Digital marketing is an industry that is chock full of acronyms – it’s an alphabet soup of abbreviations and shorthand. Between your CTR and your ROAS, it’d be easy to lose DSP in the shuffle. And that’d be a damn shame, because DSP is one of the most powerful acronyms for a 21st Century business. A DSP or Demand-Side Platform is a tool that allows marketing managers to buy display advertising space on multiple ad exchanges through a single interface.
Think Amazon for display ads.
DSPs are the most efficient, effective way to ensure that your ads are reaching the right audience, at the right place, at the right time. With a quality DSP, marketing pros are able to reach your target audience without wasting money on trial and error, effectively increasing that other acronym you love: ROI.
Demand-Side Platforms are pretty straightforward once you have a basic knowledge. The flow goes like this:
- A user visits a web page.
- Information about the website and the user is conveyed to an ad exchange.
- Impressions are filtered based on user data (this is what makes our ads targeted).
- The ads spot is auctioned off to the advertiser with the highest bid through real-time bidding.
- DSPs utilize a fancy algorithm that adjusts several variables in real time, based on performance, to make them profitable.
- The DSP will optimize performance and bids to allow for improved quality in traffic.
- The DSP will provide detailed statistics regarding the campaign.
Bada bing, your display ads start making you more money.
All that’s left is figuring out which DSP to use. The market is awash in different options, and each one offers its own characteristics and capabilities. One DSP may have a user interface you like, but its targeting capabilities aren’t as robust. Another may have a powerful algorithm suite, but its reporting leaves something to be desired. All DSPs will have sophisticated bidding that allows them to optimize campaigns as they run through the platform. When looking for the right DSP partner, keep the following in mind:
- Minimums: In order to run on many platforms, you have to meet their minimum budget requirements. These minimums can range from as little as a few hundred dollars to the tens of thousands of dollars.
- Premium Inventory: The majority of DSPs have access to ad exchanges. What makes the difference is the quality of the inventory that the platform can access. When searching for a platform, make sure their inventory matches your target user.
- CPMs: A CPM is another important acronym, and represents the cost per 1,000 impressions. CPMs can have a wide range of prices, and a lower CPM will allow you to reach more people for a lower cost.
- Customer Support: None of the fancy math or advanced ad placement means a thing if you can’t get ahold of a person when you’ve hit a roadblock. Look for a DSP provider that will work with you to develop the best user strategy, so you can implement a flawless campaign.
By now you’re sitting back in your chair, feeling pretty good about your future in DSPs. You’ve got this in the bag, right? Right? Maybe not. If spending hundreds of hours vetting countless DSP providers doesn’t sound like your glass of bourbon, then it might be in your best interest to partner with OOHology.
We’ve done all that dirty work, and we continue to evaluate providers as they arise in the market. Each of our clients has different challenges and goals, and we take sick pleasure in matching providers with people. We have an elite lineup of proven winners, allowing us to reach the target user at a cost that doesn’t break the bank.
You’re welcome.