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6 months → 3 months per platform
per new platform integration
in straight-up integration costs for two years
6 months → 3 months per platform
per new platform integration
in straight-up integration costs for two years
AdCellerant is a white-labeled provider of digital advertising services to small and medium-sized businesses across North America.
When competitors can just throw money at problems, every development hour becomes a strategic investment for a smaller team. AdCellerant faced this reality when connecting a single new data source to their platform consumed over six months of engineering time.
By partnering with Improvado, they strategically reallocated technical resources and transformed what their focused team could deliver against much larger rivals.
AdCellerant provides digital advertising technology to local media companies: newspapers, television stations, radio stations, and digital agencies. UI.Marketing, their flagship product, allows local media partners to white-label the platform and offer digital advertising to small and medium-sized businesses.
In their market, AdCellerant faced a classic David versus Goliath scenario. “There are a few companies that exist meaningfully in our space,” explains Jonathan Hemnes, Executive Vice President of Engineering. “We have a small but mighty team of engineers. Yet our competitors have significantly more resources. We have to maintain laser focus on the features that make us competitive in the market.”
This resource disparity meant that AdCellerant had to be exceptionally strategic about their engineering investments.
AdCellerant serves a diverse client base: from small coffee shops wanting basic metrics to sophisticated car dealerships requiring granular analysis at the ad group level.
Before Improvado, expanding the platform meant building every integration in-house. When partners requested support for a new advertising platform, engineers had to create API connections from scratch.
The complexity varied by platform. “TikTok was a bit of a simpler beast,” explains Josh Allen, Senior Software Engineer at AdCellerant. “But Google Ads was much more advanced and took many months. There's a lot of technical discovery that has to happen to understand how each API works.”
The maintenance never ended either: “Google Ads upgrades very regularly. You have to keep up or else everything stops working.”
When the team calculated that each integration required over six months of development time and approximately $120,000 in costs, they realized it was a severe constraint on growth.
“It's very expensive for us to spend engineering time on these integrations. It’s not just the cost of paying engineers, but also the opportunity cost. Every hour spent building connectors is an hour we don’t spend deepening our data analysis or working on truly meaningful things in the market.”
AdCellerant evaluated multiple options based on three critical criteria:
After assessing available options, Improvado emerged as their choice: its comprehensive data source portfolio already supported the critical platforms needed for their immediate roadmap. Plus, more data sources AdCellerant targeted in the longer term were also ready to use.
Finally, Improvado’s embedded iframe provided a seamless white-labeled experience, allowing end-users to connect accounts directly through the AdCellerant web application.
“We needed to add platforms quickly, and Improvado offered a clear path forward. Once we integrated with it, we could skip the learning curve for complex systems like Google Ad Manager. Instead of investing months to understand each API, we could add them directly to our portfolio and see the data almost immediately.”
Today, AdCellerant has transformed how they manage platform integrations, making the process significantly more predictable and efficient.
When adding a new DSP to their reporting portfolio, the team identifies familiar data points in Improvado's documentation. It analyzes which platform-specific metrics constitute key performance indicators, such as conversions, which aren’t often reported as just conversions.
The team also identifies additional metadata beyond reporting metrics. For instance, they might want to show a breakdown of clicks and impressions by a creative, be able to show the name of the creative, a URL to view it, and a thumbnail image of what the creative looks like.
“We needed to add platforms quickly, and Improvado offered a clear path forward. Once we integrated with it, we could skip the learning curve for complex systems like Google Ad Manager. Instead of investing months to understand each API, we could add them directly to our portfolio and see the data almost immediately.”
The entire setup is managed by a small team that interacts directly with Improvado, including two developers, two product owners, and occasionally an executive.
Improvado handles the data extraction, while AdCellerant engineers connect the dots to their system and manage QA processes before release. Data flows automatically from source platforms through Improvado into AdCellerant's BigQuery instance, where it's immediately available for analysis.
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AdCellerant has cut integration time in half, making platform expansion much more manageable. The consolidated vendor relationship provides clear accountability.
“Having a single point of contact simplifies everything. If we ever need assistance, we can reach out directly to Improvado instead of managing it internally. That's worth something.”
Development costs for new integrations dropped from $120K to $40K each. Across six integrations, this translated to approximately $280K in direct savings.
The team also previously spent thousands of dollars every quarter maintaining existing integrations to keep up with changing APIs. This ongoing cost has been eliminated as well.
Perhaps most importantly, AdCellerant's engineers can now focus on product innovations that differentiate them in the market rather than rebuilding commodity integrations.
“Improvado’s willingness to listen and continuously improve has been outstanding. Folks on their team have made amazing efforts when we're experiencing pain and have done so in an open and transparent manner. Not all companies do that. It's really nice to work with ones that do.”
