How to Select the DSP That’s Right for Your Business October 2013

WHITE PAPER
How to Select the DSP That’s
Right for Your Business
October 2013
How to Select the DSP That’s Right
for Your Business
What is a DSP?
Demand-side platform (DSP) technology
solutions support the real-time buying of
digital advertising. A DSP automates media
buying across ad exchanges and publishers
with unified targeting, data, optimization,
and reporting. Using real-time bidding
for transactions, a DSP evaluates each
ad call against campaign parameters and
determines when, where, and at what price
to deliver an ad to a user.
To learn how a DSP deploys a digital
advertising campaign, see The Life of an
Ad. This guide from Turn tracks the journey
an ad call takes through the technology
ecosystem.
Marketing professionals increasingly rely on demand-side platform (DSP) advertising
technology to assure digital campaigns drive their business goals as efficiently as possible.
Faced with many competitive offerings, how do you choose the right DSP, one that helps
you implement ad campaigns precisely and effectively?
Choosing a DSP vendor to partner with can be tricky. If you’re not intimately aware of how
DSPs work, how can you decipher the critical differences between providers? And how do you
start to vet which technology is best suited to support your advertising goals?
To help clarify what can be a complex process, it’s important to evaluate the actual value the
DSP provider brings to marketing activities, which is the ratio of your cost to the actual results
the DSP delivers. To help you make that evaluation, consider the following:
•Scalability: How far can the DSP expand your reach and frequency?
•Optimization: Can the DSP optimize to your business goals?
•Return on investment (ROI): Can the DSP significantly increase your return on ad spend?
•Transparency: Will you have a clear understanding of how the DSP attains its results and will
the partner provide key insights to improve future advertising spend?
Taking a close look at how a DSP delivers on these important characteristics can help you sort
through these vendors and choose the partner that delivers the right value for you.
Strength in Scale
Scale is a DSP’s brawn—its ability to find more of the right customers. Scale is a combination of
a DSP’s reach and frequency. It’s an indicator of the number of bid requests the DSP can receive
and how fast it can make decisions on those queries.
Reach
A robust partner ecosystem is a key component of scalability. A technology platform is only as
good as the sum of its parts, and marketers can leverage a DSP’s existing relationships with
inventory, data, and service providers for maximum campaign impact.
Frequency
Queries per second (QPS) is the measure of how many times a DSP gets called to make a bid on
an ad placement to reach a user. A greater QPS represents the speed and frequency of analyzing
and acting on those bids. It’s a simple numbers game—greater scale leads to greater bidding
visibility and provides decision engines with more information. After making a bid to reach a
unique user at a specific price, the DSP learns if the price was accepted. Denial tells the DSP it
may require a higher price to win future bids.
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Real-Time Optimization and Machine Learning
DSP Comparison by Scale
Queries Per Second (QPS)
1.2M
Accurately predicting and maximizing advertiser value
1.0M
1.0M
39.8%
800M
600K
400K
200K
0
If a DSP’s scale is its brawn, the ability to optimize is its brain. Machine learning is core to DSP
optimization, which has three goals:
Depending on the marketer’s key performance indicators (KPIs), the DSP selects a metric to
gauge the ideal cost-per-thousand (CPM) impressions—or users reached. Based on real-time
results, the optimization engine can consistently improve the precision of its bidding to deliver
media to high-value customers.
Selecting the best time and place to present to a user in a given context
100K
Provider A
Provider B
Provider B has ten times the opportunity to
bid on impressions than Provider A. This
scale enables Provider B to be more selective
when it bids. Provider B can also evaluate
bid prices more accurately with significantly
more data powering its optimization engine.
For every impression, the DSP must determine, out of all impressions available, which is most
likely to receive a favorable response from a user in this context. To do that, a DSP needs to
evaluate thousands of data points from users’ anonymous profiles, website categories, and
inventory brand-safety information in less than 0.005 seconds.
Satisfying all campaign needs
Every campaign has a set of goals and constraints. Goals may be expressed in conversions or
actions, such as purchasing a product or opting-in to a newsletter. Constraints are the limits the
advertiser imposes on the campaign, such as budget, campaign objective and length frequency
(number of times each user should see an ad in a set period), and target audience. Satisfying
both at the same time is monumentally complex—your DSP should ensure your constraints are
not counter to your campaign goals.
Evaluating Return on Investment (ROI)
Be sure your business needs are met by the DSP you choose, based on factors like their
infrastructure, features, benefits, and long-term vision. ROI is based on results; to assess it,
you need information about the DSP.
