The advancement of technology has transformed the ad buying and selling arena drastically. The conventional methods including manual ad insertions, sit-down meetings, contracts, and publishing have been overtaken by demand-side and supply-side platforms. The laborious advertising process that would take days or weeks in the past has now been made near-instantaneous and efficient with the help of programmatic platforms such as demand-side platforms and supply-side platforms. According to the market report in 2021 the demand-side platform system market size is estimated to reach a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 31.3% globally during the period 2021 to 2027 which leads to a promising future for DSP marketing. Let us walk you through the various important components of the Demand Side Platform.
What Is Programmatic Advertising - the Parent Process
To know the crux of demand-side platforms (DSP), we need to understand the parent operation- programmatic advertising. It is the automatic buying and selling of digital ad space. Programmatic advertising links the advertisers with a DSP to the publishers with ad inventories through an SSP. Most of the channels and formats can be accessed through this process because of ad inventories and databases. Most publishing business transactions are happening through programmatic advertising via real-time bidding and direct deals.
What is a Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
Demand-side platform or DSP is defined as the software system that allows ad buyers to buy and bid in real-time to display their ads and maintain their ad inventories. A DSP empowers the advertisers with the options to purchase the space in their desired niches so that their content can create meaningful impressions, reach the target audience, and generate meaningful conversions.
What is DSP in digital marketing, then? Akin to paid searches, DSP marketing enables users to optimize their strategies with a preferred benchmark like eCPC or CPA. We can expect high functionality from a DSP like serving ads, real-time bidding, vertical as well as lateral tracking, and ads tracking all typically under one roof.
With such an expansive role and a wide array of benefits, the role of DSP in digital marketing is being recognized by one and all. Several third parties are now amalgamating it directly in their operations to enable better management and tracking. An effective DSP is a perfect way that lets the advertisers automatically manage the placement and purchases which becomes rather tedious to deal with trading desks and salespeople with the ever-increasing advertising possibilities offered by the publishers.
Uncovering Different Types of DSPs
Demand-side platforms are mainly classified into two types, namely self-serve and full-service. Let us dive into a brief explanation of each:
1. Self-Serve Demand-Side Platforms
A self-serve DSP lets the advertisers produce, operate, and optimize ad campaigns and strategies without needing any external assistance. This type of demand-side platform puts all the charge of ad campaigns from ideation to fulfilling to examination on the advertisers’ shoulders. An advantage worth considering while opting for a self-serve DSP is it reduces overhead costs while providing complete control to the advertisers. The learning curve can be easy to moderate depending on the in-house expertise.
2. Full-Service Demand-side Platforms
It allows you to organize your ad campaigns via an account manager and sales representative. Advertisers have to commit to a certain budget for each campaign when utilizing a full-service Demand-side platform. Opting for this kind of DSPs can sometimes turn out to be a little expensive but can add the advantage of outsourcing the task to an external team of experts. Businesses that possess a large-scale capacity of spending hefty amounts lean more towards a full-service DSP. one major concern for people choosing this option, however, is that campaign management is not as flexible as self-serve DSPs. If you need to make even a minuscule change, you require your account manager to deal with it, which can take longer than estimated depending upon their availability.
Learning the Underlying Mechanism
By definition, a demand-side platform works in complete coherence with the supply-side platform, i.e., the platform responsible for aggregating advertising inventory sources. DSPs do not rely on individual networks. In case you are managing ads via Google Display Network manager, you are purchasing impressions on Google publishers only. In case you are utilizing the Facebook Ads Manager to purchase ads, you are buying impressions on Facebook or Instagram specifically. Demand-side platforms do not depend on these networks. They are third-party software that allows you to buy, scrutinize, and manage ads across several networks from a singular place.
When considering the programmatic advertising universe, demand-side platforms provide advertisers with every necessary information they require to purchase digital ad space from a publisher. They do not own or buy media directly from publishers but instead liaise with a supply-side platform via an ad exchange.
With the inventory in an SSP, publishers communicate with DSPs about the details and nitty-gritty of impressions. The DSP bids according to the value of the impression to the businesses. The allotment of the ad space revolves around the budget of the builder and the value of the impression to their business, all of which is smoothened and sorted automatically by the SSP, DSP, and the ad exchange between advertisers and publishers.
Evaluating the Advantages of DSPs
Media purchasers and advertisers relish numerous benefits from the use of DSP marketing in order to fulfill their advertising campaigns over manually acquiring digital advertising space.
1. Inventory Reach and Selection
Moving ahead, we observe a major benefit in the consolidation of supply in a single platform. Utilizing a DSP enables advertisers to hit a broader range of publishers from a single provider and extra diverse and global ad inventory than they can do on their own. The inventory is usually categorized by various characteristics, which permit a brand to choose meticulously where they want their ads placed. This is essential for businesses that place a premium on being able to choose a safe positioning for their ads.
2. Automated, Real-Time Bidding
Real-time bidding automates and streamlines the mediation process amongst the media buyers and sellers. The entire operation of scrutinizing the ad impression presented and bidding on that impression considering account budget, value, and target are carried out within milliseconds while the user is loading the page.
3. Reporting, Analytics, and Optimization
Advertisers highly appreciate the feature that DSPs offer to see the performance of their ad campaigns in a unified dashboard. It presents the advertisers and agencies with more data and information to act and optimize their campaigns to be more relevant and give more worth to their target audience.
4. User Targeting
Each and every information that the DSP captures regarding the user behavior is utilized to enhance the targeting, fend for remarketing capabilities, and optimize the ad rotation. Possessing a substantial user targeting functionality guarantees advertisers can cater to the users they necessitate across any digital properties they visit.
A few popular DSP providers
Presented under Amazon advertising, Amazon DSP facilitates advertisers to programmatically purchase display and video ads.
Google’s unified marketing and analytics platform programmatically include Display and Video 360 ( DV360 — formerly DoubleClick Bid Manager), Google’s DSP product.
3. Intelify Ads
An artificial intelligence-based demand-side platform that enables you to manage your account by yourself with a real-time target audience and real-time reporting facility.
A programmatic native advertising staging that supports agencies to accelerate customer engagement and procurement.
Parting Thoughts
DSPs have changed the way advertisers buy ads (and publishers sell them). Though programmatic advertising may seem complex, working with an agency can further simplify and streamline the process.