SaaS Ad Server: Less Tech Burden, More Revenue Power

Digital advertising can be confusing, especially if you don’t have an infrastructure and a team with technical expertise. However, it shouldn’t stop you from making money on advertising, whether you’re a publisher, an advertiser, or an ad network. The answer can be a SaaS ad server — a cloud-based software solution that doesn’t require time-consuming setup or big budgets.

SaaS ad platform represents the best of two worlds and embodies two significant trends. First, the size of the global software as a service (SaaS) industry is growing astonishingly. Its value is $408.21 billion in 2025 and is estimated to reach 01,251.35 billion by 2034. For the most successful SaaS companies, it means an impressive compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 13.32%!

Second, the global ad server market is projected to grow from 036.34 billion in 2025 to 077.32 billion by 2034, with a CAGR of 8.75%. As you can see, there’s enormous potential in SaaS ad servers, and you can be a part of this trend!

In this article, we’ll equip you with the knowledge to choose the best SaaS ad server to simplify ad delivery and create an effective SaaS marketing strategy for scaling your operations.

What is a SaaS Ad Server

An ad server is a crucial element of the digital advertising ecosystem. It’s a platform that manages and delivers ads to the right target audience at the right time. Also, it tracks campaign performance and helps optimize ad campaigns. Such a vast functionality makes ad servers essential for publishers, advertisers, saas companies, and ad networks.

Ad servers play a key role in reaching potential customers by delivering targeted ads and optimizing campaigns for better engagement and conversions. However, even though all ad servers serve the same core purpose and rely on the same technology, not all are the same.

Here are the main options you may find in the market:

A SaaS Ad Server

Like many other SaaS tech solutions, a SaaS ad server is cloud-based and doesn’t require setting up. A customer doesn’t need infrastructure or expertise in maintaining ad servers. An external vendor provides all services for a fee.

A Self-Hosted Ad Server

This type of platform requires installation and maintenance on a customer’s infrastructure. Hence, the publisher or advertiser must have tech expertise and be ready for additional expenses that often come with maintaining software. In return, they get almost complete control and more customization options.

An Open-Source Ad Server

You can download this system for free and customize it according to your needs. That sounds good, but it also means you must host and maintain the platform yourself. So, an open-source ad server usually requires deep technical knowledge and skills, especially if you plan to scale your operations.

These three types of ad servers are the most common, but you may have also heard other terms, such as an in-house ad server or a white-label ad server.

An in-house ad server usually refers to a broader category that includes self-hosted ad servers and all other software you build, host, and support yourself. In case of a self-hosted ad server, you install the platform created by the external vendor. If you choose a fully custom-made in-house ad server, you start from scratch and develop all its features based on your vision.

A white-label ad server represents a solution (SaaS or self-hosted) that you can brand as your own. It’s an excellent way for smaller companies to get a platform that fulfills all their needs without developing it. Maintaining a white-label ad server is also much easier than in the case of a custom-built solution.

As you can see, the differences between deployment models are significant. That’s why choosing the right ad server requires a deeper understanding of the pros and cons of various options for decision makers.

Is SaaS Ad Server the Best Option for Your Marketing Strategies?

Choosing an ad server is like buying a new apartment. It’s not just about the number of square meters or rooms — your choice depends on your desired lifestyle.

If you want near-zero hustle, you buy a fully-furnished apartment and move in right away.

If your budget is limited, you choose a fixer-upper and put some effort into repairing it and making it look like a home.

And if you have a lot of spare time, enough money, and a clear vision, you can design your apartment from scratch. The key is to be clear about your intentions and limitations.

Every ad server option can address a specific list of publishers’ and advertisers’ pain points at different stages of the marketing funnel. Let’s examine them closely and compare their upsides and downsides.

Hosting

The location of your ad server impacts the setup speed and operational complexity. The simplest solution is a SaaS ad platform. Since it uses an external vendor’s cloud infrastructure, there’s no need for a long and complicated setup. Most often, a SaaS ad server is ready to use as soon as you pay for it.

