The most popular programmatic advertising platforms of 2022
Programmatic advertising has grown tremendously lately, and is projected to reach nearly $100 billion in ad spending in the U.S. alone in 2022. Last year, worldwide, programmatic ad spending reached $150 billion. Let's learn how this marketing tool works and explore the best programmatic advertising platforms that can help your business achieve strong marketing results.
Programmatic advertising helps marketers get relevant customers all the way to purchase, effectively accelerating conversions and increasing revenue. Reduced advertising costs, better optimization, and improved ad management are all benefits of programmatic advertising.
For those people who want to invest in programmatic advertising, the first thing they need to do is determine the appropriate platform to partner with. Choosing the right programmatic platform will help you effectively manage your advertising investment.
In this article, we will compare these platforms based on several criteria, such as pricing, quality of ad inventory, audience targeting and anti-fraud measures.
What do we call programmatic advertising?
Simply put, programmatic advertising is a tool that uses automation to buy digital ad space. It doesn't refer to manual advertising, which depends on interaction between publishers and marketers.
Data analytics and advanced algorithms in programmatic advertising help serve relevant users at the right time, in the right place and at the right price. This advertising system is profitable because it occurs in real time, allowing advertisers to compete more effectively for ad space.
The mechanism behind Programmatic Advertising
The next steps may look complicated, but the entire process takes seconds thanks to the real-time bidding feature associated with this type of advertising. Here's a quick overview of how programmatic advertising works.
Potential customers visit the website.
The site owner captures the impression and auctions it, including relevant data about the site visitor through the Supply-Side Platform - (SSP).
Advertisers bid on that impression using the Demand Side Platform (DSP).
The impression will then be passed to the advertiser with the highest bid, whose ad will be shown to the visitor.
What categories of platforms exist?
Programmatic advertising can be divided into four main branches: demand platforms (DSPs), bid platforms (SSPs), ad exchanges and data management platforms (DMPs).
Advertisers use DSPs to bid for digital ad space. Publishers use SSPs to sell their ad space. The ad exchange connects advertisers and publishers through platforms. DMPs collect all kinds of data related to an advertiser's relevant customers.
What are the most popular DSPs?
DSP enables advertisers to bid for ad impressions on publisher sites. It also helps advertisers filter target audiences based on certain filters, such as location, age, gender, etc.
Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP
Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP is the only omni-channel DSP that supports connected campaigns on TV, video, display, native, audio and search. Adobe, a leader in advertising technology, provides tools to help advertisers launch, manage and optimize campaigns. These features relate to inventory management, personalized marketing and search management.
How much: Individually. Pricing depends on various factors, such as company size, requirements and number of tools 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 validation to detect bad inventory and pre-bid filtering to detect
MediaMath is one of the very first DSPs in the industry. Today, the company works with more than 3,000 advertisers and helps them run multi-channel campaigns across mobile, display, OTT, native, video, audio and other devices.
Mediamath was created to help advertisers better optimize delivery routes and algorithmic decision-making. MediaMath is also recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for advertising technology.
How much: The price is custom
Supported advertising inventory: Connected TV, display, mobile, video, audio, native and DOOH
Audience focus: Audience segment, context, first-person data, site list, location, part of the day, technology, video and audio.
Security Measures: Uses its ORIGINAL ecosystem to ensure trust in the supply chain with security tools and pre-application adaptations.
Users love AdRoll for the simplicity and quality of its advertising templates. The platform is designed 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 for advertising technology, AdRoll uses a wide range of data to find relevant customers.
How much: Offers a free package for newbies as well as a custom pricing package for businesses
Supported advertising inventory: video, social advertising, display, native advertising and email
Audience Targeting: Contextual, lookalike, demographic, interest-based and CRM targeting.
Security Measures: Has a trust and security team to automatically and manually filter out invalid traffic.
What are the most popular SSPs?
SSPs focus on helping publishers (website owners) sell advertising space in their applications, websites.
