How to Integrate StackAdapt with Your Headless CMS

What is StackAdapt?

StackAdapt is a programmatic advertising platform used by brands and agencies to buy native, display, video, connected TV, audio, in-game, and digital out-of-home ads. Teams use it to plan campaigns, target audiences, manage creatives, measure performance, and report on paid media from one demand-side platform. StackAdapt is often used by marketing teams that need multi-channel campaign execution with account-level API access for approved workflows.

Why integrate StackAdapt with a headless CMS?

Paid media teams usually work faster than content systems were designed for. A campaign might need 12 landing page variants, 4 languages, 3 audience segments, UTM rules, preview URLs, and a legal disclaimer that changes two hours before launch. If StackAdapt and your headless CMS are disconnected, someone ends up copying headlines, descriptions, image URLs, and campaign tags from one tab to another. That’s how stale creative, broken links, and mismatched tracking parameters ship.

Architecture overview

A typical Sanity and StackAdapt integration starts when an editor publishes an ad campaign document in Sanity Studio. The document might reference a landing page, localized copy, image assets, product categories, regions, and audience tags. A Sanity webhook fires on the publish event, or a Sanity Function runs directly on the content mutation. The handler receives the changed document ID, then uses @sanity/client and GROQ to fetch the exact payload StackAdapt needs, including joined reference fields like landingPage.url and image.asset.url. The handler calls the StackAdapt REST API with a bearer token, commonly to create or update creative records, audience metadata, or campaign-related assets enabled for your account. StackAdapt returns IDs for the created or updated objects, which you can write back to Sanity for traceability. From there, StackAdapt serves the ad to the targeted audience, and the click lands on a page powered by the same structured campaign content.

Common use cases

Step-by-step integration

1. 1

   Set up StackAdapt API access

   Create or use an existing StackAdapt advertiser account, then request API access from your StackAdapt account team if it isn’t already enabled. Generate an API token with the minimum permissions needed for the workflow, such as creative write access, audience metadata access, or reporting access. Confirm your account’s API base URL, endpoint names, rate limits, and whether your workflow should create new records or update existing StackAdapt IDs.

2. 2

   Install the server-side tooling

   For a TypeScript integration, install @sanity/client and use Node 18+ fetch or a small HTTP client like undici. StackAdapt server-to-server integrations commonly use REST calls with bearer-token auth rather than a public browser SDK, so keep the token in server-side environment variables only.

3. 3

   Model campaign content in Sanity Studio

   Create a schema for paid campaign content with fields like headline, description, landingPage reference, image, language, region, audienceTags, startDate, endDate, utmCampaign, and stackadaptCreativeId. Keep delivery settings, budgets, and bid strategy in StackAdapt unless your account team has approved API endpoints for those fields.

4. 4

   Create the sync trigger

   Use a Sanity webhook filtered to published campaign documents, or use a Sanity Function if you want the sync logic to run without a separate server. Configure the webhook payload to include the document ID, then fetch the full document with GROQ inside the handler.

5. 5

   Call the StackAdapt API

   Transform the Sanity document into the StackAdapt creative or audience payload your account supports. Send the request with Authorization: Bearer <token>, handle 4xx validation errors clearly, and store returned StackAdapt IDs back on the Sanity document if you need future updates instead of duplicate creates.

6. 6

   Test the full path before launch

   Test with one draft campaign, one approved image, and one landing page URL. Confirm the StackAdapt record matches the Sanity content, UTMs are present, image dimensions meet StackAdapt requirements, and the click URL resolves correctly. Then test an update, not just the first create.

How Sanity + StackAdapt works

CMS approaches to StackAdapt

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