Advertising a product or service online can be a challenging task for marketers. It can be difficult to manage all the campaigns and set up creatives manually. But, ad platforms often provide APIs to automate a lot of these workflows.

These ad APIs can perform functionalities like ad campaign setup, real-time reporting, and more to increase automation and reduce manual tasks. Below, we review some of the top advertising APIs out there.

Facebook Ads

Facebook is the world’s biggest social media platform. As most people use Facebook, more and more advertisers use Facebook to promote their products or services. The Facebook Marketing API enables programmatic access to Facebook’s advertising platform for developers. With the help of this Facebook API, one can generate keywords, access audience management features and insights, create performance reports, and much more.

Facebook’s Marketing API also lets you create, edit, pause, and start campaigns, ads, and ad sets. The API can return real-time reporting, including data like impressions, spend, clicks, age, gender, event tracking, and more. It also allows advertisers to send web events like clicks or form fills directly to the Facebook servers using the API.

Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Easy to track performance.
• One can easily target customers.

Cons:

• Some metrics are stated incorrectly.

Amazon Advertising API

Amazon Advertising API is another marketing tool that allows you to take advantage of Amazon’s powerful technologies to create applications that can sell Amazon merchandise. Developers may use this API to retrieve product details to promote products and earn money as an Amazon affiliate. With the help of Amazon Advertising API, you can programmatically access items that are listed for sale, in addition to seller reviews and seller information.

Pros:

• Secure, scalable and robust service.
• Easy to use.

Cons:

• Needs better documentation.

Google Ad Manager

Google Ad Manager is a simple yet powerful platform for increasing ad revenue. In any field, an Ad Manager will help you handle your ad business and increase sales. With Google Ad Manager, you can manage sales, web, and app inventory in a single place. It is a full-featured ad management platform for advertisers that aims to make ad distribution, reporting, and content distribution easier.

Pros:

• Provides all data and reports in detail.
• Easy to set up.
• It can target specific fields or sectors.

Cons:

• Requires a lot of skill and knowledge.
• Poor customer support.

Google Adwords

Google Adwords is another best API that you can use. It helps developers to build applications for their Google Ads accounts. The API lets you manage search and view ad campaigns on a wide scale. With the help of Google Adwords API, keywords and ad text, landing pages, account management, and custom reports can be automatically produced that track your ad results.

Besides that, you can also compile your Google Ads information for use in other systems, such as inventories, produce daily reports, and change your campaign on a volume basis. These APIs are a useful choice for marketers with technical skills as a developer or programmer.

Pros:

• Full control over your ads.
• You can measure the performance of your ads.
• Flexible pricing plans.
• Helps in reaching a large audience.

Cons:

• Keywords must be specific.
• Requires technical skills and knowledge.
• Poor customer support experience.

IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, popularly known as IAB, is an agency that partners with publishers to promote the development of online advertising. As an agency in the advertising tech industry, it develops criteria and guidance for the industry’s proper functioning.

Pros:

• Less expensive.
• It can geo-target your ads.
• Constant exposure.

Media.net

Media.net is one of the leading ad tech companies whose goal is to provide digital publishers with monetization resources. It pays you based on the impressions you make. Since Media.net has a higher quality demand, publishers are more likely to benefit from relevant traffic.
The API supports publisher data reporting and ad campaign setup on their platform. The data reported is in real-time, so you don’t have to wait for the data. While the advertisers can automate their ads using the API.

Pros:

• User friendly and easy to use.
• Shows only contextual ads.
• Amazing UI.
• Completely free.

Cons:

• Revenues do not get updated in real-time.
• No page-level reporting.

Apple Search Ads

Apple Search Ads is another best advertisement API for marketers and advertisers. It shows ads on the top of search results in the App store. It is the one and the only platform that lets you run campaigns directly inside the App Store.

With the help of Apple Search Ads API, you can create ad groups with keywords, budgets, daily caps, limits, and much more. It offers two versions that are Apple Search Ads Basic and Apple Search Ads Advanced. As the name suggests, it has limited options, which are simple and easy to use, whereas the advanced version includes more options, detailed parameters, and so on.

Pros:

• Easy to use.
• Better Performance.
• High security.

Cons:

• Not so user-friendly UI.
• Scalability concerns.

Microsoft Advertising API

Microsoft’s Bing provides an advertising service that shows ads as per the keywords that users type into the search engine. Microsoft Advertising has several tools like Keyword planner, ad preview, Microsoft advertising editor, and much more that may assist you in planning and creating your ad. Microsoft Ads allows you to target specific responsive audiences and specific times and days of the week. It also provides for changes to be made offline and then synced later.

Pros:

• Flexible ad formats.
• You can monitor ad performance easily.
• User-friendly ad management tool.
• Ease of use.

Cons:

• Lack of scalability.
• Low search volume.
• Poor customer support.

Linkedin Marketing API

Like other marketing APIs, LinkedIn Marketing API also lets you automate all the marketing tasks using the API for the LinkedIn platform. It allows you to create and manage ads, generate leads, manages the community, and ad reporting. The API is straightforward to use and lets you target specific audiences. For example, you can target an audience having only a bachelor’s degree in a particular area.

Pros

• Easy to use
• Reporting is very descriptive

Cons

• API is not available to everyone
• It is quite restrictive

Prebid API

Prebid is an open-source technology that is used in the world of advertising for Header Bidding. It is a powerful tool that is used by website and app owners to increase their ad revenue. The API allows the publishers to work with more than one advertiser and organize auctions for the ad placements on their platform. The one with the highest bid wins the auction, and this also increases the ad revenue for the publishers.

Pros:

• Helps to increase publisher revenue

Cons:

• It is difficult to implement and requires a lot of experience in advertising and header bidding.

Honorable Mentions

Did we leave out any Advertising APIs? Comment below, and we’ll consider adding it to our list!

Final Words

In this article, we have covered some of the most popular APIs in the world of advertising. Tech-savvy advertisers could use these APIs to automate campaigns, fetch reports, manage assets, and other actions. Using these advertising APIs, marketing teams could achieve a lot while reducing time.