These platforms use automation to determine the best price for each ad space and sell to the best bidder. SSPs work with ad networks to connect publishers with a wider range of advertisers.
Let's take a look at some of the top SSPs in the industry.
PubMatic helps media buyers and publishers. As an SSP, it provides tools for publishers to optimize the monetization potential of all their digital assets.
This includes tools for headline bidding, RTB advertising, private marketplace (PP) and ad quality.
Supported advertising inventory: CTV, OTT, Display, Video, Addressable, Mobile, Native and others.
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Security Measures for Publishers: Real-time user scanning and strategic partnerships to protect publisher audiences across ad formats, channels and screens.
Google Ad Manager.
Google is the most popular SSP among publishers, accounting for 51% of the industry's market share.
Google Ad Manager works primarily for large publishers with significant direct sales. Some of the tools it offers include a 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 the IAB ads.txt standard, secure frame and HTTPS to protect against inappropriate ads and inappropriate actions.
Criteo is a retail media service that offers publishers to monetize their sites' content through the use of third-party data and audiences.
Criteo provides its services to publishers with less traffic. This service is more focused on retargeting.
Supported advertising inventory: Social media, video, displays, web and mobile.
Security measures for publishers: Criteo uses advanced image recognition technology to filter out unsafe content on publishers' digital resources.
Top Ad Exchanges
Ad exchanges can be defined as the intermediary between advertisers and publishers. Publishers use ad exchanges to submit ad impressions, which are then made available to advertisers for real-time bidding.
Here are some ad exchanges we'd like to look at.
Xandr is a leading ad service that offers a full stack of programmatic advertising services. This means that it operates as a DSP, SSP and ad exchange.
With its headline bidding wrapper, Xandr makes its services more convenient and efficient for publishers. The platform supports a variety of advertising inventory, including video, banners, audio, native ads and more.
Xander, as an MRC-accredited White Ops partner, provides brand security on its marketplace.
BidsCube is also a full-featured programmatic advertising technology platform offering DSP and SSP services to both advertisers and publishers.
The platform is compatible with a wide range of traffic types and ad formats, including video, banners, audio, native, push, pop and more.
BidsCube has security and fraud protection features and partnerships to make the marketplace safer for publishers and advertisers.
We've already mentioned PubMatic because of its extensive capabilities as a full-featured ad tech platform.
As an ad exchange, PubMatic has become an industry leader with more than 171 billion ad impressions per day. Publishers point to advantages such as ease of use, DMP integration and open-source header bidding.
PubMatic has various security tools to prevent fraud and ensure brand safety.
Data Management Platforms (DMPs)
DMPs are less talked about in advertising technology, but they are just as important. Advertisers use all kinds of data when developing campaign strategies to make sure their addresses are relevant and relevant to their potential customers.
DSPs automatically bid on ad space in the marketplace, but to make sure the ads they buy are targeted to the right audience, these platforms use data provided by DMPs. Publishers, on the other hand, use DMPs to store and analyze user data to better understand their site visitors.
Here are the best DMPs in the industry.
Audience Studio from Salesforce
Salesforce is known 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 is a leading DMP that offers a number of services, including audience management and data marketplace.
It allows its users to access first-party data from sources such as email, CRM, social media, apps and more. It also provides the ability to expand the data available through its data marketplace.
However, Lotame's DMP lacks live reporting features and is relatively slow to load.
theTradeDesk
TheTradeDesk offers a DMP and DSP to help advertisers and publishers collect, manage and activate their data in one place.
The service is known for its lookalike modeling, which allows you to discover new audiences based on data about 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 began a partnership not long ago. This collaboration will attract more brands to the platform and drive advertising growth on TikTok.
The Internet is a huge space filled with hundreds of millions of user data every day. Advertisers and publishers have access to a wealth 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.
We really hope that the world of Programmatic ads has become much clearer. The BidsCube team stays in touch with you and we're available to answer your questions anytime. Join us today to start promoting offers that were previously only available to top companies in the market.
See you at BidsCube!