What Is an SSP?

How Does an SSP Work?

App publishers previously worked with media buyers directly to manually fill their ad inventory. However, with the growing number of mobile users worldwide and within the competitive landscape of digital advertising, the need grew for supply-side platforms to automate this process for publishers.

SSPs make ad inventory of publishers available to buyers – via ad exchanges and demand-side platforms (DSPs).

SSPs analyze and review connected DSPs and ad exchanges, keep track of publishers’ total inventory, and make recommendations for ads best suited to the available ad space. To ensure brand safety, publishers can establish criteria to help manage their demand sources during an auction. These criteria are then taken into account. SSPs typically require a set volume of traffic before accepting a publisher.

An SSP usually provides publishers with a dashboard to track monetization KPIs such as eCPM and average revenue per daily active user.

What’s the Difference between SSPs and DSPs?

While a supply-side platform aggregates app publishers to help them monetize their inventory more efficiently, a demand-side platform aggregates advertisers to help them buy traffic from diverse sources.

Both SSPs and DSPs are connected to an ad exchange but from different sides. This way, a publisher connects with an advertiser through this chain.

What Are the Benefits of a Supply-Side Platform?

There are multiple reasons and benefits for publishers using a supply-side platform to sell their ad inventory. These include the following:

1. For Greater Efficiency

As already mentioned, supply-side platforms help app publishers automate and optimize the sale and management of their ad inventory. This removes the need for publishers to manually manage and sell their own ad space, as was previously the case without SSPs. 

SSPs additionally open ad inventory to multiple demand sources simultaneously and ensure publishers are connected with a large number of demand sources. This can be done without the complexity of working with all these sources at once.

2. For Greater Revenue

A supply-side platform in connection with multiple networks, ad exchanges, and DSPs helps publishers fill their ad inventory, as there are more chances of their inventory being sold. This ensures maximum revenues. 

An SSP will ideally also make inventory available for demand sources by setting a minimum price. This means that inventory isn’t sold below a price set by the publisher. Working with a high-quality supply-side platform especially means that publishers have access to multiple high-quality demand sources who are willing to pay for their inventory at the highest price. 

3. For Greater Quality and Control of Demand Sources

SSPs give publishers more control over their ad inventory. Thanks to reports provided by SSPs, publishers can gain insights into the value of their inventory, who is bidding for their inventory on the impression level, and how much ad space certain demand sources are buying from them. Such insights enable publishers to optimize for further revenue uplifts. 

SSPs can additionally guarantee brand safety and ad relevance for the publisher’s users. Publishers can restrict unwanted ad content so that only relevant ad networks and specific GEOs will be able to bid for their ad inventory. Furthermore, SSP advertising gives publishers the option to blacklist and whitelist certain demand sources or ad types.

4. For Better User Experience

App publishers are interested in keeping their users engaged for the longest time possible to maximize ad consumption and therefore ad-based revenue. This is also where SSPs show their worth.

Supply-side platforms work with demand-side platforms to cap the frequency an ad is shown to users to prevent them from ad fatigue. This means that an app user will be shown a similar or identical ad only a certain amount of times. This increases the impact of ad impressions and revenue and reduces the likelihood of alienating users.

Conclusion 

In mobile programmatic advertising, supply-side platforms provide access to a wide range of buyers. This guarantees greater efficiency in ad delivery and higher revenues – per ad space and overall across all ad inventory. 

As programmatic ad technologies continue to improve and develop, SSPs remain essential for publishers to drive efficiency, enhance a user’s ad experience, and increase monetization.

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