Features to Look Before Choosing a Demand Side Platform

Demand Side Platform is your tool to ensure that your digital ad campaigns are targeting the right audience over reliable ad networks at a cost-effective bid. Well, that sounds like a responsibility for one software program. So, if you are looking to buy a Demand Side Platform (DSP), make sure that you are choosing the one that can handle those responsibilities.

Here are some of the basic features that your Demand Side Platform should have:

1. Audience Targeting Options

That’s pretty basic, but an important one. Over the DSP, you might be running different marketing campaigns, including branding, user acquisition, and retargeting, which will require you to reach new as well as existing userbase. Moreover, depending on the solutions or products that you offer, the dependencies on the regions, demographics, and other audience insights become even more important.

Audience targeting options available in your DSP should be rich enough to allow you to reach the right audience. A great part of your DSP’s targeting potential relies on the ad partners it has.

2. Campaign Management

Not only agencies but even advertisers have to run multiple campaigns. One simple example could be the one discussed above where you might have different campaign goals, such as branding, UA, or retargeting. To make the campaign more effective you can run campaigns in a different language for different regions and across platforms/formats. With so many campaigns on your plate, a DSP that offer your simplistic management for all is a necessity.

Being able to plan, build, and track different campaigns within the same interface will mean that you save a lot of time and effort. Always look for the DSP that enables you to manage all the campaigns in a single interface or dashboard.

3. Bidding Strategies

We can all agree that it is the job Demand Side Platform to automate the bidding process to enhance the campaign performance. However, DSPs may take some time to experiment and learn about your campaign requirements. Therefore, the capability of a DSP to work on different bidding strategies add to its worth.

Even in the automation era, an advertiser would like to experiment with some of the different bidding strategies to train the DSP better. So, choose a DSP that offers several options, such as fixed price, dynamic, and other options on which it can figure out the most efficient ones for different ad partners.

4. Real-time Analytics

It is understandable that the entire campaign data may not be available in real-time as data points take time and volume of responses to build. To observe trends, periodic behavior of the consumer, and for such reasons, you can wait. However, some necessities may need some spontaneous actions.

For them, campaign tracking has to be available in real-time. You should be able to see how your budget is being spent, what's working, and what needs change. Based on such insights, you can make effective business decisions in real-time to boost your campaign performance.

5. Access to Premium Inventory

A premium inventory refers to high-quality ad impressions that are relevant to your target audience. Unless your tool is capable of reaching the right audience, your campaign performance will not drive profitability. So, it makes access to premium inventory a feature on which you can't compromise.

A Demand Side Platform doesn't own the inventory (mostly), but it can access it by interacting with ad exchanges, ad networks, DMPs, and SSPs. However, it is critical to note that your definition of premium inventory may not be the same as other advertisers. Analyze the ad inventory for your requirements. You can ask for the case studies of the advertisers in the same domain for that.

Final Note

The features listed here are some of the basic features that you need to look for. Lookalike audience modeling, Artificial Intelligence-driven, transparency, DMP integration, and payment models are some other key features that you can consider. There are more features that you would like to consider depending on your campaign requirements, like size, platform, objective, budget, and so on.

The recommended practice to pick the DSP is by shortlisting the leading DSPs based on the abovementioned features and then comparing more features among them specific for your requirements.

Varsha Singh is a Digital Marketing professional from Bangalore at Affle India Pvt Ltd. I use my articles to provide quality content & tutorials to assist marketers.