What to Look For in a Banner Approval Tool (and What You Can Safely Skip)

At some point every studio that makes display ads goes looking for a banner approval tool. Usually after a specific incident: the wrong version went live, or a client's "looks fine" turned out to mean a different size than the one you shipped, or someone spent a Friday afternoon re-sending zips.

The search is confusing because the tools that show up are built for very different jobs. Some are general proofing platforms for print and PDF. Some are video review suites. A couple are built specifically for ads. And the pricing runs from free to several hundred dollars a month.

Here is what actually matters, based on years of sending banners to clients, and what you can ignore.

The six things that change your week

1. HTML5 banners run live, at real size, next to each other

This is the one that rules out most general proofing tools. An HTML5 banner is a zip with an index.html, scripts and assets. To review it, someone has to unpack it, serve it, and show it running at 300x250 or 970x250, not as a screenshot and not stretched to fit a window. And the client needs to see the whole set at once, because the question is never "is this banner fine", it is "is this set consistent".

If a tool shows HTML5 as a thumbnail, or asks you to upload a video recording of the animation, it is not a banner approval tool. Move on.

Both Adpiler and BannerPeek do this properly: drop the zips, sizes are detected from the ad.size tag, every size runs live on one page.

2. Images and video on the same page as the banners

A campaign is rarely HTML5 only. There are static fallbacks, social sizes as JPG or PNG, and often a video spot. If those live in a different tool, the client has two links and two places to comment, and the approval is split.

Look for one page per campaign that holds all three formats. Adpiler does; BannerPeek does; most video-first tools do not handle HTML5 at all.

3. Comments pinned to a spot, and to a second

"The logo is too small" is a comment. "The logo is too small" pinned to the top-left of the 728x90 at second 4.2 of the animation is an instruction you can act on without a follow-up email.

Pinning to a position is standard in proofing tools. Pinning to the second of the animation is rarer and matters more for animated ads than anything else on this list. Adpiler pins to a position; BannerPeek pins to position and second, for HTML5 and video.

4. Approvals with a record

The approval has to be per size, on the page, with the approver's name and the time. Not "great, go ahead" in an email thread, because that thread will contain three versions by the time anyone reads it again.

Adpiler and BannerPeek both record name, time and IP per approval. Check that the tool you are looking at does this per file, not only per campaign.

5. New versions on the same link

After the first round you fix two sizes and re-upload. The client must be able to open the link they already have and see the new versions, with the old comments kept on the old versions. If every revision creates a new link, you are back to "which one is current".

This sounds basic. Several tools get it wrong.

6. The client needs nothing

No account, no plugin, no download, no instructions. They open a link on a phone or a laptop, and it works. Every step you add between the client and the ad is a day of delay.

The features you can skip (at least at first)

These look good on a pricing page and, in my experience, rarely justify the plan they are locked behind.

Social media mockups. Showing a static in a fake Instagram frame is nice for a pitch deck. For approvals, clients care about the creative, not the chrome around it. If you present a lot of social work, it may be worth paying for. For display banners it is not.

Preview on real websites. Same idea: the banner shown on a screenshot of a news site. Useful once in a while for an in-context check, not something clients ask for during approvals.

White-label subdomain. Nice to have for agencies with a strong brand. Meaningless for a freelancer or a small studio, and often the reason the entry plan costs $49 instead of $12. Your logo on the preview page is what clients actually notice, and that is usually available on cheaper plans.

API and integrations. If you are not going to wire the tool into another system this quarter, do not pay for the option.

Campaign-per-month quotas. This is not a feature, it is a pricing model, and it is worth understanding. Some tools (Adpiler among them) bill by the number of new campaigns per month, on top of storage. A busy month costs more, a quiet month costs the same. Tools that bill by storage only, which is how BannerPeek prices Pro, are easier to predict.

A quick comparison

	Adpiler	BannerPeek
HTML5 live, all sizes on one page	Yes	Yes
Images and video on the same page	Yes	Yes
Comment pinned to a spot	Yes	Yes
Comment pinned to the second	No	Yes
Approval per file with name, time, IP	Yes	Yes
New version on the same link	Yes	Yes
Client needs no account	Yes	Yes
Social and website mockups	Yes	No
White-label subdomain	Yes (higher plans)	Planned
Free plan	14-day trial	Free forever, 100 MB, 3 campaigns
Entry paid plan	$49 / month	$12 / month
Billed by	Campaigns per month + storage	Storage only

There is a longer, line-by-line version in the Adpiler alternative comparison, including the things Adpiler still does that we do not.

How to decide

Ask yourself one question: what does the client actually do on the page? They look at the ads, they comment, they approve. If a tool does those three things well for HTML5, image and video, everything else is optional.

Then look at the price against your volume. If you ship a few campaigns a month, a free plan with three active campaigns covers you. If you ship dozens, $12 a month for unlimited campaigns still costs less than one hour of the time you currently spend on email.

And try it on a real campaign before deciding. A tool that looks right in a demo can still fail on the first Animate export with a missing ad.size tag. The only test that counts is the one with a real client on the other end.