Programmatic advertising has grown a lot recently, and it is projected to reach close to $100 billion in 2022 on advertising in the United States alone. Last year around the world programmatic advertising spending reached $150 billion. Let’s find out how this marketing tool works and explore the best software advertising platforms that can help your business achieve great marketing results.
Programmatic advertising is helping marketers get relevant customers throughout their way to purchase, effectively accelerating conversion and increasing revenue. Reduced advertising costs, better optimization, improved ad management are benefits of programmatic ads.
For those people who want to invest in programmatic advertising, the first thing that they need to do is to determine the relevant platform for partnership.
Choosing the right programming platform will help you effectively manage your advertising investments.
In this article we will compare these platforms based on several criteria, such as prices, quality of advertising inventory, audience targeting, and anti-fraud measures.
Table of contents
What do we call Programmatic Advertising?
To put it simply, programmatic advertising is a tool that uses automation for buying digital advertising space. This doesn’t refer to manual advertising, which depends on the interaction between publishers and marketers.
Data analysis and advanced algorithms of programmatic ads help to serve relevant users at the right time, in the right place and at the right price. This advertising system is profitable because it happens in real time, allowing advertisers to compete for advertising space more effectively.
The mechanism behind Programmatic Advertising
Further steps may look sophisticated, but the entire process takes seconds thanks to the real-time bidding feature associated with this type of ads. Here’s a short review of how programmatic advertising works.
- Potential customers visit a website.
- The owner of website grabs the impression and puts it up for auction, including relevant data about the website visitor by means of the Supply-Side Platform – (SSP)
- Advertisers bid for this impression with the help of the demand-side platform (DSP)
- Then the impression will be transferred to the advertiser who offered the biggest price, whose ad will be shown to the visitor.
What categories of platforms exist?
Programmatic advertising сan be categorized in four main branches: Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), Ad Exchanges, and Data Management Platforms (DMPs).
Advertisers use DSPs to bid for digital ad space. Publishers make use of SSPs for selling their ad spaces. An ad exchange connects advertisers and publishers with the help of platforms. A DMP collects all kinds of data related to an advertiser’s relevant customer.
What are the most popular DSPs?
A DSP gives an opportunity for advertisers to bid for ad impressions on publisher websites. It also helps advertisers to filter their target audience based on specific filters, for example, location, age, gender, and more.
Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP
Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP is the only omnichannel DSP that supports connected TV, video, display, native, audio, and search campaigns. Adobe, a leader in advertising technology, provides tools that help advertisers launch, manage, and optimize campaigns. These features are associated with inventory management, personalized marketing, and search management.
How much: Individual. Prices depend on various factors, such as the size of the company, requirements, and the number of instruments purchased
Supported advertising inventory: Display, Video, Audio, Mobile Applications, Digital Advertising Outside the Home (DOOH), Television, Native and Social
Audience targeting: audience segment, device type, location, browser, and more
Security Measures: Offers page checking to detect faulty inventory and pre-bid filtering to detect
MediaMath
MediaMath is one of the earliest DSPs in the industry.
Today, the company deals with more than 3000 advertisers and helps them conduct multi-channel campaigns on mobile devices, in the field of display, OTT, native, video, audio, and other devices.
Mediamath was created to help advertisers better optimize supply routes and algorithmic decision-making. MediaMath is also recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in the field of advertising technologies.
How much: the price is Custom
Supported Advertising Inventory: Connected TV, Display, Mobile Phone, Video, Audio, Native and DOOH
Audience targeting: audience segment, context, first-person data, list of sites, location, part of the day, technology, video and audio.
Security Measures: Leverages its ORIGINAL ecosystem to ensure trust in the supply chain through pre-application protection and adaptation tools.
AdRoll
Users love AdRoll for the simplicity and quality of ad templates.
The platform is created to help brands expand their reach through video, social advertising, media, native advertising, email, and more.
Recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant in advertising technology, AdRoll uses a wide range of data to search for a relevant customer.
How much: Offers a free package for beginners, as well as an individual price package for business
Supported advertising inventory: video, social advertising, display, native and email
Audience targeting: Contextual, lookalike, demographic, by interests, and CRM targeting
Security measures: Has a trust and security team for automatic and manual filtering of invalid traffic.
What are the most popular SSPs?
SSP focuses on helping publishers (website owners) sell advertising space in their applications, websites.
These platforms use automation to determine the optimal price for each ad placement and sell to the best bidder. SSPs work with advertising networks to connect publishers with a wider range of advertisers.
Let’s take a look at some of the leading SSPs in the industry.
PubMatic
PubMatic is helping media buyers and publishers. As an SSP, it provides tools for publishers to optimize the monetization potential of all their digital assets.
