15+Best Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) 2024

Best Demand Side Platforms (DSPs):

Demand Side Platforms were first launched in the 2000s and have become bread and butter for advertisers and digital marketers. These platforms give advertisers and agencies access to advertising inventory from publishers across various channels.

With so many available options in the market, choosing the right one is very difficult. But you don’t need to worry because we are going to explore some of the best demand-side platforms working in programmatic advertising.

Before jumping to details, let’s discuss what the Demand Side Platform is? And what is programmatic marketing?

What is a Demand Side Platform (DSP)?

A Demand Side Platform (DSP) is web-based advertising software that connects advertising inventory buyers like marketers, agencies, brands, or app developers with publishers via automation tools. Advertisers use this software to buy inventory (banner, native, mobile, display, video ads) from publishers through real-time bidding and optimize ad performance based on various key performance indicators like CPC (Cost-Per-Click) and CPM (Cost-Per-Millie). DSPs also allow media buyers to create, launch, and manage advertising campaigns across hundreds to thousands of publishers.

Some of the benefits of DSP are given below:

• Bridges the gap between advertisers and publishers
• Allows advertisers to instantly create and run multiple campaigns from a single dashboard
• Helps to manage campaigns in real-time with ease
• Provides advanced tracking tools to monitor campaign performance
• Save time and effort with automated tools

In essence, DSPs are the third-party software that enables you to buy, analyze, and manage advertisements across numerous networks from a single place.

What is Programmatic Marketing?

Programmatic Marketing/Advertising is the process of purchasing and selling ad space via real-time bidding and then publishing based on sophisticated algorithms. The advertiser puts his preferences (targeted audience or how much they’re willing to spend) in DSP, and then real-time bidding takes place between publishers and advertisers that want to reach the same audience. The whole process can be done with Artificial Intelligence (AI). The bidding takes place in the time it takes for loading the web page, and the highest bid advertisements will display when the page has completely loaded.

Briefly, the steps involved in Programmatic Marketing are given below:

• User visits website
• The website has inventory available
• The website communicates with the ad exchange/ supply-side platform (SSP)
• SSP passes user info to DSPs
• Advertisers place bids through a DSP
• The highest bid wins the ad placement

Let’s explore the list of best Demand Side Platforms (DSPs)!

Best Demand Side Platforms 2023:

Here is the list of the Best Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) for 2023 and 2024:

1.  Amazon DSP
2. BidTheatre
3. AcuityAds
4. MediaMath
5. Adelphic
6. Adform
7. StackAdapt
8. Admedo
9. Platfrom.io
10. Avocet
11. BidSwitch
12. Emerse
13. BidTellect
14. Choozle
15. Adobe Advertising Cloud

1- Amazon DSP:

Launched in 2019, Amazon DSP is one of the best demand-side platforms that allow its advertisers to programmatically purchase display, audio, video, and more ads both on and off Amazon. The platform helps advertisers reach a wide range of audiences to increase their brand awareness, acquire more customers, improve engagement, enhance conversions, and drive sales.

Moreover, you can programmatically reach your audience across Amazon-owned sites, apps like IMDb, and top publishers’ websites via direct inventory from Amazon publisher services and third-party exchanges. The platform upholds quality standards and brand safety through various solutions like manual site reviews, real-time bud evaluation, and more.

Furthermore, Amazon DSP provides deep insights on audience and analytics reports on the performance of campaigns in real-time. This data helps you understand your campaigns’ driving results and how customers discover, reach, and purchase your products or services.  Various metrics offered by the platform help you monitor campaigns’ effectiveness before, during, and after your campaigns.

2- BidTheatre:

BidTheatre is a powerful DSP that allows advertisers, brands, and integrators to programmatically display native banner & video ads. The platform provides advertisers access to the ad spaces of millions of websites in the open and private marketplace. You can easily engage your consumers with multiple ad formats across mobile, desktop, and tablet devices. Moreover, your data is 100% secure with BidTheatre.

Some of the prominent features of BidTheatre include:

• Creatives: The platform host and serve your ads with the aid of superfast CDN to ensure fast loading time and enhance user experience. It allows you to bring your own creatives or use their integrated editor to create your own designs.
• Advanced Targeting: It offers advanced targeting tools to target your buying to the impressions best suited to your KPI’s.
• Optimization: BidTheatre uses past impressions to predict the value of future bid opportunities via machine learning models, thus optimizing both your media spend and campaign KPI’s.
• In-depth Reporting: The platform offers deep insights into your campaign metrics and audience to help you make data-driven decisions in the future. You can easily understand campaign response across your audience, location, demographics, device type, language, and much more.
• Privacy & Anti-Fraud: BidTheatre takes serious measures to ensure inventory quality, brand safety, and user privacy and works with the top partners to detect low-quality users, identify malicious tags, and block fake & non-human traffic.