AdCellerant is a white-labeled provider of digital advertising services to small and medium-sized businesses across North America.
https://adcellerant.com/When competitors can just throw money at problems, every development hour becomes a strategic investment for a smaller team. AdCellerant faced this reality when connecting a single new data source to their platform consumed over six months of engineering time.
By partnering with Improvado, they strategically reallocated technical resources and transformed what their focused team could deliver against much larger rivals.
AdCellerant provides digital advertising technology to local media companies: newspapers, television stations, radio stations, and digital agencies. UI.Marketing, their flagship product, allows local media partners to white-label the platform and offer digital advertising to small and medium-sized businesses.
In their market, AdCellerant faced a classic David versus Goliath scenario. “There are a few companies that exist meaningfully in our space,” explains Jonathan Hemnes, Executive Vice President of Engineering. “We have a small but mighty team of engineers. Yet our competitors have significantly more resources. We have to maintain laser focus on the features that make us competitive in the market.”
This resource disparity meant that AdCellerant had to be exceptionally strategic about their engineering investments.
AdCellerant serves a diverse client base: from small coffee shops wanting basic metrics to sophisticated car dealerships requiring granular analysis at the ad group level.
Before Improvado, expanding the platform meant building every integration in-house. When partners requested support for a new advertising platform, engineers had to create API connections from scratch.
The complexity varied by platform. “TikTok was a bit of a simpler beast,” explains Josh Allen, Senior Software Engineer at AdCellerant. “But Google Ads was much more advanced and took many months. There's a lot of technical discovery that has to happen to understand how each API works.”
The maintenance never ended either: “Google Ads upgrades very regularly. You have to keep up or else everything stops working.”
When the team calculated that each integration required over six months of development time and approximately $120,000 in costs, they realized it was a severe constraint on growth.
“It's very expensive for us to spend engineering time on these integrations. It’s not just the cost of paying engineers, but also the opportunity cost. Every hour spent building connectors is an hour we don’t spend deepening our data analysis or working on truly meaningful things in the market.”
AdCellerant evaluated multiple options based on three critical criteria:
After assessing available options, Improvado emerged as their choice: its comprehensive data source portfolio already supported the critical platforms needed for their immediate roadmap. Plus, more data sources AdCellerant targeted in the longer term were also ready to use.
Finally, Improvado’s embedded iframe provided a seamless white-labeled experience, allowing end-users to connect accounts directly through the AdCellerant web application.
“We needed to add platforms quickly, and Improvado offered a clear path forward. Once we integrated with it, we could skip the learning curve for complex systems like Google Ad Manager. Instead of investing months to understand each API, we could add them directly to our portfolio and see the data almost immediately.”
Today, AdCellerant has transformed how they manage platform integrations, making the process significantly more predictable and efficient.
When adding a new DSP to their reporting portfolio, the team identifies familiar data points in Improvado's documentation. It analyzes which platform-specific metrics constitute key performance indicators, such as conversions, which aren’t often reported as just conversions.
The team also identifies additional metadata beyond reporting metrics. For instance, they might want to show a breakdown of clicks and impressions by a creative, be able to show the name of the creative, a URL to view it, and a thumbnail image of what the creative looks like.
“We needed to add platforms quickly, and Improvado offered a clear path forward. Once we integrated with it, we could skip the learning curve for complex systems like Google Ad Manager. Instead of investing months to understand each API, we could add them directly to our portfolio and see the data almost immediately.”
The entire setup is managed by a small team that interacts directly with Improvado, including two developers, two product owners, and occasionally an executive.
Improvado handles the data extraction, while AdCellerant engineers connect the dots to their system and manage QA processes before release. Data flows automatically from source platforms through Improvado into AdCellerant's BigQuery instance, where it's immediately available for analysis.
AdCellerant has cut integration time in half, making platform expansion much more manageable. The consolidated vendor relationship provides clear accountability.
“Having a single point of contact simplifies everything. If we ever need assistance, we can reach out directly to Improvado instead of managing it internally. That's worth something.”
Development costs for new integrations dropped from $120K to $40K each. Across six integrations, this translated to approximately $280K in direct savings.
The team also previously spent thousands of dollars every quarter maintaining existing integrations to keep up with changing APIs. This ongoing cost has been eliminated as well.
Perhaps most importantly, AdCellerant's engineers can now focus on product innovations that differentiate them in the market rather than rebuilding commodity integrations.
“Improvado’s willingness to listen and continuously improve has been outstanding. Folks on their team have made amazing efforts when we're experiencing pain and have done so in an open and transparent manner. Not all companies do that. It's really nice to work with ones that do.”
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