Table of contents:
- What is a Demand Side Platform (DSP)?
- How does a DSP work?
- What are the benefits of a DSP?
- EXADS DSP Solution
- Conclusion
Programmatic advertising offers a lot of benefits so it is no surprise that it has become an integral part of marketing strategies. Demand Side Platforms (DSP) and Supply Side Platforms (SSP), are the two programmatic solutions available for Advertisers and Publishers. Together, these technologies provide the opportunity of reaching wider audiences, maximizing ad spaces and offering all the benefits of automation. Programmatic advertising allows brands to optimize their advertising spend while maximizing the publisher’s revenue from ad space.
This has had a direct impact on the online advertising spend channeled through Demand Side Platforms. Fortune Business Insights evaluated that the DSP market will grow from $20.77B in 2022 to $92.12B in 2029. This means that more advertisers are using DSPs to buy ad impressions. So if you haven’t considered using a Demand Side Platform, now is the time to do it!
What is a Demand Side Platform (DSP)?
A Demand Side Platform is a programmatic advertising platform that allows advertisers and media buying agencies to automate the buying of advertising inventory from different sources. The buying process is done through Real-Time Bidding (RTB), which allows auctions to take place in milliseconds.
By using this platform, advertisers can avail of a wide range of advertising opportunities on multiple digital media platforms.
How does a Demand Side Platform (DSP) work?
The steps involved into the process of buying ad impressions on publisher websites through a DSP is quite simple:
- The advertisers create their campaigns: they upload their ads, set their targeting options and budgets.
- The DSP through its integrations with ad exchanges and SSPs has publisher advertising inventory available.
- Once a user visits a publisher site that matches the targeting options selected by the advertiser, the DSP places a bid for an ad space.
- Once a bid is won, the DSP handles the payment and the advertiser’s ad is displayed on the publisher site.
The process of matching the advertisers campaign settings with the right publisher site and the subsequent steps take place in milliseconds and generally involves a data management platform, or DMP.
What are the benefits of a Demand Side Platform?
Some of the benefits of a Demand Side Platform include
- Efficiency in the work flow and in the way the data is used to serve and manage ads.
- Extensive reach: instead of manually contacting hundreds of publishers and striking separate deals for each of them, a DSP gives advertisers access to a global audience through its integrations with multiple SSPs and ad exchanges.
- Real-time bidding (RTB): the ad inventory buying process is streamlined, efficient, targeted and convenient.
- Easy to manage: when using a DSP you can create, manage, track and optimize all your digital campaigns from one interface.
- Real-time reporting: once your campaigns start running you will have access to real time reporting which means that you can see what is working and what is not.
- Automatic optimizations: a DSP also offers a number of automatic optimizations that you can use to easily maximize your ROI.
- Better ROI: through a DSP, advertisers can get lower prices than through direct deals with publishers.
- Advanced targeting: a DSP offers access to a huge array of audience segments through the use of targeting tools like contextual targeting, keyword targeting and more.
- Better exposure: DSPs open the door for smaller brands to compete against bigger brands or have their names next to each other.
EXADS Demand Side Platform (DSP) Solution
White-label DSP
EXADS will deliver your own branded DSP. It is important that your platform looks and feels like part of your business. From your logo to your brand colors, EXADS will ensure that your identity shines through. More than that, the platform will be accessible via a domain of your choice.
Integrations
Advertisers using a DSP, require access to a wide variety of publishers, networks and ad exchanges for their programmatic buys. As a basic requirement, they need to be able to easily integrate their DSP with SSPs and ad networks. At EXADS, we kept this process as simple as possible for our solution. To start with, EXADS already has integrations available with a wide number of supply partners. Moreover, the process of adding any OpenRTB supply is straightforward and requires minimum effort.
Targeting options
The features offered by EXADS allow you to target audiences with precision. You can target by Category, Country, Language and then start delving deeper into your audience characteristics like the type of technology they use: Device, Operating System, Browser or Mobile Carrier. You can also set your targeting by using options such as IP Ranges, Keywords, Domains and set the timing of your ads with our Time Scheduling feature. The EXADS Demand Side Platform also offers Behavioral Retargeting, Frequency Capping and VR targeting, which allows you to target or exclude VR users. All of these features provide high accuracy and guarantee maximum impact for your campaigns.
Powerful real-time analytics
Having access to real-time and in-depth data is a key factor in running successful campaigns. With EXADS, you can evaluate the performance of each campaign for over 50 metrics, 25 filters and 25 dimensions. This makes our reporting capabilities one of the best on the market.
Set up your conversion goals and track them through the Server-2-Server Conversion Tracking API or using Pixel Tracking. Monitor the conversions that your campaigns are achieving and optimize accordingly. Features like Customizable Dashboards make it really easy to assess performance statistics in a more consolidated way. Also the ability to download data, or even to copy it into documents, means that you can share reports with your clients and teams with very little effort.
Automatic optimizations
Automatic optimizations are very effective tools that help save time and resources. The EXADS DSP offers two such tools:
EXADS Bidder is an intelligent bid adjustment tool that ensures you place optimal bids for your campaigns. As shown in our case study, this feature allows an Advertiser to automatically adjust the price set on each zone based on the conversion value, and block zones that do not convert. With the Bidder, you can block under-performing browsers, countries, devices, languages, mobile carriers, operating systems, sites and zones automatically according to rules that you set.
Variations and Landing Page Optimization: with these features the advertiser can select from several traffic distribution algorithms, to ensure that the best performing Landing Page and the Ad Variation with the highest conversion rate for a set goal will receive the bigger share of traffic.
Ad formats
EXADS provides a large range of high performing ad formats, so you will never be limited in your ability to create a video, native or display programmatic campaign.
Banner campaigns using the classic Display Banners in various sizes, Sticky Banners or Large Footers.
Interstitial Ads campaigns using formats like Desktop Fullpage Interstitial, which fills the full desktop screen when the user navigates a site, Mobile Fullpage Interstitial or Native Interstitial.
Native Ads campaigns with Native Recommendation, a fully customizable widget that features a responsive or custom size image and a short text: title and description, or Native Exit.
Video Ads campaigns with In-Stream Video (VAST) which is customizable with clickable calls to action, Video Slider, Outstream Video, a responsive video format that can be placed anywhere on a site, Video Banners or In-Video Banners (VAST).
EXADS also supports both VAST and VPAID, which means that you can serve your ads flawlessly on all video ad zones and provide rich ad experiences for viewers while collecting valuable ad playback and interaction details.
More available ad formats include Email Clicks, Instant Messages, Popunders and Push Notifications.
Support
From the planning stage on, you can rest assured that the EXADS team will give you all the support and advice you need. With EXADS you get more than just a platform, you get a team of ad tech experts that will help you make the most of it.
Our goal is to help you maximize your revenue using our technology. We put at your disposal advanced documentation that is regularly updated and we keep you in the loop with everything that we are doing to improve your experience. EXADS technical teams will always be available to answer your questions, or to give you guidance related to specific topics.
Conclusion
In the rapidly evolving world of digital advertising, programmatic has given more transparency and power to advertisers and publishers. The key to success in this environment is the right technology. With EXADS Demand Side Platform you can deliver cross-channel campaigns with a variety of ad formats, you will have advanced analytics and great optimization features within an intuitive interface. Contact us today and have your new DSP ready to go in weeks!