--- title: "What is managed advertising? | daily.dev Ads glossary" url: https://business.daily.dev/glossary/managed-advertising/ description: "Managed advertising is a campaign run for you by the platform's team: they set targeting, shape the creative, pace delivery and report results under an agreed plan. Self-serve advertising is the opposite: a dashboard where you do it yourself." lastUpdated: "2026-10-20" llmsTxt: https://business.daily.dev/llms.txt --- ## What is managed advertising? Managed advertising is a campaign run for you by the platform's team: they set targeting, shape the creative, pace delivery and report results under an agreed plan. Self-serve advertising is the opposite: a dashboard where you do it yourself. Also called: Managed service, Self-serve advertising. Self-serve platforms put the controls in the advertiser's hands: bids, audiences, creative upload, budget pacing, reporting. It scales to any number of advertisers and suits teams with the time and the practice to run campaigns well. It also means every mistake is yours, and developer audiences punish mistakes. Managed platforms assign a person. A campaign manager knows the audience, the formats that work and the creative that does not, and runs the campaign against a plan. The advertiser supplies the goal, the product facts and the approval; the team supplies the craft. It costs the platform more per campaign, which is why managed services usually come with a minimum commitment. The choice is about expertise, not size. A team that runs developer campaigns every day will usually outperform a marketer running one on the side, in a feed where the creative sits next to the best posts of the day. Hybrid models exist: managed setup with self-serve reporting, or self-serve buying with creative help. ## What does a managed campaign include, step by step? - **A brief:** the goal, the product facts, the first developer you want, what counts as a result. - **Targeting set by the team:** the tags, seniority and regions that match the brief, from what the audience actually reads. - **Creative shaped with you:** headlines and covers written to the feed's standard, usually several variants. - **Pacing:** delivery spread across the month and the audience, with frequency capped. - **Optimisation during the run:** the variant developers read stays; the one they skip is rewritten. - **A weekly report** of reads, clicks, follows and pixel conversions, with what changes next week. You supply the goal, the facts and the approvals. The team supplies the craft and the hours. ## When is managed better than self-serve, and when is it not? Managed wins when the audience is unforgiving and the team is small. Developer feeds punish creative that reads like an ad, and targeting by job title misses the people who adopt; a campaign manager who runs developer campaigns every day has already made those mistakes for someone else. It also wins when the marketer's time is the scarce resource. Self-serve wins when a team runs many campaigns, has in-house practice with the audience, and wants to change bids and creative daily. Agencies and large performance teams often prefer it. The honest test: who on your side will log into the dashboard every day, and have they run a developer campaign before? ## How is managed advertising priced and compared? As a plan or a monthly commitment, because a person's time is part of what you buy, rather than per click. That makes rate cards hard to compare with self-serve CPMs; compare instead on the result per month: activated developers, follows gained, cost per activated developer, with the team's hours counted on the self-serve side too. On daily.dev it is one [monthly plan](https://business.daily.dev/pricing.md) in three sizes, quoted per company, with a campaign manager in every plan. ## What should you ask a managed platform before signing? - **Who runs my campaign,** and how many others do they run? - **What does the weekly report contain,** and can I see one? - **How is creative approved,** and how fast can a variant change? - **What is the minimum term,** and what happens at the end of it? - **What do I own afterwards:** the page, the following, the pixel data? The last answer separates a platform that builds you an asset from one that rents you reach. **Common mistakes** - Comparing a managed plan to a self-serve CPM without counting your own hours. - A brief that says "developers" instead of which developers. - Approving creative by brand guidelines instead of by whether a developer would read it. - Ignoring the weekly report until the renewal conversation. **How developers experience it** - They never see the model; they see whether the post was worth reading. - Well-paced campaigns read as a company that is consistently there. - Badly run self-serve campaigns read as the same card ten times a day. ## On daily.dev daily.dev Ads is managed: one monthly plan in three sizes, quoted per company. Our team sets targeting, shapes and tests the creative with you, runs the campaign and sends a weekly report, and a campaign manager is part of every plan. ## Managed vs self-serve advertising | | Managed | Self-serve | | --- | --- | --- | | **Targeting is set by** | A campaign manager who knows the audience | You, in a dashboard | | **Creative** | Shaped and tested with you | Uploaded by you | | **Pacing and optimisation** | Run by the team during the campaign | Your bids and budgets | | **Pricing unit** | A plan or monthly commitment | Per click or per thousand impressions | | **Suits** | Teams that want expert execution | Teams that run many campaigns in house | ## Go deeper - [How pricing works on daily.dev](https://business.daily.dev/pricing.md) - [Developer marketing platforms compared](https://business.daily.dev/resources/developer-marketing-platforms-compared.md) Related terms: [In-feed ads](https://business.daily.dev/glossary/in-feed-ads.md) | [Developer audience platform](https://business.daily.dev/glossary/developer-audience-platform.md) | [CPM](https://business.daily.dev/glossary/cpm.md) ### Frequently asked questions **Is managed advertising better than self-serve?** For developer audiences it usually is, because the creative has to meet the feed's standard and the targeting has to match what developers read, both of which take practice. Self-serve suits teams that run many campaigns and have that practice in house. **What does a managed campaign include?** Targeting set by the platform's team, creative shaped and tested with you, pacing and optimisation during the run, and reporting on delivery and what developers did. You provide the goal, the facts and the approvals. **How is managed advertising priced?** Usually as a plan or a monthly commitment rather than per click, because a person's time is part of what you buy. On daily.dev it is one monthly plan in three sizes, quoted per company. **How much of my time does a managed campaign take?** A brief at the start, creative approvals in the first week, and a short weekly review. The team does the rest, which is the point. **Can an agency run a managed campaign for its client?** Yes. The agency holds the brief and the approvals and the platform's team runs the campaign; the weekly report goes to both. [All terms](https://business.daily.dev/glossary.md) | [Explore your options](https://business.daily.dev/schedule/?ref=glossary-managed-advertising) | [How pricing works](https://business.daily.dev/pricing.md)