A DSP or Demand Side Platform is a web server based software system that allows brands, agencies, app developers that buy advertising inventory from publishers to manage multiple Ad Exchange and Data Exchange accounts through a single unified interface. Essentially, with a DSP advertising solution, advertisers can bid on ads (banners, video, native and other types) and optimize ad performance based on eCPC (stands for effective Cost Per Click) and eCPM (stands for effective Cost Per Mile) Key Performance Indicators.
The value of the best DSP platforms lies in its transparency, the capacity to empower advertisers to manage lots of ads, bid real-time, track and optimize ads performance. With a DSP platform, and a mobile DSP in particular, they can buy mobile ad inventory across a wide range of publishers, through a single interface. Advertisers can see the market rate for every impression they buy, control which exchanges they want to buy across and how much they want to bid.
Demand Side Platform as a part of online advertising system
Source: Mobidea blog
In Q1, 2020 leading US online advertisers spent $763 million combined, with Disney leading the pack – spent at the beginning of this year $245 million, Amazon.com – $80 million and Procter & Gamble – $71 million.
Given the above-mentioned value of DSPs, it’s a small wonder that the digital advertising space is seeing a fierce competition among top players. The following table brings up a picture for the actual demand on the top DSP advertising platforms.
If you ever felt like you couldn’t quite answer yourself a question – what is a DSP, you are not alone. The next table is here to demonstrate the level of confusion among advertisers when it comes to what Demand Side Platform to choose to spend their advertising budget with. As you can see, unfortunately, less than one of four advertisers knows exactly what a DSP is and hence has a hard time choosing the right platform to work with.
Widespread confusion over platforms and their services
Source: AdvertisingPerceptions.com, Bidease
Once we’ve addressed a confusion among advertisers, let’s talk a bit about various kinds of Demand Side Platforms.
Top Mobile DSPs
- BidMind by Fiksu - Reach your ideal audience from the comfort of their living room with our programmatic media buying platform
- mediasmart - #1 DSP for Incremental growth
- Jampp - Unlock new growth
- Adikteev - Data-driven app marketing platform
- InMobi - Driving Real Connections
- Bidease - #1 DSP for mobile app marketers
- HUAWEI Ads - Mobile Marketing Platform tailored for HUAWEI devices
- AdPushup - Ad Revenue Optimization
- AdColony - The In-App Marketplace for Brands
Mobile DSPs are the next step in the evolution of advertising networks, they are designed to tackle many challenges of mobile advertising. These are include precise targeting and the need to deliver a message that is relevant to users and does not ruin their experience of using a mobile app or visiting a website. Recent advances in technology mean that mobile DSPs, can now track smartphone and tablet models, operating systems, screen size, location and more. The past couple years have seen a huge shift towards mobile programmatic buying, as advertisers begin to reap the rewards of sophisticated targeting and measurement capabilities.
Another special case for demand side platforms is a Video DSP. For the last several years video has been the fastest growing medium for advertising, with companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok are leading the field. This grow led to development of multiple ad formats to meet requirements of both desktop and mobile platforms. Vertical video ads on Snapchat are radically different from pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll video ads on Google’s YouTube.
How to choose a DSP Advertising platform
Not sure where to start? When choosing a DSP there are some key questions to consider: how many inventory sources does it access? Does that include app and mobile web inventory or both? A larger reach gives you the best chance of finding the most effective impressions. Which third-party data integrations does it offer? What targeting criteria is available? The success of programmatic campaigns depend largely on the strength of data available to target audiences. Finally, how sophisticated are its algorithms? The most effective automatic optimization will win the most bids at the most competitive prices.
To help you to make an informative decision on choosing the right DSP for desktop and mobile ad campaigns, we’ve gone through variety of DSP advertising platforms and picked the best ones for you. So here is the list of Top DSPs for 2020 and their key features.
List of mobile demand side platforms (DSPs) and bidders
| Employees | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 190.000 |
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2008 | 400 | $192m+ | 25k | 4m+ |
Founded in 2011, AdColony was created by mobile developers, for mobile developers and has grown into one of the largest mobile advertising and monetization platforms in the world with a reach of more than 1.5 billion users globally. AdColony is known for its exclusive Instant-Play™ HD video, Aurora™ HD Interactive video, and playable technologies, its global performance advertising expertise, its programmatic marketplace, and its extensive ad SDK footprint in the top apps worldwide.
- Mobile platforms: Android, IOS
- Campaign types: CPM
- Ad formats supported: Rich Media, Video
- Targeting: Demographic
- Key markets: US
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 70 | - | - | - |
Adikteev is the leading app re-engagement platform for performance-driven marketers.
We help the world’s top-spending app publishers increase retention, reacquire churned users and drive incremental revenue. App publishers in gaming, eCommerce, on-demand, services and entertainment rely on us to deliver made-to-measure strategies, creatives and algorithms.
By combining science and creativity, we deliver best-in-class playable and interactive ads paired with top retargeting tech. We believe in creating a unique strategy for each client based on data to provide measurable and transparent results that increase user LTV and fuel business growth.
