What is Demand Side Platform? How Does It Work?

Sridaran Baskaran
6 Min Read
Demand side platform structure

Demand Side Platform or DSP is one of the essential components in programmatic advertising. In short, Supply Side Platforms help the publishers to sell their ad inventories for a good price. Otherside, Demand Side Platforms support the advertisers in buying suitable ad inventories at a good price. In this post, you will learn about the demand side platform, how demand side platform works and what are the advantages of demand side platform.

What is Demand Side Platform?

The definition for a demand side platform is that the demand side platform is a software that has the automatic buying capability to buy advertising spaces for advertisers. Demand Side Platform supports real-time bidding [Programmatic Bidding]. Demand Side Platforms are commonly used by advertisers to buy ad inventories in an automatic way.

Demand Side Platform helps advertisers to buy ad spaces from different ad exchanges, Ad Networks and SSPs in an automated way. Also, DSPs are providing many features to the advertisers such as audience targeting, contextual targeting, and reporting etc. DSP never purchases any inventory instead it acts as an interface and with this interface, advertisers can access many inventories. So Demand Side Platform can be called as Advertiser Side Platform.

How Does Demand Side Platforms Work?

If any advertiser needs to show their digital advertisement on a third party website or third party mobile application, they need to sign with the demand side platform. Then they need to setup an ad campaign and set their targeting per their expectation. Usually, demand side platform connect with various ad exchanges. Ad exchanges are connected with various Server Side Platforms, Ad Networks.

Demand Side Platforms provide various features to advertisers. From the demand side platform, advertisers can set various targeting in order to buy exactly needed ad space.

demand side platform

For example, advertisers can set the following below targetings.

  1. Can set the frequency cap
  2. Can use the audience data available from many data providers
  3. Can target specific geo location
  4. Can connect with multiple ad exchanges
  5. Can target by contextual
  6. Can target by Device
  7. Can Whitelist or Black List the Sites/Apps
  8. Can use dayparting
Programmatic advertising structure

Once an ad campaign is live on all levels then it is ready to serve ads.

When the user refreshes the website, it loads all the codes and sends a request to the publisher hosting server to fetch the content. If the page contains ad code then it sends a request to the supply side platform. Then the request is forwarded to the Ad Exchange. Ad Exchanges are connected to many DSP’s and within that DSPs many advertisers setup their campaign to buy ad inventory.

Supply Side Platform helps the publishers to sell their ad inventory and Demand Side Platform helps the advertisers to buy the ad inventory to show their ads. Real Time Bidding auction happens at the Ad Exchanges. When the advertiser’s targeting matches with the publisher’s request advertiser participates in the auction. If many advertisers compete for the same ad inventory then an auction happens on Ad Exchange. The advertiser who bids higher will win that auction and show their advertisement on the winning ad inventory.

Demand Side Platform tracks the performance. How many impressions were served, How many clicks were received, How many actions were received, Impressions were served on which site/app, and like these many events can be trackable by the demand side platform.

Advantages of Demand Side Platform

All at one place : Managing campaigns at various networks is difficult to handle. But in DSP, the advertisers can manage many campaigns in one place and advertisers can purchase the ad inventory from various Ad Exchanges without any direct connection.

Targeting : By using DSP, the advertisers can able to target a group of people by Geo,Interest, Demo, Contextual, Retargeting etc

Data : Through DSP advertisers can access data from many third party data providers. Using third party data providers data, advertisers can reach the suitable audiences from their businesses.

Reporting : Tracking and Reporting are the main features of the demand side platform. Advertisers can track their campaign performance at various levels.

Conclusion

Demand Side Platform provide various features to advertiser when buying an ad inventory. In industry many demand side platforms are available. Based on your requirement and demand choose your demande side platform. In this article, you learned about the demand side platform. Hope, this information will help you to understand the programmatic advertising better.

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