly intuitive and logical.  The process of setting up campaigns is so straightforward I think I searched the Help documents once.   I can not stress how easy this ad server is to use compared to Dart or Atlas but the engineers of Ad Shuffle out designed the UX engineers at Google and Microsoft to level that is quite frankly bordering on embarrassing. 

This ease of use is extended to building reports, which I would say take about half the time compared to the big guys while easily allowing for manual optimization of campaigns on the fly.  Ad Shuffle is also incredibly fast both in serving and in interface response time. 

When deploying campaigns especially in an agency environment time is money and the speed of which I could build out campaigns, monitor, optimize and build reports greatly reduced the time I had to spend in managing a campaign.  I also like the (almost) real time updating of delivery stats compared to the 24-hour delay seen with other servers. 

Ad Shuffle has also recently created their own ad exchange creating new opportunities for managing media buys in the open marketplace another nice feature of Ad Shuffle. 

So is Ad Shuffle the right ad server for you?  If you are a small agency managing anywhere from about $100k to $3 million in online media Ad Shuffle should probably be high on your list.  If you are pushing more than $3 million then you will probably want to look at Dart or Atlas since at that point this will become a critical selling point during pitches for large clients and your billables will support a full time traffic manager with expertise in Dart or Atlas.  Plus the integration of Google’s Media Visor, Google Analytics and MOTIF rich media services become a must when deploying large million dollar campaigns. 

As a small media publisher with a site driving less than a million visitors Open X or Dart for Small Business is probably a better solution since they are free.  Note Open X is only free up to a certain impression delivery and then you have to upgrade to their paid service or install and manage their application on your own servers while Dart for small business is designed to only effectively handle a certain number of advertisers.  But as impression delivery needs increase so will the need to actually pay for ad serving and the zero cost of Open X and Dart for Small Business become a moot point. 

At that point as a publisher selling media space Ad Shuffle becomes a serious consideration since it can serve to help you build to business models and support a more diverse revenue stream. 

Personally my agency background will always drive a need for using best in breed technology and industry accepted standard technology.  But Ad Shuffle is still my top choice when the situation is not optimal for deployment of Dart or Atlas.