Self-serve ad network
Adstean is a self-serve ad network: you create campaigns, set bids and budgets, and control targeting yourself — no account manager and no monthly minimum. Advertisers buy traffic by auction; publishers monetize their sites with the same transparent pricing.
Self-serve means you are in control. Fund your balance, launch a campaign, and every impression is priced by a live second-price auction and logged with the winning bid. You see won and lost auctions, the price paid, and a suggested bid to win more of the matching traffic — the kind of transparency most networks hide behind a sales team.
Advertisers set a CPM bid from 0.10 upward (default 1.00). Smart Bid charges the second price + 0.01 CPM. No setup fee, no monthly minimum, no long-term contract — top up your balance and go.
Create your accountWhat's included
- Full campaign control: targeting, bids, budgets, frequency cap, schedule
- Transparent second-price auction with per-impression records
- Real-time reporting: won/lost auctions, cost, eCPM, conversions
- Popunder and direct-link formats, by country and device
- Publisher side: monetize inventory with the same pricing engine
How it works
- 1Sign up
Advertiser or publisher — one account can be both. - 2Fund your balance
No monthly minimum; pay as you go. - 3Launch and control
Campaigns or ad zones, live in minutes.
What you actually get in the dashboard
Self-serve only works if the tools are good enough to run a campaign without a sales rep. These are the screens an Adstean advertiser uses every day:
- New campaign form in sections: general settings, budget and bid, frequency cap and throttling, country/device/environment, schedule and IP or website lists
- Campaign list with Active, Completed and Archived tabs, a daily-budget progress bar and a row menu to pause, copy, add budget, empty budget, open reports or archive
- Campaign view with four tabs: targeting filters, bidding chart (won and lost auctions per minute), bidding map (the last 100 auctions and the winning bid) and analysis with a suggested bid
- Bidding panel with the anonymised market price (minimum, average and maximum CPM) so you know what the traffic costs before you bid
- Reports grouped by date, campaign or website, with quick ranges and saved templates
- Conversions by postback, inventory by country and token lookup by website ID
How your money is protected
A self-serve network has to stop spending when you tell it to. Adstean enforces three limits on every campaign, automatically and on every request:
- Total budget: when the delivered impressions at your CPM reach it, the campaign stops delivering
- Daily budget: when today's delivery reaches it, the campaign pauses until midnight and resumes on its own
- Frequency cap: by default one impression per visitor every 24 hours per campaign, editable in minutes, hours or days
Self-serve versus a managed network
| Adstean self-serve | Typical managed network | |
|---|---|---|
| Minimum spend | None — pay as you go | Monthly minimum or insertion order |
| Who sets the bid | You, in CPM, from 0.10 | The account manager |
| Price visibility | Winning bid and price paid per impression | Monthly invoice |
| Time to launch | Minutes after approval | Days of back-and-forth |
Frequently asked questions
Is there a monthly minimum?
No. It is fully self-serve and pay-as-you-go. You add funds and spend them at your own pace.
Do I need to talk to sales?
No. You can create an account, launch a campaign or an ad zone, and manage everything from the dashboard.
Can one account advertise and publish?
Yes. A single Adstean account can hold both the advertiser and the publisher role and switch between them.
What does "suggested bid" mean?
In the campaign analysis tab Adstean looks at the auctions your campaign is currently losing and tells you the CPM that would win about 50% more of the matching traffic. You decide whether to raise the bid.
Can I copy a campaign that works?
Yes. The row menu has Copy: it duplicates the campaign paused, with its own budget, so you can test a new country or bid without touching the original.
Read more
Ready to start?
Sign up in a minute, no monthly minimum, and launch your first campaign or zone today.