If you're looking into programmatic DSPs, AdRoll and StackAdapt both come up as key players. But at a glance, when do you choose which?
This post breaks down StackAdapt and AdRoll and how they compare on key features, capabilities, pricing, and plans.
AdRoll is a demand-side-platform that generates awareness, deepens interest, and drives outcomes with AI-powered audience targeting, full-funnel and multi-channel advertising campaigns, insights, analytics and cross-channel attribution.
AdRoll’s data analytics and cross-channel dashboard provide a holistic view of your entire customer journey, so you know how to best invest your resources and optimize your campaigns.
AdRoll caters to midsized businesses. They help businesses grow by leveraging real-time and historical data to design, deliver, and optimize high-performing advertising campaigns that drive customer engagement, boost website traffic, and increase revenue.
AdRoll's primary features include the following:
AdRoll grows awareness for your brand and consideration for your products and services by targeting online profiles who share attributes with your current customer customer base.
We connect you to 2,000+ third-party syndicated audiences containing in-market signals for behaviors, demographics, interests, purchase predictors and more. Our natural language processing enables you to curate ad placements via 140+ contextual categories and up to 100 contextual keywords.
AdRoll drives conversions, repeat purchases and loyalty via targetable audience segments built from your first-party, data such as the contacts in your CRM or ecommerce platform, and by retargeting visitors to your website or mobile app, based on intent signals and customizable attributes such as behaviors, interests, and more.
AdRoll’s provides marketers with quality and brand-safe ad placements, without sacrificing performance. A combination of human specialists and automation ensures optimized supply paths and protections from unsafe content, made-for-ads sites, and fraudulent traffic.
BidIQ, AdRoll’s proprietary bidder, optimally prices every impression to maximize value. We’ll talk more about its strength below.
AdRoll’s combines data intelligence with sophisticated engines to accelerate execution, enhance workflows, and maximize ad performance. By transforming AdRoll into a strategic collaborator, you’ll gain efficiency and expand your capacity.
AdRoll has built its own machine learning bidder from the ground up to optimize ad budget for your ideal placements. We have a wealth of data from over 15 years of operation and are able to use this to create the best bids for your budget.
AdRoll measures business impact and attributes conversions with its analytics dashboards. You can monitor campaigns in real time, campaign monitoring, reporting, insights, and cross-channel attribution.
AdRoll has been in the digital advertising space for nearly 20 years. Because of this, they’re a major player across several channels:
Display (image): This includes traditional banner ads that appear on websites and apps across our extensive network of ad exchanges and publishers.
HTML5: Rich media ads that incorporate animations and interactive elements for more engagement.
Static image: Standard image-based ads.
Native: Ads designed to blend in with the surrounding content of a website or app, making them less disruptive and often more engaging.
Video: Ads delivered within video content (in-stream: pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll) or within non-video editorial content (out-stream).
CTV: Ads delivered on premium streaming channels and devices (like HBO Max, Paramount, ESPN, Kayo) to reach audiences on larger screens
Mobile: Ads delivered on native mobile apps
Dynamic display and native: Personalized ads that feature products or content a user has previously viewed on your site, pulling information directly from your product feed.
AdRoll is known for its retargeting capabilities, but the platform offers much more that’s in line with modern DSPs. We’ll cover its retargeting offering to start.
AdRoll's helps advertisers target users who have previously interacted with their website or ads. We can segment audiences based on:
URLs
Fixed pages
Events
Pages viewed
Impressions served
Customer lifecycle
AdRoll helps you find new customers who are likely to be interested in your brand, both with your own data and with data from third-party providers.
AdRoll lets you upload your own customer lists (CRM data) to target existing customers down to their ZIP codes based on their characteristics.
With partners like Experian, you can also reach new prospects based on demographics and interests.
AdRoll’s contextual targeting places your ads alongside content that is relevant to your brand or products.
One method of contextual advertising AdRoll does is content categories. With choices from several predefined categories (e.g., "Beauty & Fitness," "Automotive," "Food & Drink," "Sports") you can ensure your ads appear on websites in similar categories. This is available for both web display and CTV campaigns. Take, for example, this Coach ad on a fashion website:
You can also enter specific keywords to associate your ads with relevant webpage content. AdRoll uses NLP to understand semantic matching, meaning it can identify related terms beyond exact keyword matches.
As we mentioned in its key features, AdRoll has real-time analytics in its dashboards that let you measure your ads against KPIs. These KPIs include:
ROAS
CPA
CPC
CPM
CTR
Conversion Rate
Impressions
Clicks
Unique visitors
CLTV
As the standard, AdRoll’s Benchmark Report provides a 30 day snapshot, for insight into how your CPM, CPC, and CTR compares to over 20 industries.