Along with this, the platform offers a 24/7 customer support service to solve your issues.

3- AcuityAds:

Headquartered in Canada, AcuityAds is the leading technology platform that offers advertisers and marketers various digital advertising solutions. The platform, with the help of cutting-edge automation technology, illumin^TM, offers planning, buying, and real-time intelligence from a single platform. Moreover, AcuityAds offers in-house proprietary algorithms that help optimize campaigns and increase performance by upto 15%.

Furthermore, the platform grants advertisers access to advertising inventory (Display, Audio, and Video) from the best ad exchanges as well as publishers in the market. Besides, it comes with unique brand safety and fraud protection measures to provide pre-campaign, in-flight, and post-campaign protection. This fraud protection technology minimizes bot fraud, human click farms, & farming units so that only the real traffic reaches the campaigns.

Additionally, you can also use one-to-one messaging to reach a wide range of audiences across desktop, mobile, tablet, CTV, and audio. Plus, you can also get actionable insights into your campaign’s performance, leads, number of conversions, and revenue generated. Besides, the platform also offers numerous guides and case studies to inform you of industry trends and complex concepts in the advertising industry.

4- MediaMath:

MediaMath is a unique DSP that provides advertisers a safe and transparent environment to buy media through their omnichannel platform. It offers the most responsive, performant, and accountable advertising technology for businesses and brands to buy addressable media. One of the most remarkable features of MediaMath is SOURCE which is a modernized ecosystem for programmatic marketing. With SOURCE, advertisers get accountability, addressability, and alignment.

The platform takes pride in offering transparency and ensures that users have full access to their data. Moreover, the platform also connects you with consultative experts who help you easily set up campaigns and get the most out of platform features & functionalities.

Along with this, the platform enables brands and agencies to control every feature of digital advertising through APIs, including Customized workflows, Campaign intake & syndication, Preferred identity partners, BYO Algorithm, and Data & audience management tools.

5- Adelphic:

Adelphic is the only omnichannel DSP that is built from the ground up for programmatic traders. The platform gives its clients access to high-quality advertising inventory from top publishers in the market. It helps advertisers and marketers reach customers easily across all programmatic channels and networks and allows you to manage campaigns across desktop, mobile, tablets, TV, audio, native, video, display, and digital out-of-home (DOOH).

Moreover, the platform offers inherent brand safety filtration to ensure that the clients are exposed to human-verified traffic and eliminate bot and fake traffic. Besides, Adelphic comes with innovative planning tools that allow media planners to develop data-driven strategies via advanced analytics.

Another important feature offered by the platform is Advanced Reporting, a full suite of programmatic campaign planning, reporting, and analytics tools. Some of the reporting features are given below:

• Foot traffic Attribution: It allows you to monitor your advertising’s real impact on driving traffic to any point of interest.
• Multi-Touch Attribution (MTA): The MTA suite gives you the ability to report on six different attribution models, ingest offline & online files, and view the customer purchasing pathways to gain an understanding of your advertising strategy.
• Survey Tool: The survey tool offered by the platform helps you to gauge the effectiveness of your advertising spend and enables you to establish benchmarks for historical performance.

Apart from this, Adelphic offers other reporting features like a TV reporting suite, DOOH reporting suite, and Cross-channel suite.

6- Adform:

Adform is another powerful DSP that offers seamless launching of ad campaigns across multiple channels in real-time. It helps media buyers easily identify, reach and purchase inventory with precision. Adform DSP provides you effortless access to inventory across a wide range of channels, including display, video, audio, DOOH, CTV, in-app, and mobile.

The platform offers an extensive collection of advanced buying algorithms and machine learning technology to provide a transparent ecosystem for you to buy inventory with confidence.

Following are some of the key features of Adform:

• Programmatic and direct buying
• Audience collation and planning
• Creative build & execution
• Campaign planning & measurement
• Campaign reporting & optimization

Like other DSPs, Adform comes with a built-in anti-fraud protection tool to ensure high-quality and bot-free traffic. Moreover, the advanced reporting tool gives you deep insights into your campaign performance to improve your marketing decisions and generate more revenue.