You must put considerable effort into preparing a self-hosted ad server. At the same time, open-source and especially fully in-house solutions may be extremely hard to install and configure.

So, if you don’t plan to use your infrastructure to run an ad server, the best option is a SaaS ad platform.

Ease of Maintenance

It’s not enough to install an ad server once — you need to maintain it, update it regularly, and fix problems when they appear. The type of ad server you choose defines who’s responsible for these tasks.

In case of fully in-house, self-hosted, and open-source solutions, it’s your team. If you choose a SaaS ad server, the provider will keep your platform running, update it, and fix possible bugs.

So, if you don’t employ ad server maintenance experts and don’t want to expand your team, the choice is clear.

Budget Constraints

Before choosing a specific ad server, analyzing all the expenses associated with this decision makes sense. Sometimes, expenses can add up significantly in the long run.

For example, when using a SaaS advertising platform, the initial cost is low, since it doesn’t require much setup. There’s usually a fixed monthly fee, which makes this option cost-efficient.

With an open-source ad server, the initial cost is also low, but the ongoing cost (team salaries, infrastructure maintenance) can be pretty high.

Self-hosted ad servers are usually more expensive, both at the beginning and throughout the usage period. A fully in-house option is the most expensive because it includes thorough research and development stages.

So, if your budget is tight, a SaaS ad server or, sometimes, a self-hosted option may be the most practical solution.

Speed

For many companies, the time to market may be one of the deal-making criteria. If you’re not a large corporation, you likely can’t afford months or years of waiting for deployment.

In terms of speed, a SaaS ad platform is a leader without any doubt. It usually takes a few days to start using a cloud-based ad server. With a self-hosted solution, you can start in several weeks.

Installing and customizing an open-source ad server may take weeks to months, and a fully in-house option requires a lot of patience. After all, building a system from scratch may take over a year.

Data Ownership

In today’s world, overlooking data privacy and ownership can lead to customer churn and a shortened customer lifetime.

Before committing to a specific option, the wise publishers and advertisers determine if it’s secure and suitable for handling sensitive data. With a SaaS ad server, the vendor stores and controls the data, while open-source, fully in-house, and self-hosted solutions allow you to control the data.

So, choosing an ad server implies accurate analysis of your data ownership needs and risks. Usually, these needs aren't as critical for small and medium-sized publishers and advertisers as for large companies.

Important thing to keep in mind: it’s essential to check if the potential vendor complies with privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, or industry-specific standards).

Let’s summarize the key decision-making points. Every option presents a different combination of cost, control, and complexity, and every publisher or advertiser has a unique set of needs and constraints. Comparing them and defining the room for compromise is how you find the perfect match for achieving long-term SaaS marketing success.

Comparison of the main ad server types for Ad Campaigns

Benefits of a SaaS Ad Server

By now, you’ve already had a glimpse of what a SaaS ad platform can offer. In addition to these features, SaaS ad servers enable ad personalization.

They can also help marketers who create content tailored to their audience get the most out of their efforts. When managing and optimizing paid ads across multiple channels, SaaS ad servers play a crucial role in lead generation and generating qualified leads. Additionally, they streamline the management and optimization of campaigns while providing robust analytics and reporting tools to track marketing goals and measure success using key SaaS marketing metrics.

Let’s explore other SaaS ad server benefits to help you make an informed decision.

Scalability

One of the most valuable characteristics of a SaaS ad server is its scalability potential. Due to the cloud infrastructure, it can handle website traffic spikes, increasing paid or organic traffic volumes, and more ad campaigns with various ad formats.

So, if your business is seasonal or just slowly growing, a SaaS solution is the right fit. It helps you scale up your operations without additional investments.

Cost-Efficiency and Customer Acquisition Cost

With a SaaS ad platform, there’s no need to make significant investments — you pay as you go, usually only for what you use (if the payment model is usage-based) or a fixed fee (in the subscription-based model).

Also, a reliable SaaS ad server doesn’t charge any hidden fees. You don’t pay for hosting, maintenance, or regular updates. Hence, you can always plan your tech and marketing budget.

