Client behaviour has evolved with time and much more focus has been put on audience reach and performance then just mere volume. Now when this change was observed by publishers, they realised that they could not keep 100% of their inventories with the sales team. So they kept 60% of their inventories with the sales team and 40% of their inventories were listed with something called as Exchanges or Supply Side Platforms.
SSPs are Technology Platforms who supply inventories. They are like a reservoir of inventories, impressions and ad requests. They are softwares which are used to sell inventories in an automated matter. Some examples are Google doubleclick and AdMob.
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But do agencies have the technology to buy these inventories from these exchanges? The answer is no. So this is where the DSP or Demand Side Platforms come into picture.
DSPs are technology platforms which create a demand of inventories in the market. Agencies turn to these technology platforms in order to carry out automated buying of inventories. The inventories which have been listed out in SSPs someone has to buy them right and too using intelligence and automation! So this is what the DSP helps in.
DSPs buy or bid for the inventories from SSPs or exchanges on real time basis. They connect to inventory sources like Google doubleclick, calculate bid and make decisions on buying for advertisers.
After that they collect audience data for analysis from multiple sources like Data Management Platforms. They also collect campaign action feedback from the agency or the advertiser. Then they optimize bids by utilizing precise targeting, frequency capping and retargeting methods. Their role also includes things like campaign performance tracking and reporting. Some common DSPs are Mediamath, Doubleclick Bid Manager(DBM), Rubicon, AppNexus, Criterio, Tubemogual, etc.
But as we saw earlier, inventories were not only bought in terms of volume but now a lot of things were kept in mind like performance. But how would these inventories be read? So in order to provide audience data to read inventories provided by the SSPs or exchanges, DSPs turn to softwares called DMPs or Data Management Platforms.
Also Read: Development of Programmatic Audience Buying
As mentioned earlier, DSPs cannot read inventories. DSPs can only buy inventories. But to buy audiences, one needs to read inventories in terms of cookie ids, geo location etc. Every impression has lot multiple data points like device id, cookie id, IDFA. These are just some metrics which are attached to each impression. The DMP reads all of this data and concludes about the audience behaviour.
Data is read, reported and published by the DMPs. DMPs also sell the derived data. This is done because agencies cannot produce their own data so they turn to third party platforms like DMPs and DSPs to bid for their inventories.
By Ankita Mundhra