This includes headline betting tools, RTB advertising, private marketplace (PP) and ad quality.
Supported Advertising Inventory: CTV, OTT, Display, Video, Addressable, Mobile, Native and more
Security measures for Publishers: Real-time user scanning and strategic partnership to protect the publisher’s audience in various advertising formats, channels and screens.
Google Ad Manager
Google is the most popular SSP among publishers, occupying 51% of the industry’s market share.
Google Ad Manager works mainly for large publishers with significant direct sales.
Some of the tools it offers include managed PMP, an advanced dashboard and reporting system, and other features.
Supported advertising inventory: video, mobile, media and native.
Security Measures for Publishers: Google supports popular security standards, initiatives and protocols such as IAB ads.txt a standard, secure frame and HTTPS to protect against inappropriate advertising and unacceptable actions
Criteo
Criteo is a retail media service that offers publishers to monetize their website content through the use of third-party data and audiences.
Criteo makes its services available to publishers with less traffic. This service focuses more on retargeting.
Supported advertising inventory: social networks, video, display, web and mobile devices
Security Measures for Publishers: Criteo has advanced image recognition technology to filter unsafe content from publishers’ digital properties.
Top of advertising exchanges
Advertising exchanges can be determined as a mediator between advertisers and publishers. Publishers use the advertising exchanges to send advertising impressions, which are then provided to advertisers for bidding in real time.
Here are some of the ad exchanges we would like to draw attention to.
Xandr
Xandr is a leading advertising service offering a full stack of programmatic advertising services. This means it works as a DSP, SSP, and an Ad Exchange.
With its header bidding wrapper, Xandr makes its service more convenient and efficient for publishers. The platform supports different ad inventory, including video, banner, audio, native, and more.
Xander as a partner of White Ops, an MRC-accredited company, ensures brand safety across its marketplace.
SmartyAds
SmartyAds also serves as a full-stack programmatic ad tech platform, offering services as a DSP and SSP to both advertisers and publishers.
The platform is compatible with a wide range of traffic types and ad formats, including video, banner, audio, native, push, pop, and more.
SmartyAds has security and anti-fraud features and partnerships to make the marketplace safer for publishers and advertisers.
PubMatic
We have already mentioned PubMatic thanks to its great capabilities as a full-stack ad tech platform.
As an ad exchange, PubMatic became a leader in the industry with over 171 billion ad impressions per day. Publishers note the following advantages such as ease-of-use, DMP integrations, and open-source header bidding.
PubMatic possesses various security tools to prevent fraudulent practices and ensure brand safety.
Data Management Platforms (DMPs)
DMP is less talked about in advertising tech, but they are no less important. Advertisers use all kinds of data when developing a campaign strategy to make sure that their addresses match their potential and relevant customers.
DSPs automatically place bids on ad spaces on the marketplace, but to ensure that the purchased ads are targeted at the right audience, these platforms use data provided by the DMPs.
Publishers, on the other hand, use DMPs to store and analyze user data to better understand visitors to their website.
Here are the top DMPs in the industry.
Audience Studio by Salesforce
Salesforce is famous for its CRM system. The company also offers a data management platform for advertisers.
Formerly known as Salesforce DMP, Audience Studio allows advertisers to collect data from any source using machine learning algorithms. It has a built-in consent management system that helps advertisers maintain transparency and trust with their customers
Lotame
Lotame is a leading DMP that has a range of services, including audience management and data marketplace.
It allows its users to access first-party data from sources like emails, CRMs, social media, apps, and more. It also provides the opportunity to expand on available data through its data marketplace.
Lotame’s DMP, however, lacks live reporting features and loads relatively slowly.
theTradeDesk
theTradeDesk offers a DMP and a DSP to help advertisers and publishers collect, manage, and activate their data in one place.
The service is famous for its lookalike modeling which allows you to discover new audiences based on insights from your existing audiences. It also offers a data marketplace where users can access high-quality audiences from data providers.
TheTradeDesk is actively expanding in the DMP sector. For example, TikTok and theTradeDesk launched a partnership not long ago. This collaboration will drive more brands to the platform and stimulate the growth of advertising on TikTok.
Conclusion
The Internet is a huge space filled with hundreds of millions of user data every day. Advertisers and publishers have access to a large amount of this data from an ever-growing list of sources. Leading brands are recognized for their ability to make effective decisions using the data at their disposal.
Zeydoo is an affiliate network with private offers from PropellerAds advertisers. We offer multiple revenue models and are highly competitive in each and every one of them. Currently, we focus on CPA, CPL, CPS, and CPI.
We really hope that the world of Programmatic ads has become much clearer. Zeydoo team stays in touch with you, we are ready to answer your questions any time. Join us today to start promoting offers that were previously available only for top companies in the market.