7- StackAdapt:

StackAdapt is the highest performing and easy-to-use DSP that offers various omnichannel solutions for their clients, including unique targeting via custom segments for narrow categories. The platform helps advertisers, brands, and agencies to accelerate customer engagement and acquisition.

Moreover, it provides advanced internet-based targeting, real-time campaign optimization, and automation intelligence to maximize campaign ROI for its clients. Some additional features of the StackAdapt are given below:

• Advanced Targeting: The enhanced targeting tools like B2B targeting and dynamic retargeting allows advertisers to narrow down their targeted audience to enhance campaign performance.
• Brand Safety: StackAdapt ensures that its marketers and publisher partners operate in a trusted environment.
• Quality Support: The dedicated team of StackAdapt is ready 24/5 to provide tailored implementation, rollout plans, as well as best-in-class training. They help you in developing various strategies to increase the performance of your campaigns.

In addition, the Ad Previewer feature offered by the platform allows you to see how your display, native, and video ad creatives will appear on select domains.

8- Admedo:

Admedo is another unique programmatic marketing platform that offers a transparent environment for brands, agencies, and markets to buy inventory confidently. The platform provides transparent insights to make better decisions that will lead to great efficiency and ROI. Admedo is a fully customizable DSP and offers various solutions that perfectly fit your resource, strategy, and budget.

Some of the benefits of Admedo are given below:

• Online Reach: The platform integrates with more than 30 ad exchanges/SSPs and covers 97% of quality bidding across America and Europe, including desktop, mobile, video, and more.
• Ease & Simplicity: Admedo offers an easy-to-use, intuitive interface that helps you set up and manage multiple campaigns across different channels from a single place.
• Intelligent Targeting: The targeting capabilities of Admedo includes behavioral, contextual, demographic, locational, and much more.
• Transparency & Control: The fully customizable platform gives you full control to run programmatic campaigns according to your preferences. Transparent reporting provides you deep insights into your campaign performance to influence future activity.
• Brand Safety: The platform works with leading brand safety, anti-fraud, and viewability partners to ensure that advertisements are displayed in the brand-safe ecosystem are tracked according to authentic impressions. Admedo also focuses on providing real and bot-free traffic.
• Data Management: Admedo also offers a fully–integrated Data Management Solution to measure and understand customer behavior. It allows you to get actionable insights from your customer touchpoints and use them to grow your business.

Along with this, the platform also has a team of dedicated experts to optimize your campaigns and provide advice & support.

9- Platfrom.io:

Platfrom.io is a leading DSP that allows its users to unlock their programmatic skills by launching an easy-to-use transparent media buying ecosystem. It gives you full control over your budget at each step of the programmatic marketing and ensures you don’t overpay for traffic.

Moreover, with the aid of powerful real-time APIs offered by Platform.io, you can easily increase your media buying efficiency via custom bidding algorithms. The platform lets you go beyond conversions and helps to track all the relevant events at each stage of your sales funnel. It offers real-time analytics for you to make data-driven decisions.

Furthermore, you can export raw bid stream and campaign performance data, create audience segments, and enhance prediction models by closing the loop. Interestingly, Platfrom.io enables you to import your audience segments for precise targeting.

10- Avocet:

Avocet is another powerful demand-side platform for buying digital display media to reach a wide range of audiences and drive more revenue. The platform offers powerful features to engage, acquire, and retain more customers. Following are some of the services offered by Avocet:

• Planner: It helps to deliver real results from the first impression. The platform offers Incremental Marketing that empowers clients to buy digital inventory based on real-world business outcomes. It lets you combine your first-party data and web behavior to tailor the perfect campaign for your KPI. Moreover, Avocet allows you to target customers based on their demographics, location, device type, intent, etc. the platform offers transparency, safety, and quality to ensure that your ads are seen by real humans, and make it easy to avoid low-quality inventory and verify the authenticity of clicks.
• Trader: The key features of this attribute include View-duration, Viewability suite, Prediction engine, and real-time insights.
• Developer: The platform offers customizable APIs to meet your business needs. It also enables you to test hypotheses, conduct granular analysis, and generate custom insights you need. Moreover, Avocet can be integrated into any Data Management Platform.

The platform offers advanced analytics tools that provide you with real-time reporting on conversions, impressions, clicks, and other metrics to monitor the performance of your campaigns.

11- BidSwitch:

BidSwitch is an efficient DSP that offers various solutions for managing programmatic supply. The platform provides advertisers and marketing partners with a transparent environment for buying digital inventory. BidSwitch’s Supply Inventory Market is home to hundreds of supply partners and inventory sources across all media types and geographies.

