The Plain English Guide to Demand-Side Platforms (DSP)

As a marketer, you may focus most of your time on creating organic content. Note, however, that paid advertising is just as important.

If you manage the paid ads for your business, you can go through individual ad managers like Google Ads or Facebook Ads. However, this is not the only option. You can also use automated demand-side platforms (DSP) to buy and manage your online ads.

Did you know that in 2020 $ 46.86 billion, or 88.7% of all US dollars for mobile display ads, was automated?

This means that the majority of marketers’ paid ads use DSPs to buy, manage, and track advertisements online.

All the basics of DSP advertising are explained below.

With a DSP, you can buy mobile ads on apps, banner ads on search engines, and video ads on Facebook, Instagram, Google, and even more platforms. For example, instead of using both Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you can buy those ads in one place on a DSP.

The goal is to make buying ads faster, cheaper, and more efficient. Now let’s examine how DSP platforms work and why you should use one.

DSP advertising

So you might think “How do DSPs work?”

DSP works with programmatic advertising, that is, buying and selling ads in real time through an automated system. With real-time bids, ad placements are auctioned in milliseconds.

When you start out with DSP advertising, you need to start with a strategy of how much you want to spend. Think what the effective cost per click and the cost per action could be. This is a great way to set up your online ads so the platform knows how much to spend on a given auction.

The best DSP platforms allow you to incorporate multiple rich media ads, including videos, images, and animations.

Now you may be wondering “Why should I use a DSP?”

The main reason is that it makes your digital ad experience easier and cheaper. You can control, track, and maximize all of your digital ads in one place. This means that you can manage an entire advertising campaign across multiple websites in one dashboard. For example, you can serve someone an ad on Google, then serve ads on Facebook, and then visit everyone in one campaign on other websites. Before DSPs, these would be separate campaigns for Google and Facebook ads.

This means that on many networks, including all major publishers, you can do more advertising in addition to it. With the number of networks, you have a more global reach.

In addition, DSPs often work with third-party data providers to provide you with better tracking and reporting capabilities than what is typically found on a single network. In the planning process, the targeting options are more personalized so that you can achieve better conversion rates.

When choosing a platform to work with, you should look at how many ad exchanges the DSP will have access to as this will affect how many people you can reach. You should also consider costs, training (full-service or self-service), support, and ease of use.

Now that you have learned more about DSP advertising and how it works, let’s discuss the platforms that can help you with this.

Top demand-side platforms

1. Centro

Centro is an omni-channel DSP designed to get better results for your advertising campaigns. One of the best things about it is that it uses AI machine learning to automatically analyze data from numerous campaign parameters to optimize your ads.

With this DSP, you can address hyper-local audiences across devices and multiple contact points. You also get access to the industry’s leading exchanges and more than 25,000 target audience segments from over 30 different data providers.

2. Google Marketing Platform

The Google Marketing Platform is Google’s unified advertising and analytics platform for intelligent marketing and better results. This DSP offers a variety of products for small businesses and businesses, including Campaign Manager 360.

This product allows you to save time with cross-channel ad management to maximize insights and optimize media and creative performance for all of your digital campaigns. The flexibility is the outstanding feature of this DSP. You can use third-party features and integrations to choose the features that will best help you manage and measure your campaigns.

3. Knorex

Knorex is a universal advertising platform that automates personalized marketing across channels, devices and ad formats. You can market on Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn in one place.

This DSP also uses AI to learn from previous data and dynamically predict and adjust the ad budget in real time for greater efficiency.

4. Jampp

Jampp is a DSP that uses unique context and behavioral signals to enable customers and in-app purchases through programmatic advertising.

The main features of this platform are user acquisition, app retargeting, geolocated ads, dynamic ads, and predictive bidding. This is primarily a mobile user acquisition and app retargeting DSP that lets you focus on initial mobile ads.

5. Smadex

Smadex is a mobile DSP built for growth. The platform uses a combination of its own programmatic advertising technology, machine learning, and first-party data.

With this platform, you can reach a global audience on a large scale and re-engage the audience with its retargeting capabilities.

When choosing a DSP, make sure you know how many inventory sources it is accessing, what third-party data integrations it offers, and what targeting criteria are available. To successfully serve programmatic ads on a DSP, you must reach a global audience with personalized ads.