What is a Demand Side Platform?
A Demand Side Platform (or DSP for Short) is an advertising management system that allows ad inventory buyers to use just one interface for different ad and data exchange accounts (display, video, search, and mobile ads).
Demand Side Platforms cover everything from automatically buying ad inventory to managing it and tracking results. This reduces the margin for human error or expenses created by manually buying and tracking ads.
Demand Side Platforms help ad inventory buyers buy impressions from different publishers. They’re targeted to users based on information like location and behavior. Publishers offer their inventory through ad exchanges, and Demand Side Platforms automatically decide which inventory is best and bid for it (usually through Real-Time Bids or RTBs). Users can optimize based on KPIs like eCPC and eCPA.
Even though the offer of Demand Side Platforms is similar to those of ad networks, Demand Side Platforms are central tools that allow advertisers to optimize their campaigns easily due to better access to data. Additionally, Demand Side Platforms fees are much lower than those of ad networks’ tools and integrations.
There are 4 types of Demand Side Platform programmatic buys: Preferred Deal (no auction and non-guaranteed inventory, set CPM), Programmatic Guaranteed (guaranteed inventory, set CPM, no auction), Private Marketplace (RTB, price floor), and Open Exchange Buy (RTB, set CPM).
