Introduction to the Ad Manager

The Ad Manager is designed to empower you by putting advanced advertising tools directly into your hands. With a user-friendly interface, real-time data insights and flexible campaign formats, the Ad Manager enables you to reach new customers, deepen engagement and drive conversions across all Zalando markets.

Reach over 50 million engaged shoppers with your brand and assortment to maximise, 

• Visibility: Ensure your products appear at critical moments of the customer journey.

• Engagement: Foster deeper customer connections through Sponsored Collections with exciting products and content.

• Sales: Drive conversions with Sponsored Products that capture attention and turn interest into action.

• Insights: Benefit from holistic 24/7 reporting, customer-centric campaign KPIs and insights.

Place your brand and assortment in front of shoppers primed to buy. Extend your brand’s presence on one of Europe’s leading fashion platform, reaching millions of customers who are ready to convert. Choose dedicated ad formats to drive your consideration and conversion with tangible results.

Choose campaign formats, allowing you to manage and refine your brand’s presence and business impact. Tailor your campaign set up according to your goals and benefit from automated campaign optimisation. The Ad Manager also gives you the ability to set budgets for specific markets or assortment so you can set up your self-service campaigns to meet your objectives.

In-depth insights and reporting allow you to monitor what works best and adapt your campaigns as you go, ensuring each investment supports your brand’s objectives effectively. Gain a clear understanding of your campaign impact, both for your self-service campaigns managed by you on zDirect, as well as campaigns managed and set up by the ZMS team.

Our self-service advertising tool within zDirect allows you to create your marketing campaign on Zalando in less than five minutes. Choose from two types of campaigns to aim for your marketing goals.

Boost your sales with significant return on investment by promoting a broader range of your assortment on the Zalando catalogue and increase your performance, for example during sales events or as an always-on campaign. Sponsored Products is an ad format that helps you increase visibility and drive sales.

• Increase your sales as well as customer acquisition, achieve significant RoAS (Return on Ad Spend).

• Either boost your overall assortment with Dynamic Sponsored Products or boost specific assortment with Selected Sponsored Products.

Sponsored Products are displayed prominently on the Zalando catalogue pages with up to 15 rows with 2 products per row. The selected assortment will also be displayed on the Zalando app, the catalogue layout typically features 5 rows per page with 3 slots per row.

To increase relevance and visibility Sponsored Products is also positioned on product detail pages (PDPs) to ensure attention where its most likely to drive clicks and conversions.

• Automatic placement: Ads appear in high-visibility spots on Zalando’s website and app.

• Effortless setup: Use existing product feeds without needing additional creatives.

• Conversion-driven: Boost performance by reaching customers actively browsing.

Partners with a Brand Home can set up Sponsored Collections campaigns directly in the Ad Manager. This powerful ad format is designed to boost the visibility of your collections right on the Zalando home page.

Its main purpose is to help customers make informed decisions by showcasing your collections through engaging and influential content to drive engagement and consideration with your brand and articles. Sponsored Collections on the Zalando home page reaches and engages audiences with high brand affinity, new customers and followers. Familiarise customers by highlighting your most popular or discounted items, for example prior to sales events.

• Boost your consideration and foster engagement with your assortment.

• Substantially increase product detail page (PDP) views, add-to-wishlist, add-to-cart and brand followers.

• Available only to brands with access to Brand Home.

Your Sponsored Collections will be shown as a teaser on Zalando. When customers click the collection banner they will be led to a page containing the collection you have set up for your campaign. When clicking on an article in the carousel, the customer will arrive directly on the product detail page (PDP) of the article.

Unlock comprehensive insights and 24/7 access to your campaign results, whether you're running your self-service campaigns directly on the platform or managing campaigns across Zalando and beyond.

Our new reporting interface empowers you with enhanced, customer-focused data, offering greater granularity and actionable insights. This ensures you can effectively align your key performance indicators (KPIs) with campaign goals and gives you the opportunity to add more articles to maximise results.

Accessible 24/7, the reports are updated daily to reflect the latest metrics, enabling you to monitor performance, analyse trends and make confident, informed decisions that drive success.

1. Visit zDirect (Zalando partner login. Feel free to bookmark this link).

2. Click on Activate in the Marketing module. You will receive a confirmation email within 24 hours. 

3. If you can’t access the Ad Manager after receiving email confirmation that your set up was successful, please get in touch with your consultant or submit a request to us via the support form.

4. Once logged in, you will find the Ad Manager in the Marketing module.

Take your first steps towards setting up self-service marketing campaigns. For optimal performance, we recommend ensuring you have at least 20 articles live on Zalando ready for promotion. 

Depending on the campaign you want to set up, your account has to meet the following criteria :

• Stock levels: At least 30% size availability for each SKU, with a minimum of three articles per size.

• Market portfolio: Ideally, run your campaigns in all Zalando markets where your brand is available.

• For Partner Program partners: Aim for strong Customer Experience Model (CXM) performance across all KPIs if you manage your own logistics, or alternatively, use Zalando Fulfilment Solutions (ZFS).

• For Wholesale partners: Make sure stock is delivered to the Zalando warehouse before launching your campaign.

Sponsored Collections is only available to partners with Zalando Brand Homes. Brand Homes is a free self-service platform, empowering you to create captivating brand spaces where you can showcase your stories, mission and articles.

• • Article

  Introduction to Zalando Brand Homes

For your Brand Homes page to go live with your Sponsored Collections, you will need:

• A Brand Homes header including category links.

• At least one collection through the Brand Homes CMS. A collection can hold between 9 to 999 articles or Zalando SKUs.

Discover more details by downloading the Ad Manager partner guide from the download section on the left.