In today’s digital advertising landscape, having a reliable, trustworthy, and efficient programmatic ad partner for campaigns is crucial for marketers.
But with a growing number of programmatic advertising platforms out there, selecting the right one for your business is no easy feat. As digital marketers, you need a platform that knows the business of programmatic buying technology like the back of their hand.
Programmatic advertising platforms let marketers automatically buy and optimize ad spaces for their digital marketing campaigns, rather than working with publishers. On these platforms, you can bid on advertising inventory in real-time and reach specific target audiences.
In 2021, advertisers in the United States were projected to spend $US106 billion on programmatic display advertising, according to data from Statista. That number is expected to increase to nearly $US142 billion by the end of 2023.
In this guide, we take a look at 10 best programmatic advertising platforms among digital marketers today, the features they provide, supported ad inventories, and audience targeting options, so you can decide which platforms suit your next digital marketing campaign best.
The programmatic buying ecosystem is made up of three types of providers: demand-side-platforms (DSPs), supply-side platforms (SSPs), and ad exchanges.
While DSPs let advertisers buy ad impressions across publishers’ sites, SSPs do the opposite, selling inventory to advertisers. Ad exchanges facilitate the buying and selling of ads from multiple ad networks.
PubMatic offers the whole programmatic advertising supply chain, from a supply-side platform to private marketplaces and an ad buying platform for marketers. With over 1.4 trillion ad bids per day, the platform’s supply of high-quality ad spots has made it popular among digital advertisers.
PubMatic is built on real-time bidding (RTB) technology and provides advertisers CTV, OTT, display, video, targeted, mobile, web, and native ad inventories easily and efficiently.
The platform’s fraud-free omnichannel sell-side platform leverages a specialized infrastructure delivering scalable and flexible innovation, providing tools for header bidding, RTB advertising, private marketplaces (PMP), and ad quality.
PubMatic also recently launched “Connect”, an audience solution that leverages addressable signals from across the open internet so marketers can find the right target audiences. AlikeAudience partnered with PubMatic’s Connect in Australia, Japan, and Indonesia, enabling advertisers to access quality audience data on the supply side.
Read more: All About Supply-Side Platform: How It Works, DSP vs. SSP, and Top Platforms
The Trade Desk is the world’s fastest-growing DSP, offering agencies and advertisers programmatic marketing automation technologies to manage their digital campaigns.
As a programmatic advertising platform, The Trade Desk lets publishers sell targeted ad space to advertisers on a global scale, making it an ideal space to collect, manage, and activate data in a single place.
One of the platform’s key features is its ability to use lookalike modeling, a tried-and-true marketing strategy where advertisers can discover new, targeted audiences based on insights from existing audiences to expand their market share.
The TradeDesk also offers a data marketplace where users can access high-quality audiences from data providers. The platform enables agencies and brands to place digital ads in the form of mobile advertising, native advertising, digital audio, video, and social inventories.
AlikeAudience integrated with The Trade Desk in 2017, allowing clients of The Trade Desk to use our third-party audience data pertaining to markets in the United States, Australia, and the Asia Pacific region.
In 2021, AlikeAudience also announced its integration with the new digital identity framework Unified ID 2.0, a trusted ID solution delivering relevant advertising while protecting consumer privacy in environments without third-party cookies.
LiveRamp is a stand-alone SaaS programmatic ad buying platform compatible with all major data management platforms (DMPs), enabling advertisers to connect, unify, control, and activate data across different marketing channels and devices.
DMPs make first-, second-, and third-party audience data from any source (online, offline, or mobile) available to DSPs and SSPs, matching different ads with their relevant target audience.
With LiveRamp, marketers can accurately obtain audience segments by onboarding data into media platforms with CRM retargeting, ad suppression, and lookalike modeling to increase their advertising campaigns’ overall targeting efficiency.
The platform supports one-to-one marketing, helping advertisers increase conversion rates with A/B testing and website optimization to create relevant messages for consumers.
LiveRamp provides simplified access to global data from the world’s top providers activated across technology and media platforms. The company’s recent integration with AlikeAudience aims to empower marketers in performing audience targeting at scale for increased reach and engagement.
Launched in 2007, MediaMath is a programmatic advertising service widely recognized as the first-ever DSP in the digital advertising industry.
Today, this omnichannel marketing platform is known for running end-to-end campaign management across mobile, display, OTT, native, video, and audio channels for over 3,500 advertisers worldwide.
MediaMath integrates datasets from first and third-party services, allowing marketers to connect with their most valuable target audiences. The platform also activates predictive audiences to enhance one-to-one customer conversations, determining how to best support marketers’ goals in delivering better outcomes for their brand in real time.