Speed

If you choose a SaaS ad server, you can start delivering ads immediately. No installation or complicated setup is needed — only a quick onboarding to get familiar with the main features.

Other ad server options usually require weeks from the setup beginning to the launch of the first ad campaign. With a SaaS alternative, you can save time.

Low Maintenance

For companies without vast tech expertise, this benefit is crucial. A SaaS ad server lets you focus on the core business and enhance your marketing efforts to better serve your existing customers instead of thinking about updates and fixing bugs. The vendor is responsible for maintaining technical operations, solving problems, and updating software.

Support

This benefit is connected to the previous one: SaaS ad server providers usually have support teams, often working 24/7.

Also, they help with onboarding and equip you with comprehensive documentation, such as tutorials and FAQs. It speeds up the onboarding and troubleshooting, especially compared to open-source solutions. Eventually, using a SaaS ad platform may lead to lower downtime and risks.

Tracking Campaign Performance Metrics

One of the most significant advantages of SaaS ad servers is their ability to monitor campaign performance in real time. These platforms provide built-in analytics and reporting dashboards that help publishers and advertisers make the best possible decisions.

By tracking essential SaaS marketing metrics like click-through rate, conversion rate, viewability, and new users, advertisers can better understand the cost-effectiveness of their campaigns, especially in relation to customer acquisition cost. Additionally, evaluating metrics like frequency, bounce rate, and fill rate helps optimize user experience and maximize long-term value.

When these insights are tied to customer lifetime value, which represents the total revenue generated by a customer over their entire relationship with your business, the marketing team can allocate budget more effectively.

Finally, metrics like monthly recurring revenue and customer churn are directly influenced by how well your ad campaigns perform. A quality SaaS ad server can help you improve ad campaigns results, which improves customer satisfaction and reduces customer churn rate.

All listed benefits make a SaaS solution a strong option for companies looking for easy setup and maintenance, flexibility, and cost-efficiency. A SaaS ad server removes the tech burden and helps you reach sustainable growth in ad operations, contributing to recurring revenue on your terms.

Choosing an Ad Server: Top 5 SaaS Products

Now that we’ve covered the primary benefits of SaaS ad servers, it’s time to look at the best options in the market.

Many SaaS ad servers support pay-per-click ads across various channels. While they mostly don't directly integrate with platforms like Google Ads or search engines, they can complement search marketing efforts by enabling retargeting, helping re-engage active search traffic.

These platforms also offer robust capabilities for managing and distributing video content, including video demonstrations, across websites, mobile apps, and social media channels to increase visibility and reach.

For B2B marketers, many SaaS ad servers support account-based marketing strategies, enabling sales teams and marketing teams to align on highly personalized campaigns for high-value accounts.

Google Ad Manager

It’s one of the most popular ad servers for publishers that you can access via a web interface. It helps manage and deliver ads sold programmatically or through direct deals, utilizing ad markup to define how ads are displayed. The essential feature is seamless integration with other parts of the Google ecosystem, such as AdSense, Ad Exchange (AdX), Google Analytics, and other services.

Here are some benefits of Google Ad Manager:

• Built-in header bidding feature (it allows publishers to offer their ad inventory to the programmatic ecosystem before direct sales).
• Vast targeting options, based on geolocation, demographics, and device types.
• Strong analytical and reporting tools.
• Automated updates with new features added regularly.

However, Google Ad Manager may not be the right choice if you prefer a white-label option or don’t want to be locked in the Google ecosystem.

Epom Ad Server

This SaaS ad server offers flexibility, scalability, and a comprehensive feature set, including vast customization potential. It serves ads across various channels and supports all the popular ad formats, such as display, video, native, mobile, and rich media.

Other key features include:

• Advanced targeting options. You can target your ad campaigns based on geolocation, device type, browser, etc.
• Real-time analytics with a filtering feature, which makes it easier to draw insights from the data.
• API access. Epom allows integration with various external tools.
• Programmatic selling via real-time bidding (RTB) technology. It helps harness the power of programmatic deals in addition to direct sales.
• White-label solution. You can brand the platform according to your vision, include logos, and use custom domains.

