The digital world of today requires publishers to utilize the proper tools to convert their content into income and add to revenue streams. The Supply Side Platform acts as an integral technology for publishers who wish to maximize monetization through its functionality in managing ad inventory and smoothing advertiser relationships. This informative guide analyzes the internal dynamics of an SSP and its major advantages and compares it in comparison to other ad technologies.
What is a Supply Side Platform?
A Supply-Side Platform (SSP) is a technology platform that helps web publishers and digital media owners manage their advertising inventory, fill that inventory with ads, and grow revenue. Supply-Side Platforms automate the selling of digital ad impressions across multiple ad exchanges and networks, and allow publishers to maximize yield via real-time bidding (RTB) auctions.
In short, for a publisher, a Supply-Side Platform is the technology backbone of a programmatic advertising operation. A Supply-Side Platform connects a publisher’s inventory to multiple demand sources (buyers, networks, etc.) at one time, and makes transactions at scale and through efficient means.
How Supply Side Platforms Work
When a user visits a publisher’s website or app, the SSP recognizes the new ad space available for bidding and puts the selling process into motion:
- The publisher’s ad server sees the available ad opportunity and sends it to the SSP
- The Supply Side Platform bundles the impression with the available data (demographics, behavior, etc.)
- This is sent to the various ad exchanges, ad networks, and Demand Side Platforms
- The advertisers bid on the impression from whatever ad exchange, network, or DSP
- The Supply Side Platform offers the impression to the bidder that paid the most
- The winning ad is served to the user
This whole process happens in milliseconds and allows the publisher to maximize the revenue potential of each page view. Sophisticated Supply Side Platform technology also has yield optimization algorithms that continually optimize this entire process for maximum revenue.
Supply Side Platform vs. Demand Side Platform
Grasping the demand side platform vs supply side platform relationship is important to understand the programmatic advertising ecosystem. These two technologies work on opposite sides of the transaction but are complementary to one another:
- An SSP builds a publisher’s interests by optimizing their potential inventory sales to the highest bidder.
- A Demand Side Platform builds an advertiser’s interest by efficiently buying impressions according to targeting criteria they establish.
The main distinction of the demand side platform vs supply side platform relationship is where their interests diverge and the desired outcome of optimization of purchased inventory in favor of the buyer/seller:
When the publisher’s SSP connects with an advertiser’s Demand Side Platform, the two create an automated marketplace that programmatically transacts based on predefined parameters and real-time bidding.
Main Features of an Advertising Supply Side Platform
Today’s Advertising Supply Side Platform solutions come with comprehensive tools to allow publishers to efficiently manage their digital advertising activity, including:
Yield Management
A core purpose of any Advertising Supply Side Platform is to maximize publisher revenue. Today’s new SSPs utilize advanced algorithms that take into account historical performance metrics, current market conditions, and the characteristics of the particular users to provide price floors and to identify the most optimal demand for an impression.
Support for Header Bidding
Many Supply Side Platform vendors are providing header bidding options for publishers to allow multiple demand partners to bid for inventory at the same time before the ad server calls out for an impression. The added competition traditionally yields higher CPMs for publisher inventory.
Private Marketplace Capabilities
An Advertising Supply Side Platform helps to create and maintain private marketplaces (PMP) where publishers can selectively deliver inventory to certain advertisers, sometimes at mutually agreed rates. This ability enables publishers to develop more ideal strategic relationships with higher value advertisers.
Advanced Analytics
Reporting tools, which journalists in the press claim are not easy to come back, are included in most SSP solutions. Reports and analytics provide useful information to publishers on each of their inventory units, which can verify inventory usage and highlight potential revenue opportunities.
Ad Quality Controls
SSP includes tools to protect publishers’ user experience by filtering out malicious, inappropriate, or low-quality advertisements. These controls help maintain site performance and preserve audience trust.
Benefits of Using a Supply Side Platform
Using an SSP makes the landscape complicated for publishers easier to navigate with some significant benefits:
Increased Revenue
SSP connects a publisher to multiple sources of demand at one time, creating competing requests for inventory that normally raise CPMs and fill rates. Access to this wider range of demand is even more critical for publishers with more diverse audience segments.
Operational Efficiency
By using an SSP, a publisher can automate the selling process rather than requiring manual work to manage the advertising operational process. This allows the publisher to focus on producing content rather than spending time creating and negotiating separate deals or managing many technical points of integration.
Data-Driven Decision Making
The data and analytics that can be leveraged via the Advertising Supply Side Platform help to examine and optimize content strategy, audience development, and pricing models. This data assists a publisher in generating short-term revenue while continuing to build long-term business.
Enhanced Control
SSPs enable publishers to maintain granularity over their inventory, including who has access to it, what price they see, and under what rules. This level of control enables publishers to create rulesets to aid brand safety while maximizing and monetizing their inventory.
Choosing the Right Supply Side Platform
When considering Supply Side Platforms, publishers should consider a number of factors:
Demand Relationships
When comparing Supply Side Platform examples, the quality and breadth of demand relationships are obviously important. All other things equal, platforms with strong relationships to numerous DSPs and ad networks tend to yield greater revenue performance.
Technical Integration
Publishers must examine how Supply Side Platforms integrate with their existing technology stack including content management systems, ad servers and analytics stacks. The less friction there is in terms of integration, the less work for publishers to implement the Supply Side Platform and the less chance for operational issues to arise.
Fee Structure
Publishers need to understand the models of cost associated with an Advertising Supply Side Platform. Most SSPs will take a percentage of revenue, but the fee models differ widely across the industry. Publishers need to compare the total cost of ownership for the Supply Side platform against expected revenue increases.
Support and Service
Support, technical services, and strategy are important guides in assessing Advertising Supply Side Platforms and the value that they deliver. Most publishers prefer working with an SSP that can provide them with more than just a technological service.
Future Trends in Supply Side Platform Technology
The Supply Side Platform marketplace will continue to change as supply-side players react to changes in the industry and new supply-side technologies:
Identity Solutions
As third-party cookies become obsolete, Supply Side Platforms are working on identity solutions as alternatives, so as to help publishers maintain addressability and targeting capabilities without violating user privacy.
Direct Publisher-Advertiser Connections
With programmatic guaranteed and curated marketplaces, there is less demarcation than ever before between Demand Side Platforms and Supply Side Platforms, as they facilitate more and more direct relationships in the selling of inventory by publishers to advertisers.
Expanded Format Support
Leaders in the Advertising Supply Side Platform space are increasingly expanding beyond digital display advertising to include Connected TV, audio, in-game advertising, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) inventory listings.
Conclusion
A Supply Side Platform is a critical technology to enable publishers to navigate today’s increasingly complex digital advertising ecosystem. A Supply Side Platform can provide a publisher with efficient access to demand, more sophisticated yield optimization and reporting, as well as analytics reporting to extract maximum value from their content and audience.
It is helpful to understand the relationship between the Demand Side Platform and the Supply Side Platform in the context of the programmatic marketplace. Both tools are integral to the programmatic ecosystem, and healthy programmatic marketplaces require both DSPs (which intelligently cater to advertisers’ desire to quickly and efficiently buy media) and SSPs (which help publishers efficiently and sustainably monetize their content).
When publishers are using the right Advertising Supply Side Platform, they are put in an advantageous position to succeed as an ever-increasingly challenging media landscape impacts their opportunity to optimize revenue, improve user experience, and ultimately grow their business.