Adikteev is #10 among Inc. Magazine’s Top 5000 fastest growing companies and ranked in the top retargeting partners of the world for two consecutive years by AppsFlyer Performance Index
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012 | 10-50 | - | - | - |
mediasmart, a self-serve mobile programmatic platform (now part of Affle group) provides advertisers, trading desks and agencies an integrated mobile advertising solution with the unique capability of measuring incremental metrics in real-time for Proximity and App marketing.
- Tagline: #1 DSP for Incremental growth
- Services: Proximity Marketing, Connected TV (CTV), Programmatic Brand Marketing, App Marketin, Incrementality Measurement
AdPushup is a leading revenue optimization platform and Google Certified Publishing Partner (GCPP) that helps independent web publishers, media organizations, and e-commerce platforms accelerate their growth using ad layout optimization, header bidding, innovative ad formats, smart ad refresh, ad mediation, adblock recovery.
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013 | 51-200 | - | - | - |
Jampp unlocks programmatic advertising to drive incremental performance. A demand-side platform (DSP) at heart, Jampp leverages unique contextual and behavioral signals to deliver customers and in-app purchases through programmatic user acquisition and retargeting. We simplify programmatic growth for some of the biggest names in mobile.
- Services: User Acquisition, App retargeting, Lift measurement, Geolocated ads, Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO), Dynamic Product Ads, Predictive Bidding
- Tagline: Unlock new growth
| Founded | Employees | Social | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 11-50 | 3k+ |
Bidease is a mobile DSP platform for mobile marketers. Its built on a foundation of proprietary programmatic advertising technology, Machine Learning, and first party data. Bidease team optimizes campaigns across all major mobile formats for desired post-install behaviors at no risk to its clients’ bottom line.
- Mobile platforms: iOS, Android, Mobile Web
- Campaign types: CPI, CPA, CPM
- Ad formats supported: Banners, Interstitial, Native, Rewarded Video, Video
- Targeting: Carrier, Device, Gender, Geo, Interests, IP, OS
- Key Markets: global
BidMind by Fiksu
Reach your ideal audience from the comfort of their living room with our programmatic media buying platform
| Founded | Employees | Revenues | Social | Traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 10-50 | - | 11k+ | - |
Fiksu is a global DSP providing advertisers access to the highest quality audiences on mobile and CTV.
By combining the industry’s largest proprietary datasets with powerful optimization and segmentation tools, Fiksu DSP lets performance-driven marketers target and engage specific audiences that are most likely to spend time and money in their apps.
Fiksu is headquartered in Boston, MA with offices in London, New York and San Francisco.
Learn more about BidMind by Fiksu
| Founded | Employees | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2007 | 500+ |
InMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network with global reach in markets including the UK, Europe, US, South Africa and India. InMobi offers advertisers to reach over 1,5 billion mobile users across more than 32,000 mobile properties to choose from. With InMobile mobile ad network, advertisers can launch brand engagement, user acquisition or remarking ad campaigns. Acquisition of a mobile rich media company Sprout allows InMobi to offer premium mobile ads as well as a huge volume of other inventory. Advertisers include leading brands such as Ford and Levis.
- Mobile platforms: Android, iOS, Mobile Web
- Campaign types: CPC, CPI, CPA, CPX, CPM
- Ad formats supported: Banners, Native, Video, Interstitial, In-Game
- Targeting: carrier, channel, country, device, operator, os, time
- Key Markets: Europe, India, Japan, Kenya, South Africa, UK, United States
Appreciate is a mobile app marketing platform running sixty billion daily auctions and enabling marketers to take control of their programmatic ecosystem. In addition to extremely granular targeting, buyers have unconditional transparency at the exchange
Learn more about Appreciate
SmartyAds DSP is a programmatic-buying platform for advertisers who search for safe, supreme-quality push traffic that converts in higher ROI, instant user engagement and retention.
Pricing & Features:
- Push traffic for all screen types & sizes that translates in 200-400% higher ROI & conversions.
- Easy to segment and personalize push creatives.
- The broadest network of premium push traffic publishers and SSP partners (MoPub, MobFox, PubNative) with tested and localized landings across all geos and verticals.
- In-app traffic from more than 1000 top-rated apps with push traffic for iOS & Android.
- 30+ targeting options for geomarketing push campaigns Including geo-targeting, GPS, language, etc.)
- Frequency capping, dayparting and sparring to fine-tune push advertising experience.
- Comprehensive, easy-to-grasp statistics with an in-deep performance overview.
- Third-party impression analytics tags support, API.
- Rapid and easy campaign set up and creative approval.
- Flexible CPM pricing model.
Splicky is the new Demand Side Platform (DSP) for the mobile channel using proprietary Real-Time Advertising (RTA) technology. Their technology makes it simple to buy mobile ad impressions and clicks within mobile sites and apps – in real-time. Using just one platform, you have immediate access to all global mobile inventory which uses Real-Time Bidding (RTB) technology. Within a matter of minutes, your mobile ad campaigns can be displayed on a Cost Per Impression (CPM) and Cost Per Click (CPC) basis. Our platform allows you to target on individual Mobile Sites and Apps, giving you total control at campaign management-level. Our detailed analysis gives you full insights on campaign performance enabling you to maximize your ROI.
- Easy to use interface with a self-serve platform and real-time analytics
- Worldwide reach across a transparent publisher set
- Wide range of targeting options including Geo+hyper location and support for mobile retargeting
- Range of formats supported including banners, interstitials, rich media & video