With technologies coming into our lives and work, especially, it can be hard to catch up with all these terms and abbreviations that they bring along. The industry of advertising is not exclusion. Such notions as Demand-Side Platform (DSP), Supply-Side Platform (SSP), Ad Exchange, Ad Network, and Programmatic have been introduced to marketing a long time ago but even today, at the end of 2019, not everyone on the market and from outside of it understands fully what they mean and what are the differences among them. So let’s untangle you.
Programmatic
The programmatic advertising platform is the way of buying and selling advertising, where a computerized system is involved. Bids for sales of advert space on websites are done through a system, which collects information about this inventory in own database, to make it simpler for all participants to make their trade.
Ad Network
Ad Network is a media company or a batch/group of them, which sells the advert space on websites that they work with to advertisers, for a fixed price. The work is not automated and a lot of contracts are signed on paper with many people involved. This is an old, low effective, costly but still undead method of work.
Ad Exchange
Ad Exchange is the automated website, which collects a lot of information about advert space on sites for sale – from Ad Networks, other sites, and platforms, as well as having own clients directly registered on this exchange with their offers – and sells it automatically to buyers. The process of sales may be programmatic direct or RTB (Real-Time Bidding), which in either way has a lot of pluses, such as fastness of the trade process, lower prices of each ad impression, and a big number of trades that are executed per one unit of time. It may be called an industry aggregator and one of the places where a ton of information is hosted – which is then distributed to other online resources.
Demand-Side Platform (DSP)
DSP is a type of information platforms, where advertisers – buyers – dwell. They can see here information gathered from Ad Exchanges and Ad Networks in a single interface, which is convenient for them. It is possible to buy, manage, and plan advertising spaces using either programmatic direct either RTB.
Supply-Side Platform (SSP)
It is the same informational system as DSP only for owners of sites – which provide advert spaces for sale. Here they can upload, sell, and manage the inventory that they have in a convenient manner, with stats and everything other needed for work. The same as in DSP, in SSP, a lot of information is collected from many places and is available in one interface convenient for a user.
Each of the mentioned systems has own benefits and limitations, and we are highlighting them briefly below.
Ad Network’s benefit: the inventory is bought and sold centralized, without a need to go to every individual site.
Ad Network’s limitations:
- a limited reporting and it is impossible to know the entire information about the site that you are interested in (such info is usually masked or unavailable)
- fixed price of all ad impressions – even though they differ in quality
- no automation.
Ad Exchange’s benefits: transparency, big bidding environment, and data segmentation.
Ad Exchange’s limitation: you only work with the inventory of this platform, without access to others.
DSP and SSP ad networks benefits:
- many sources of information
- ability to choose from
- non-fixed price
- big degree of transparency
- data segmentation.
DSP and SSP online advertising networks limitation: as such systems are overwhelmed with information and participants (as well as reporting), it is hard to learn nuances of using them with a little time. So effective work on such platforms starts only after some initial learning.
Now you know the differences amongst the DSP and Ad Network, as well as informed about SSP and Ad Exchange advertising platform and can choose the better approach to buying and selling inventory.