Finding the best demand side platform for your business could be a real challenge. Which one do you choose? What makes one DSP better than the other? Often times these questions and answers cause a lot the debate in the marketing world. Here we will discuss all the best demand side platforms to consider for your agency or business.
How To Evaluate The Best Demand Side Platforms
A DSP (Demand Side Platform) is a self-service media buying platform that serves ads across the internet and publishers. Demand side platforms are the foundation for marketing with programmatic advertising.
Key areas to consider when evaluating DSPs:
- Unique Value – The key value the platform bring to the marketplace
- User ID Graph – The level of granularity in the audience data available to target
- Inventory – The total available impressions and audience availability
- Integration – Ability to connect reporting, ad tech, and APIs
- Measurement – Level of full funnel measure (Pixels, website attribution, offline attribution)
- Audiences – Audience value and diversification
1. Amazon DSP
The Amazon Advertising Demand Side Platform is the perfect solution for brands looking to take advantage of first party audience data and e commerce intent. Since 81% of the entire US population has an amazon account, the demand side platform has a plethora of audience segments for brands to align their marketing strategies.
In addition to an amazing user ID graph, Amazon’s DSP integrations and measurement set their DSP significantly a part from other competitors. For example, Amazon’s DSP is the only demand side platform to offer full funnel offline attribution directly integrated through the Amazon Marketing Cloud.
This ensures that regardless of whether you advertise with display, over-the-top, or streaming audio. Measuring media exposure to offline attribution is as easy as running the actual media.
2. Google’s Display & Video 360
Google’s DV360 is definitely a force to reckon with. After all most of the programmatic advertising did start with Google. However, over the years they have made mistakes that have allows competitors like Amazon build a much stronger programmatic DSP platform.
DV360 excels in its ability to capture search intent on Google and funnel that intent across display & YouTube. However, the quality of their audiences are up for debate. Specific industries may want to evaluate whether or not Google is indeed the best DSP to deliver media.
Since Google does have a market-leading advantage they have built a lot of integrations that allow for flexibility in reporting. However, they do not have the strongest offline attribution which leads them to be just begin the Amazon DSP.
3. Adobe’s Demand Side Platform
Many marketers are unaware that Adobe was actually a first mover in the CTV (Connected TV) space. If you look into the Adobe DSP you will find they do boast some significant opportunities. Such as their recent ability self serve ads on DOOH (digital out of home) campaigns. However, we are still not convinced that their push towards “people-based marketing” truly boasts the advantage of having strong audiences.
A key decision in putting Adobe in 3rd is that despite having the ability to place ads across multiple tactics, the audiences available on the DSP simply do not live up to the level that Google and Amazon could provide.
Conclusion
Amazon DSP by far is the strongest option for both agencies and businesses to deliver media to high intent audiences while maintaining the ability to measure media exposure full funnel. As the market continues to evolve in the programmatic space, it will be interesting to see where brands decide to invest their media dollars and which demand side platform will become the preferred choice.
