What Is a Demand-Side Platform?

How Does a DSP Work?

Advertisers working with a demand-side platform upload their ad creatives and set up targeting and a budget for their campaigns. These ad creatives might be for ad formats such as playable, native, banner, or video ads, for example. 

Publishers make their ad inventory available to advertisers on a DSP via ad exchanges and supply-side platforms. These platforms offer an ad impression to the DSP, which then searches through its list of publishers for a suitable fit for the ad and its targeting and bids on that ad space.

After advertisers compete with each other for the space, the DSP sends the winning ad with a bid price to an ad exchange or an SSP. If an ad exchange and/or mediation platform decides that the ad from this DSP is the best option for a specific ad request, a mobile end user will then see the winning ad shown in the publisher’s app. This entire process happens in real time.

What Are the Differences between an SSP and DSP?

The greatest difference between an SSP and DSP is that they come into play at different stages of the programmatic process. Both are just as important as the other and would not work without the other component connected.

Unlike a demand-side platform that allows advertisers to buy ad inventory, a supply-side platform is used by publishers to connect their inventory to ad exchanges and sell it to advertisers at defined costs. 

A DSP must plug into an SSP (usually through an ad exchange) in order to enable an advertiser to bid on a publisher’s inventory.

Why Are DSPs Important?

Advertisers enjoy multiple benefits when they work with a demand-side platform. These include the following.

1. Greater Reach and Scalability

With DSPs, advertisers can reach a wide range of publishers and ad inventory simultaneously from one single solution. This would otherwise be impossible. Not only does this bring advertisers greater reach, those that consider brand safety their top priority can carefully select where they want their ads to be served to maintain a positive brand image among their users. 

With DSP targeting functionalities and audience insights, advertisers can make steps to ensure they are buying quality at scale across the globe and increase their ROI and user acquisition KPIs.

2. Greater Efficiency 

Demand-side platforms ensure UA managers can reduce the time and energy they spend on manually working with and contacting hundreds of publishers to advertise their app. It would be rare to find an advertiser these days still doing this. Instead, with DSPs, these teams can set up campaigns quickly and manage them across multiple inventories. What the mobile DSP does is analyzes the ad impression on offer, takes budget into account – all in real time. 

This automation therefore not only delivers time savings, which can be shifted toward activities with high impact – such as segmenting users more effectively.

3. Campaign Management in Real Time

Another reason for advertisers to use mobile DSPs is they ensure campaign performance can be managed and monitored in real time – through a dashboard. A DSP can capture data about users that advertisers can leverage to optimize targeting and ad creatives – for example. 

This means that advertisers can act quickly to optimize or pause their campaigns based on their performance while they’re running instead of waiting for them to end. This saves them money in the long run.

Conclusion

Demand-side platforms empower app advertisers to manage and monitor their ad campaigns efficiently – in real time. This means that they can carry out optimizations without spending unnecessary budget or maximizing the success of these campaigns. 

Advertisers can achieve greater reach, user quality and impact to grow their app with more efficient ad campaigns, allowing user acquisition teams to focus on other important tasks in their everyday work.

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