Within the context of programmatic advertising nowadays Supply Side Platforms (SSPs), together with Demand Side Platforms (DSPs), play a major role. Thanks to their artificial intelligence technology they make advertisers and publishers’ lives a lot easier in the context of app install campaigns and programmatic advertising. Here is everything you need to know about what a SSP really is.
What is an SSP (Supply Side Platform)?
An SSP is a platform or software that holds publisher’s ad space information and manages a publisher’s ad impression inventory across multiple ad exchanges and allows publishers to sell various ad types for app install campaigns including display, video and natives at different prices.
They optimize the sales of a publisher’s media space, they automate the selling and managing of their advertising inventory on the web and also on mobile devices. Basically, Supply Side Platforms together with publishers represent the supply side of the exchange, while DSPs and advertisers are the demand side.
Prior to Supply Side Platforms and programmatic advertising, publishers manually and independently managed and sold their ad space, but this did not guarantee that the ad space would all be filled.
In the beginning, Supply Side Platforms were used by publishers to fill their remaining ad inventory at lower prices. Today, SSPs play a very important role and are responsible for the programmatic sale of all advertising inventory.
Why is a SSP (Supply Side Platform) important?
Supply Side Platforms play a major role in the programmatic advertising ecosystem.
In the framework of app install campaigns, Supply Side Platforms make the publisher-seller relationship much easier. Because they are able to send available ad impressions to as many potential buyers as possible, they can sell ad impressions to more than one ad exchange at a time and sell the publisher's inventory at the best possible price.
Supply Side Platforms offer advertisers the ability to buy ad impressions on many different publisher websites and mobile apps, all of which are based on key user identifiers and online behaviors and therefore targeted to specific users.
The publisher's SSP offers its impressions available, and advertisers can see information about visitors and based on that make an offer to place their ads on those sites. At this point it's the advertiser's DSP's turn to analyze the impressions in real time.
The result of this process is the fact that you get ads placed in the right place and shown to the right users and it all happens in full transparency.
Without Supply Side Platforms and programmatic advertising publishers would be limited to a small set of advertisers; automation, instead, allows them to manage a huge number of bids together.
What you need to know about SSPs (Supply Side Platforms)
- In the world of programmatic advertising, SSPs represent a huge help for publishers since they sell their ad placement through ad exchanges;
- Using a SSP, your ad fill rates will not only increase but also be as high as possible;
- An SSP chooses the bid with the best price, and this raises the market reputation of a publisher’s website and app;
- Supply Side Platforms allow publishers to have more control over the pricing.
