Launching Your DSP: What's Involved?

According to expert predictions, AdTech industry is about to continue stable growth in the near years and reach USD 1,496.2bln by 2030, which is 2.6 time more than was the industry's revenue of 2023 (USD 579.4bln) Though considered quite young even by the Internet parameters, AdTech industry increasingly attracts attention of businesses that want to control and successfully operate their programmatic media.

However, building a successful digital advertising business requires careful planning, execution, substantial expert knowledge and ongoing optimization. For those who want to remain competitive, it is crucial to stay agile and adapt to changes in the industry.

Everything starts with setting up and launching a Demand-Side Platform (DSP), which is the 'engine' of the process. In this short review, we'll take a look at the key steps that a business must take to start selling digital ads.

Well, as always, everything starts with market research and planning. The business will never become successful unless you study the digital advertising landscape (the target audience, competitors, industry trends, etc.) and identify the market segment which you want to serve with your DSP.

Then, traditionally, the business model and monetization strategy must be set up: you've got to decide whether you'll charge advertisers based on impressions, clicks, conversions, or other metrics, and you've got to determine your pricing strategy and fee structure.

The third step is to choose a reliable (or develop your own) DSP platform. Different DSP providers offer various features, scalability, pricing, and integration capabilities, and if you prefer to customize the platform to serve your business specificities, you've got to have a precise, detailed vision of what digital product you want to get.

Integration and setup come as a next step. Make sure to integrate your DSP platform with relevant ad exchanges, data providers, and third-party tools. Also make sure that you have proper tracking and reporting mechanisms to measure campaign performance.

The next important step in the process is data management for targeting and optimization processes (a robust data management strategy is necessary for collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data about audiences).

And, of course, it is necessary to remember about being compliant with data privacy regulations like GDPR or CCPA.

At the next step a business should establish partnerships with publishers or ad networks to access ad inventory. Negotiate deals and secure access to premium inventory for your advertisers.

When all this is done, the time comes for setting up a processes for creating, launching, and managing digital advertising campaigns. You'll need to provide advertisers with tools and support to set targeting parameters, budgets, and bidding strategies.

The performance of campaigns should be monitored in real-time and optimized based on key metrics (like CTR, CPC, CPA, etc.). To track the effectiveness of ad campaigns, you should generate quite comprehensive reports for advertisers.

For a business operating ad campaigns, it is important to stay updated with various regulatory requirements related to digital advertising (including consumer privacy laws and industry standards).

And finally, like every other business, you've got to have a strong marketing strategy and promote your DSP to attract advertisers. A good sales team is necessary for this.

The last thing that should be mentioned here is customer support and service: to address any issues or concerns from advertisers you'll need to organize a strong system of customer support services.

Well, these are the main stepping stones of digital advertising process. No matter how complex and resource-consuming it looks, Xenoss team continues receiving requests for development of customized DSPs. The business is growing fast, and the prognostic, seemingly too optimistic figure of its exponential growth may even be beaten much sooner than 2030, as predicted by Marketsandmarkets.