AdRoll has 6 rules-based attribution models to choose from: Last Touch, First Touch, Last Click, Linear, Positional, and AdRoll Blended.
You can also use Custom Position-Based or Custom Time-Based models and adjust the conversion window and attribution credit percentage. You can adjust credit for the lookback windows you value.
How specific can you get with your reports? You can drill down from an overall campaign view to specific campaigns, ad groups, and even individual ad creatives to understand performance at a granular level. AdRoll allows you to analyze performance specifically for each channel and helps you analyze which ad creatives (images, videos, native units) are resonating most with your audience.
AdRoll’s Help Center documents common questions its customers encounter from setup to integrations to audience activation.
We also offer channels for direct support via email, chat, and support tickets.
Users of our managed services can speak to dedicated account managers who offer strategic assistance in addition to personalized support. This is a significant benefit for users looking to improve their campaigns with individualized support as opposed to the general advice you can garner from asynchronous learning centers.
AdRoll also provides the standard API documentation you’d expect for teams to set up AdRoll and use personal access tokens.
AdRoll has two plans:
This is a pay-as-you-go plan that includes all of AdRoll's key features in a self-service model. With the Ads Plan, you can expect all of the campaign reporting, ad types, and retargeting and prospecting features you see above.
Social channels and monthly ad credits will not be available.
This is the full AdRoll package, with hundreds or even thousands in free ad credits, guaranteed services, and early product access when you commit for a year.
The Advanced Package also includes managed services, which are the biggest value ad for companies looking to maximize ad campaigns:
Onboarding services
Account management services
Creative services
Optimization & policy services
24/7 customer support
See our pricing page for full details of both plans.
StackAdapt is an AI-powered marketing platform for brands to execute and analyze multi-channel ad campaigns. StackAdapt offers audience targeting across display, native, video, CTV, audio, DOOH, in-game, and email channels.
Like most DSPs, StackAdapt includes bid optimization, creative insights, and comprehensive reporting. StackAdapt is trusted by hundreds of agencies for end-to-end marketing with features like email and advertising.
Historically, StackAdapt positioned itself as an agency platform. WIth its rebrand, StackAdapt's ideal customer profile centers around B2B-focused companies seeking advanced programmatic advertising solutions. These businesses are often looking to engage their audience across multiple channels beyond traditional display and social media.
These ideal customers are typically data-driven and technologically inclined, appreciating platforms that offer granular control and comprehensive reporting. They are focused on precisely targeting niche B2B markets.
StackAdapt carries these primary features:
StackAdapt offers audience segments you can tailor to find relevant users for your brand across 120,000+ sites.
StackAdapt also uses natural language processing to index hundreds of millions of pages per week to find the people demonstrating strong intent to engage or convert. You can specify topics and subsequently target the audiences who have shown the most interest in those topics.
StackAdapt ensures you spend less time hopping between platforms to advertise. That’s why it supports several channels and ad formats, which we’ll explore further in the next section.
StackAdapt launched an email offering recently, which helps agencies and brands seamlessly integrate paid media, email, first-party data, and AI-driven personalization.
Another of StackAdapt’s strengths is its reporting dashboard. The dashboard has these key characteristics:
Customizable reports: Allowing users to create reports tailored to specific metrics and KPIs.
Real-time dashboards: Providing a live overview of campaign performance across different channels.
Cross-channel reporting: Providing a unified view of performance across all activated channels.
These are the channels StackAdapt offers to its users.
Display: Traditional banner ads that appear on websites, often including rich media like images, video, audio, or animation.
Native: Ads designed to blend seamlessly with the surrounding content, making them less intrusive and more engaging.
Video: Ads delivered before, during, or after video content on various online platforms.
Connected TV (CTV): Ads delivered through connected TV devices.
Audio: Ads played through podcasts, digital radio, and music-streaming services, etc., often with companion banners for visual reinforcement.
Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH): Digital billboards and other outdoor advertising with digital elements, allowing for programmatic buying and engaging audiences in contextual environments.
Email marketing: StackAdapt’s new email marketing capabilities connect programmatic advertising with owned messaging strategies.
In-app advertising: StackAdapt has partnered with companies like Lyft Media to offer programmatic in-app advertising, allowing clients to serve hyper-localized ads within mobile applications.
(Source: StackAdapt’s website)
Advertisers know that an ad campaign is only as good as your ability to target an ideal audience. StackAdapt has these capabilities for better audience targeting.
StackAdapt offers both first-party and third-party data activation, so you have the option to upload customer lists into the platform or use audiences from their third-party data providers.
For account-based marketing, you can segment audiences by firmographic data, technographic data, intent, device type, or persona-level data.