Short-term points of evaluation include the following:
•Are you able to target your audiences across all channels—wherever your audience might be?
•Are you able to see how your campaign dollars are being spent—across data, inventory, and
technology fees—any time you want?
•Does your reporting show, in real time, how media dollars are spent and if a campaign is
reaching its goals?
•Is information easily accessible and clear so you can quickly bring it back to your organization?
•Are you getting what you pay for?
Over the longer term, you may want to consider if the DSP has capabilities that help construct
query-based analytics to directly address business questions and determine if their solution can
easily integrate with your data management platform (DMP).
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Clarity at the Moment of Decision
Clarity provides actionable insights
Transparent access to DSP data paired with
a robust analytics solution can transform
the way you make decisions. No longer
limited to analyzing traditional metrics like
clicks and view-through actions, queries
can dig into deeper insights and unexpected
trends. Examples of unexpected insights:
• Republicans in Texas typically don’t buy
sneakers
• Individuals with PhDs are more likely to
buy online tax software
Marketers rely on the efficiency of offloading day-to-day campaign management supported
by a DSP and real-time bidding. But you also need to be sure your DSP provides direct access
to every element of your campaign so you can be in control and make precise decisions at
critical moments. Find out if potential DSP partners can give you all the information you need
to evaluate campaign performance and make quick adjustments.
With a cross-channel DSP, your campaign can be delivered across all ad formats and devices
(display, video, mobile, and social) and its performance can be optimized in real time—but only
if you have transparent direct access to DSP data and processes. With that transparency, you
can test alternative creative and messaging to uncover unexpected results and adjust campaign
parameters for better use of your ad budget.
Does the DSP provide simple checks and balances to verify how much you’re paying for
inventory, data, and technology fees? The more information you have, the more effective you
will be when managing media dollars, analyzing results, and making future strategic and
tactical adjustments.
Sort for Value
A DSP’s scale, ability to optimize, impact on ROI, and transparency are the keys to its ability
to deliver effective marketing campaigns. Considering these factors together will help you
go beyond looking at cost alone and determine if you’re obtaining genuine value. By selecting
a DSP best suited to your digital advertising objectives and business strategy, you will be
empowered to carry out more complex analysis and problem solving. Discovering new
characteristics and trends about your customers helps you dig deeper into the layers of insights
you can use to inform your advertising strategies and better engage with your audience.
Learn how two global brands evaluated DSPs and, as a result, exceeded campaign objectives.
Retail: Scale and Optimization in Action
Turn
Media Budget $17,785.22
CPM
Competitor*
$18,045.99
$0.60
$2.50
29,651,353
7,231,985
Clicks
21,189
11,402
CTR
0.07%
0.16%
CPC
$0.84
$1.58
Coupon
Conversion
1,690
104
$10.52
$173.52
Impressions
CPA
* Test ran in the month of April 2013.
In choosing between two DSPs, a global retailer through it’s agency Sq1 closely evaluated
each platform against the goals of scaling campaigns to drive coupon conversions and
optimizing for low cost-per-click (CPC).
Taking advantage of Turn Campaign Suite’s scale, the retail brand reached a larger pool of
potential targets with more than 29 million impressions at $0.60 CPM. Platform optimization
enabled more than 1,500 coupon conversions than the competitor, and Campaign Suite
targeted and delivered ads to users who were more likely to convert.
In the end, Turn’s advantage in scale and optimization—which resulted in higher coupon
conversions and an CPC below $1.00—produced a cost-per-acquisition savings of 94%.
“After testing multiple platforms, our platform choice was obvious.
Turn’s results stood head and shoulders above the competition and our
expectations. The significantly lower eCPA in particular, made the decision
an easy one. Turn Campaign Suite has become a major asset to our
clients’ digital campaigns.”
—Brandon Bethea, Chief Conversion Officer, Sq1
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About Turn
Every day, the Turn platform analyzes more than 1.5 billion anonymous customer attributes
and makes more than 30 billion advertising decisions. Turn delivers real-time insights that
transform the way leading advertising agencies and enterprises make marketing decisions.
Our integrated cloud platform enables data management, cross-channel advertising, and
advanced analytics from a single login, along with point-and-click access to more than
100 premium technology partners. Turn is headquartered in Silicon Valley and provides its
products and services worldwide.
Contact us
For more information about Turn and solutions for marketers, contact us: turn.li/contact2013.
© 2013 Turn. All rights reserved. Turn and the Turn logo are registered trademarks of Turn Inc. Other trademarks are trademarks of their respective companies. All services are subject to change or discontinuance without
notice. October 2013
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