If you’re a marketer looking to use MediaMath, the platform supports CTV, display, mobile, video, audio, native, and digital out-of-home (DOOH) ad inventories.
Amobee is an automated programmatic platform that aims to create a harmonious and complete digital advertising campaign for marketers. With its series of ad options for TV, CTV, digital, and social media, advertisers can engage with their audiences through an omnichannel strategy.
Since its launch in 2005, the platform has developed a solid understanding of how customers consume content across a range of platforms, with its main solution involving a DSP allowing clients to execute cross-channel programmatic campaigns.
Amobee helps brands and agencies unify audiences to optimize results across TV, CTV, and digital media ad inventories to drive customers’ growth through real-time analytics and reporting.
Read more: OTT vs CTV: What to Consider For Effective Advertising
SmartyAds is a full-stack programmatic ad tech ecosystem offering services for brands, agencies, publishers, and app developers. The omnichannel platform’s services consist of a DSP, SSP, data management platform (DMP), and ad exchange.
With SmartyAds, users can run display, video, native, and in-app marketing campaigns across both desktop and mobile devices. It serves as a tool for advertisers to boost click-through rates (CTR) and conversions, with over 500 million monthly impressions in North America alone.
The platform is compatible with a wide range of traffic types and ad formats, including video, banner, audio, push, pop, and native inventories. Other features include ad creation tools, real-time analytics, and targeting capabilities to assist advertisers in inventory selection, placement, and campaign management.
SmartyAds’ ad exchange platform, Smart Hub, offers a white-label solution allowing brands to build their products on top of it, boasting over 25,000 recorded publishers and 2 billion impressions daily.
Adobe is without question one of the biggest names in programmatic advertising software. Its DSP platform, Adobe Advertising Cloud, prides itself in being the “first independent, omnichannel DSP specializing in CTV, video, display, native, DOOH, audio, and paid search ad campaigns” that offers marketers a complete solution.
The platform uses a people-based marketing approach, providing advertisers with cross-channel integrations that help them launch, plan, buy, manage, and optimize their campaigns at scale – from inventory management to search management.
Its real-time, in-dash reporting, custom reports, activity logs, and reporting APIs to provide marketers with the flexibility they need to analyze their campaign performance and make faster, more informed optimization choices.
Pricing for Adobe Advertising Cloud is custom, depending on your company size, requirements, and the number of tools your team purchases. Page screening for detecting faulty inventory and pre-bid filtering for fraud or brand violation is also offered.
Read more: How to Run High-Performing Connected TV Advertising Campaigns
Simpli.fi allows for programmatic advertising localized on a localized level, allowing marketers to buy inventory through RTB ad exchanges when targeting ads to produce the right content.
Its programmatic DSP supports workflow for CTV, addressable, geo-fencing, mobile, display, native, audio, and social.
With Simpli.fi, users can build audiences based on criteria such as browser used, geolocation, and search intent data. Advertisers can import customer relationship management (CRM) data to enhance audience targeting to the platform, with additional optimization tools like contextual keywords, IP data, and frequency capping available.
Simpli.fi makes it easy to create custom ad content based on the local needs of particular locations. With over 60 in-built report templates in its suite, the company has integrated with over 40 marketing platforms, including Google Analytics, Ahrefs, SEMRush, Facebook, and MailChimp.
Known by users for its simplicity and high-quality ad templates, AdRoll is a single platform for e-commerce brands to quickly launch display, social media, and e-mail ads that engage existing customers.
Despite missing certain features like A/B testing, a driving component of AdRoll is its audience targeting service, providing advertisers with options for lookalike, contextual, demographic, CRM, and interest-based marketing campaigns. Plus, its straightforward interface makes launching campaigns simple for users, so this platform is great for beginners.
AdRoll offers a 30-day free trial package for starters and additional custom pricing for enterprises. The platform supports video, social, display, native, and e-mail ad inventories, with a trust and safety team installed for automatically and manually filtering invalid traffic.
Read more: Why Demographic Segmentation Should Be Your Go-to Audience Segmentation Tactic for Ad Campaigns
Wrapping Up
We covered 10 of the most cited programmatic advertising platforms among digital marketers today, highlighting their features, ad inventory quality, and audience targeting so your team can decide which platforms best suit your next campaign.
Thanks to AI-powered algorithms and an increasingly popular programmatic advertising ecosystem, marketers are able to place their ads on publishers’ websites with little to no human participation with ease.
AlikeAudience supplies advertisers with high-quality, high-performing audience segmentation and data-driven insights for programmatic advertising campaigns across various industries, from e-commerce and retail to finance and insurance.
Find us on your favorite DSP or contact our data strategist for custom solutions. Sign up for our email newsletter for regular ad tech insights!
