Demand-side platform (DSP) is a system that enables digital and buyers to manage multiple ad inventory accounts through one interface. With DSP, digital advertisers can effectively control and maximize the impact of their advertising inventory.

Learn how to use it to your advantage!

DSP is a major trend in digital marketing.

Demand-Side Platform (DSP) is an application that allows you to purchase promotional ad spaces for running display campaigns on online publishing platforms. These properties could be video content, native ads, pop and push advertising formats etc. Advertisers buy online ad spaces via ad exchanges integrated with DSP and choose the suitable inventories based on a number of impressions. This is an automated process and works in real-time.

Why Educational Marketers Need to get Acquainted with Demand Side Platform

So, what are the reasons for which marketers prefer a demand-side platform?

Efficiently Manage Ad Bids and Performance Tracking

By utilizing a DSP, marketers can manage their bids for display banners and its costing in real-time. DSPs further enables advertisers to optimize ad inventory based on performance Indicators such as CPC and CPA.

DSPs provide a wide array of inventory for targeting ads and you can control and maximize their impact using only one interface. It also gives access to sophisticated data analysis and metrics to track the performance of your ads.

DSPs also help in retargeting users and make online media buying more efficient.

Reduces Ad Buying Time

The process of media buying through demand-side platforms is fast. Auctions for ad spaces is done in real-time and the appropriate ad space is sold to the highest bidder as per the campaign requirement.

Parallel access to more than one ad exchange enables advertisers to opt for the most suitable ad space for their campaigns. Therefore through DSPs, all media purchases are carried out quickly and efficiently.

Optimizes Audience Targeting

DSPs help advertisers to reach out to the appropriate audience through high-level targeting. Reaching out to the most effective audience ensures better campaign ROI. DSPs also provide protection from fraudulent ad impressions and ad click frauds using machine learning technology.

Comprehensive Campaign Reports

It is quite easy to analyse ad performance in DSP technology. All insights and data points can be pulled in real-time for detail analyses. This allows quick optimization of your digital ad campaigns.

How DSP simplifies the process

DSPs make the process easier by letting you buy digital inventory across websites. These web advertising properties are available as per your specific needs of targeting based on geographical and demographical profiling of your audience base.

By using DSP software, both your ad performance and advertising ROI improves.  Bidding takes place on impressions which further enhances your ad selection process.

DSP provides a single interface for sourcing multiple ad inventories from different publishers which means more targeting options on devices, such as a mobile, desktop, tablet.

With DSPs, advertisers are ensured complete transparency and safeguard from fraud clicks. They are fully aware of the platforms where their ads are running and can monitor progress at each stage of the process. DSPs help agencies to understand campaign effectiveness for better audience segmentation and targeting.

DSPs enhance the programmatic experience for marketers. By integrating technology in the programmatic process, demand-side platforms help marketers to run display campaigns in a very simplified manner.

suggestions for Marketers in Academia to Leverage DSP Technology

Mobile growth has resulted in the successful expansion of DSP technology among marketers.

With the rising number of mobile users and cross-device platforms, marketers in all industry domains including education can quickly shift towards DSP advertising. Currently, programmatic display ad spending is expected to rise in the next few years.

For digital marketers considering a quick shift to DSP should take a closer look at its benefits and relevance as a new advertising tool. Not only DSP is an efficient and transparent tool for running ad campaigns, but it also gives marketers better control in each step of the process.

Most importantly, marketers can efficiently allocate their budgets using real-time analytics. There is always an opportunity to modify the campaign in real-time, depending on the response you get.

DSP is a premium media buying technology platform for performance marketers. DSP gives you an advantage by automating the whole account management process.

Planning your campaign with DSP is a very important part of the campaign creation process. Things like bid floor, average win price, available traffic etc. are all crucial to know for successful testing of the campaign.

Your budget spending strategy should be smooth which means that your daily budget spending should be evenly distributed across the day to avoid overspending in a shorter duration of the day.

Ideally, one Ad Exchange per campaign should be the strategy. As the response rate varies from device to device, you need to split your campaign accordingly.

A DSP campaign creative should be created as per the requirements of Ad Exchange. Custom banners should be tested frequently. Be aware of the image specifications of the ad exchange like caption character limit, image dimensions etc. Later as per the response, non-performing elements can be removed. Keep experimenting with targeting options, creative sizes and spend strategy to optimize your ad performance.

Summary

DSP is not that difficult to begin if you know what to do, where to do and when to do.

With DSP technology you don’t need any external tracking mechanism to assess your ad performance. However, you should be aware of a few important aspects of the demand side platform advertising mechanism. These could be aspects related to Ad Exchange policies, DSP planning tool etc. Besides as a digital advertiser, you should be familiar with DSP terminology like average win price and bid floor, targeting criteria etc.

If you want to get more efficiency from your digital ad campaigns by taking advantage of a demand-side platform, always be ready with at least 5 creatives to see what is working and what does not.

So what are you waiting for? Those who still haven’t tried DSP are missing out on a valuable prospect to carve a niche for themselves in an already crowded digital advertising space.

Further Readings:

How Technology Can Affect Front Line Services in Academia

Understanding the Role of Data Analytics in Marketing of Academic Brands

SEO For Universities & Institutions