StackAdapt also has your typical geographic targeting capabilities, down to local ZIP code, those who have visited a specific geographic radius, ISP connections, Congressional districts, and so on.
Most of this is targeting that you’d expect from a DSP. StackAdapt’s contextual targeting helps differentiate its product.
StackAdapt uses its page context AI (PCAI) — a proprietary, AI-driven feature that analyzes webpage content in real-time. Advertisers input "in-context phrases" (keywords or topics), and StackAdapt's AI determines the best placements on websites with relevant content. This method doesn't rely on cookies, making it privacy-compliant.
StackAdapt’s example of PCAI.
For more specific control, you can also use keyword rule targeting to include or exclude keywords, specifying if they are case-sensitive, if they appear in the heading or body, and their frequency. This helps you align precise ads with the content.
StackAdapt allows for dynamic retargeting. Users who have already seen StackAdapt’s native ads can be retargeted for additional advertising.
StackAdapt also offers click and impression retargeting with their pixel. This helps users achieve several touchpoints with shoppers.
Like most DSPs, StackAdapt has an interactive dashboard where you can monitor campaign performance in real time.
As we mentioned in its key features, StackAdapt’s dashboard allows advertisers to measure against their campaign goals, such as:
Impressions
Clicks
Conversions
Media cost
CTR
CVR
eCPC
eCPM
CPA
ROAS
Engagement rate
What’s important is how StackAdapt allows you to drill down performance by campaign, line item, and creative level. StackAdapt lets you group campaigns and channels as well to analyze groups at a larger level.
Generally, prebuilt reports aren’t enough for each advertiser’s use case. StackAdapt allows you to create custom reports tailored to specific KPIs. You can choose the dimensions most relevant to your goals.
In addition, you can schedule reports to automatically generate and deliver at preferred intervals (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly). How can you make these automated reports so easily? StackAdapt has a drag-and-drop report builder.
StackAdapt supports the primary attribution models an advertiser would expect — namely, last-, first-, and multi-touch attribution models that can support channels and campaigns where attribution is more difficult to track.
For these attribution models, you can define the time period to attribute a conversion with custom lookback windows.
StackAdapt has a few free ways you can learn about the product. Foremost, they have StackAdapt Academy, which is a free training program with courses and certifications that enable advertisers to learn their product and programmatic advertising principles. They have courses specifically designed to help clients master the StackAdapt platform's features.
StackAdapt also offers direct client support. If you’re part of their managed services, they have dedicated account support. Many clients, especially larger accounts, benefit from dedicated account managers for their strategic advice and help with campaign optimization.
Interestingly, many of StackAdapt’s support resources do not exist on their website, such as a help hub.
For businesses looking to integrate StackAdapt data or automate processes, they provide API access and documentation. These are standard guides on how to use the StackAdapt API to extract data for reporting, manage campaign elements, and integrate with other platforms (e.g., CRM segments, pixel events).
While StackAdapt heavily promotes StackAdapt Academy for user education, some users might find the initial learning curve steeper if they prefer a more hands-on, guided setup. Some reviews mention that the platform was a lot to learn.
StackAdapt also has two options: one is more self-serve and the other has guided or managed support.
StackAdapt positions itself first and foremost as a self-serve DSP. This is the core offering where advertisers and agencies have direct access to the platform's full suite of features.
StackAdapt uses flexible pricing models tailored to campaign objectives, often based on CPM, CPC, or CPE.
While StackAdapt doesn't have hard monthly minimums in the same way some platforms might, some reviews suggest there is an expected level of spend for their platform to be viable and for clients to get sufficient support.
Even for clients primarily operating on a self-serve basis, StackAdapt provides significant support that blurs the line between pure self-serve and a fully managed service:
Dedicated account managers
Platform training
Creative services
Onboarding
They also offer flexible programmatic solutions and for industry-specific campaigns, where their team might help build out the optimal strategy within the platform for specific client needs (such as ABM, B2B, and political campaigns).
AdRoll and StackAdapt go toe-to-toe on most core DSP features. If you’re looking for the essentials, they’ve got them.
However, AdRoll has been an industry player for twenty years with a bidder that has a wealth of data and experience to optimize your ad campaigns. With this experience comes over 500 partners and exchanges.
In addition, if you prefer a platform with accessible support and managed services, AdRoll's dedicated account managers provide strategic assistance and optimization recommendations, which can be invaluable to improve your ad campaigns.
If you’re looking for a marketing platform, StackAdapt has also recently integrated email into their product suite. This change signals a pivot in direction to encompass more marketing features and could potentially be a pro for those looking for a one-stop solution.
Last updated on June 20th, 2025.