• Fraud detection & blocking
• User & ID syncing
• Deal support & troubleshooting
• Transparent billing & invoicing

In addition, the platform offers a robust set of tools to set up, customize, and manage connections and Proprietary intelligent routing technology that accurately matches traffic to buyers. Moreover, the platform provides a wide range of reporting tools and performance metrics, including Media reports, Health metrics, Invoicing, Avails reports, and Deals reports. Besides, the Bar Tool can be used for finding new partners via multiple filters such as geographies, center, content, device, data, and inventory type.

12- Emerse:

Emerse is a fully transparent and independent DSP with powerful features for programmatic marketing. It helps advertisers buy inventory (display, video, mobile, CTV, etc.) from top publishers. The platform lets you explore, target, build and expand specific audiences via built-in tools.

You would be surprised to know that Emerse offers dynamic A/B Testing for faster insights and testing campaigns before launching. The platform comes with advanced anti-fraud technology to detect fraudulent traffic & collision, poor quality inventory, and suspicious activity.

Some additional features of Emerse include:

• In-stream & Out-stream video formats
• Conversion tracking and optimization
• Inventory & placement-quality scoring and control
• Brand safety filters
• A/B Testing
• Contextual targeting and retargeting of audience based on ISP, IP, Language, Dayparting, Direct URL, Browser, Operating system, Connection speed, and more
• Easy-to-use cloud-based dashboard
• Real-time analytics

In addition, Emerse offers 24/7 customer support.

13- BidTellect:

BidTellect is a performance-based DSP with smart native programmatic technology. The platform is trusted by world-leading brands, including Toyota, Shell, IBM, KIA, Dell, Microsoft, and more. The platform offers a vast ecosystem of Native inventory with more than 5B+ Native auctions per day.

The dedicated account service team of BidTellect helps clients to develop and execute specific strategies for every campaign. Moreover, it offers advanced KPI optimization to drive targeted customers to take desired actions.

Furthermore, the anti-fraud software ensures brand safety and allows clients to be sure that they are not running their ads next to unsafe content for their brand.

14- Choozle:

Choozle is a self-service digital advertising platform built for agencies, marketers, and publishers. The platform helps streamline your digital advertising from a single platform with the campaign launch, targeting tools, and real-time reporting. The platform grants advertisers access to 98% of the online inventory (mobile, native, display, CTV, etc.) across 40+ ad exchange networks.

Following are some of the prominent features of Choozle:

• Plan & Manage Campaigns: Instantly manage and optimize multiple advertising campaigns with an easy-to-use and feature-rich dashboard. It offers effective and flexible line-item bid adjustment options. Moreover, powerful performance tracking and auto-optimization tools are also available.
• Targeting Tactics: Choozle combines first and third-party data to identify the targeted audience that might be interested in your offers. It helps you launch highly targeted campaigns based on a wide range of targeting options, including IP targeting, Site, Email, Purchase history, Behavioral, Geolocation, Contextual, Keyword, Device targeting, and much more.
• Reporting: Choozle’s dashboard provides you deep insights into your campaign performance via exportable and API-driven reporting. Detailed real-time reporting helps you instantly optimize and set the course for successful campaigns.

Along with this, Choozle offers a wide range of other features, such as Geofarming & Geofencing, Dynamic passback tracking, Email advertising, Quick PDF reports, API integrations, 24/7 customer support, and more.

15- Adobe Advertising Cloud:

Advertising Cloud by Adobe is an independent DSP that offers cross-screen and cross-channel integrations for planning, purchasing, monitoring, and optimization. It is a powerful tool that supports display, native, audio, video, social, search, and all forms of TV (linear, connected, addressable) campaigns.

Moreover, the tool helps you analyze campaign performance with real-time reporting, reporting APIs, and raw activity logs to make faster and more informed optimization decisions. Additionally, Advertising Cloud DSP automates private management for guarantee purchases and premium, on-demand inventory from 100+ publishers and TV broadcasters.

Final Thoughts:

This is the list of some of the best Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) that offer a wide range of features, including inventory buying, campaigns set up, tracking, targeting, and much more to help you reach a wide range of audiences, enhance engagement, increase conversions, and drive sales. These DSPs mentioned in the list are trustworthy, reliable, and easy to use. Through this article, we tried to explore the features of the best DSPs available in the market, and we hope you will find them helpful.