How to Improve Your Display Campaign with a Demand-Side Platform

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Reaching your ideal customer these days is easier than ever. In the past, marketers struggled with manual order insertion, lengthy and often unproductive meetings, contract discussions that could last for ages. But anymore. The process of ad buying and selling is now transformed thanks to the growth of demand-side and supply-side platforms. The new adtech developments help to create ultra-focused campaigns almost instantly. Here’s how it works.

Using a demand-side ad platform, advertisers acquire search, video, and mobile ads from the available publishers. This helps to easily manage campaigns in real-time across multiple networks. Instead of logging in and out Google AdWords, forward-thinking marketers use the demand-side platform (DSP) to automate the mundane tasks and focus on creativity. But that’s not all that programmatic advertising can offer.

To personalize the marketing message and enable better targeting, demand-side platform software uses real-time bidding and contextual placing of the ads using complex algorithms. All the marketer has to do is to specify who the ads are aiming at, what’s the budget, and the bidding process begins. AI-powered algorithms use browsing history, location, and time of the day to calculate which particular ad will be displayed to the user.

Thanks to automation and precise personalization, programmatic is exploding in popularity. According to eMarketer, nearly 85% of all display advertising is bought and sold programmatically, while MarketWatch predicts 26.3% revenue growth for the platforms in the next four years.

What attracts marketers is the independence of their ad buying and selling. Instead of being tied to Google Display Network or Facebook Ads, by using DSP solutions, they can manage, purchase, and analyze ad performance across several networks from one location. Thanks to being cross-platform, DSP instantly gives marketers all the data they need to make a decision when buying ads from a particular publisher, including digital streaming platforms. Instead of lengthy meetings, advertisers can instantly communicate with a supply-side platform using an ad exchange. On the other side of the deal, publishers use supply-side platforms to list their available ad inventory and communicate with DSPs informing of the cost of ad placements.

Advantages of demand-side platforms

Before you start using – and investing – in a DSP solution, it’s worth to sum up all the pros and cons of this advertising buying approach. Let’s start with the bright side.

Benefit #1. Time savings. If you are running campaigns on several ad networks, DSP saves you time and effort allowing you to manage all ads conveniently from one platform.

Benefit #2. Easier data management. You can import your ad data from your own CRM or use information supplied by third-party data providers.

Benefit #3: Precise targeting. Thanks to ample data access, accurate targeting allows serving better-personalized ads that result in higher conversions.

Benefit #4: Premium inventory. Demand-side platforms offer access not just to major networks but also to hand-picked leading publishers. It’s a good idea to check the scope of inventory before making a decision, though.

Of course, the move to a DSP platform can mean a sizable investment. That’s why the common practice is to stay with the conventional Google Display Network unless your advertising budget is less than $5,000 per month.

If you are looking to take your marketing stack to the next level, a demand-side platform is your logical step ahead. In addition to the efficiency and time savings, you will enjoy a wider choice of publishers and ad inventory of several ad exchanges at once. Even with the initial cost and a learning curve, a leading DSP will help you see the results you are aiming for.