AppLovin Exchange (ALX) vs. Kevel

AppLovin is a great app if you are trying to grow your business and want to expand into mobile gaming or the mobile industry in general. It is less appropriate for a business that wants to set up a traditional store and not grow into the mobile gaming industry. This app is very popular in the gaming industry as it boasts over 300 million users as of June 2022.

Incentivized

For ad serving, implementing client-side header bidding with prebid was actually easier with Kevel than it is with Google Ad Manager in most cases, particularly for display advertising. I found though that with more complex integrations (like video), there were more solutions and code snippets available with other larger ad servers (Google).

Incentivized

• Very good quality. Their CTRs are above average.
• Great support team, very personable and helpful
• Exclusive publishers, mostly on the gaming category

Incentivized

• More personable team that can address customizations needed to the product.
• Easy to use interface.
• Frequent product updates with notifications via email.
• Well documented API.

Incentivized

• Support team takes a lot of time to answer
• Not a lot banner inventory
• Really high CPM prices on the platform

Incentivized

• User interface could be faster to load.

Incentivized

AppLovin has been a great partner for us. We have used them through our DSP and gotten great results with them. Their focus is on monetizing publishers' inventory and they could put more resources into their standalone service as an SSP to make sure DSPs can consider them strategic partners for the long term.

Incentivized

AppLovin's support team is their weakest point. They are not very responsive and they tend to provide solutions that do not fix the problem. It seems like they will only be proactive if you are a very big client and by doing that they are preventing the rest of the client base from increasing spend on their platform and growing their accounts

Incentivized

Of all of the competitors above, AppLovin is the one that is more focused on gaming and that has a better pool of users in terms of conversion rate. While PubMatic and Magnate offer better solutions for CTV, AppLovin is better than InMobi and MoPub regarding in-app formats and inventory.

Incentivized

Kevel was an easier initial implementation for header bidding with prebid. The team worked alongside us to make sure everything was operating as intended. We ultimately switched to Ads Manager to access AdX demand and other features that were not possible with Kevel (for instance, EBDA). There are benefits to both but I appreciated the attention we got from Kevel support when we were first working through the implementation. We are still using Kevel for many things, just not as our primary display advertising ad server.

Incentivized

• We have seen good CPAs, increasing budgets and improving ROI.
• We have bid aggressively in most cases reducing our margin.
• Overall positive impact by allowing us to reach more users.

Incentivized

• Kevel enabled us to get up and running with client side header bidding when our team was still small and the technology was still new. This improved our ability to monetize our inventory.

Incentivized