Such an enormous toolbox makes Epom Ad Server a strong option for publishers, advertisers, and ad networks, especially if they want a robust yet highly customizable platform or aspire for a white-label solution.

Kevel

This cloud-based SaaS ad platform provides many customization capabilities and valuable features, such as:

• Comprehensive set of APIs for campaign management, reporting, and targeting. It makes the integration of external systems easy and smooth.
• Support of various ad formats, including display, video, and sponsored listings.
• Real-time reporting and forecasting.
• Security. Kevel utilizes a server-to-server model that helps comply with privacy regulations.

These characteristics make Kevel a solid option for retail media networks and marketplaces offering sponsored listings.

AdButler

This solution saves its current customers from the need to maintain their own infrastructure and offers various campaign management and optimization tools. Here are some of them:

• Support different ad formats, including native, display, and video ads.
• Real-time reporting feature to monitor campaign performance.
• Multiple targeting criteria, such as location, device type, and time.
• API access for seamless integration of other services.

Publishers, advertisers, and ad agencies can benefit from this set of features. Some of them cost extra, as is usually the case with SaaS solutions, so you can choose which functions you actually need.

Equativ

It’s a good option if your company size is large, especially if you're a publisher. It’s a SaaS advertising platform with an ad server, supply-side platform (SSP), and demand-side platform (DSP). It provides:

• Support for programmatic and direct sales.
• Advanced segmentation of the target audience.
• Convenient reporting dashboards.
• Various targeting options.

Today’s market offers a diverse range of SaaS business solutions, but the best option for you is the one that fulfills your needs.

Conclusion: Making the Most of Your SaaS Ad Server

An ad server is a game-changing tool in the digital marketing landscape, especially for b2b SaaS marketing strategies. It helps publishers attract new customers and allows advertisers to decrease marketing expenses. By removing common pain points, such as a lack of technical expertise and digital infrastructure, a SaaS ad server makes advanced features accessible even for small-sized companies.

However, to make a SaaS ad platform efficient, it’s crucial to start with a deep analysis of your needs and plans. How fast do you want to start? What’s the current scope of your ad operations? Do you plan to scale them up?

These and other questions outlined in this article help you prioritize features and choose a platform that supports your long-term strategy. A comprehensive SaaS marketing plan is essential to guide your decisions, set budgets, and select the most effective channels.

Before making a final decision, you can test them and see if they are the right fit. Many SaaS businesses offer free trials, which play a key role in customer acquisition and allow potential clients to evaluate the product before committing. For example, Epom Ad Server has a 14-day free trial, and it’s the perfect amount of time to understand if there’s an “ad server chemistry”.

FAQ

• What is a SaaS Ad Server?

  It’s a platform that manages and delivers ads to the right target audience at the right time, tracks campaign performance, and helps optimize ad campaigns.

• What are the most common types of ad servers?

  There are three main options. A SaaS ad server is cloud-based and doesn’t require setting up, whereas a self-hosted ad server involves installing and maintaining a customer’s infrastructure. An open-source ad server you can download for free and customize according to your needs.

• Is a SaaS ad server better than a self-hosted ad server?

  A SaaS ad server is ready to use as soon as you pay. All other types require having your servers and setting them up manually. Also, if you choose a SaaS ad server, the provider will keep your platform running, update it, and fix possible bugs. With a self-hosted option, your team will perform these tasks.

• What are the benefits of a SaaS ad server?

  There’s no need to make significant investments — you pay as you go, usually only for what you use. Also, if you choose a SaaS ad server, you can start delivering ads immediately.

• What are the top SaaS ad servers?

  Epom Ad Server is the best for advertisers and publishers looking for speed and low maintenance. Google Ad Manager is a strong choice if you’re deeply integrated into the Google ecosystem, and you can consider Equativ if your business is already large and in search of an all-in-one solution.