12 Top Programmatic Advertising Platforms in 2024

Programmatic advertising is witnessing an impressive growth rate in recent times with global ad spending approaching 557.56 billion U.S. dollars. 

If you're looking to invest in programmatic advertising or optimize your efforts, the first thing on your mind would be to determine the best platform to partner with. 

This guide explores 12 of the best programmatic advertising platforms that can help your business achieve marketing success in 2024 and beyond. We'll compare platforms based on several criteria, including pricing, ad inventory quality, audience targeting, and anti-fraud/safety measures.

What Is Programmatic Advertising?

How Programmatic Advertising Works

Here's a great scheme by Publift that sums up how programmatic advertising works:

1. When a user lands on a website with programmatic ad placements, the website sends the visitor's data to an ad exchange.
2. The ad exchange evaluates the user's data, including browsing behavior and demographic details. This data is then presented to advertisers in real time, and an auction begins.
3. Advertisers, using demand-side platforms (DSPs), review this information and determine the value of serving their display ads, video ads, or native ads to this particular user. They then place a bid based on this evaluation, considering metrics like CPM.
4. Once the bidding is completed, the ad exchange chooses the highest bid and grants the winning advertiser the ad space.
5. Almost instantaneously, the chosen ad loads onto the user's webpage, ideally aligning with the user's interests and behaviors, enhancing the overall user experience.
6. After the ad is displayed, feedback metrics such as clicks, impressions, and conversions are collected. This data helps advertisers refine their future ad buying strategies and targeting criteria while minimizing ad fraud risks.
   

Top Programmatic Platforms by Category

Programmatic advertising relies on four categories of platforms to function: Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs), Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs), Ad Exchanges, and Data Management Platforms (DMPs).

Advertisers make use of DSPs to bid for digital ad space, while publishers make use of SSPs for selling their ad spaces. 

An ad exchange serves as a marketplace for connecting advertisers and publishers through their respective platforms. A DMP collects all kinds of data related to an advertiser's ideal customer.

Now, let’s explore some of the best programmatic ad platforms in each category.

1. Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs)

A demand-side platform (DSP) allows advertisers to bid for ad impressions on publisher websites. It also enables advertisers to filter their target audience based on specific criteria like location, age, past online behavior, gender, and more.

Here are some of the most popular programmatic DSPs:

Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP

Adobe Advertising Cloud DSP prides itself as “the only omnichannel programmatic DSP that supports connected TV, video, display, native, audio, and search campaigns.”

Mentioned as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech, Adobe provides features that help advertisers launch, manage, and optimize campaigns. This includes inventory management, personalized marketing, search management, and more.

• Pricing: Custom. Pricing depends on different factors like company size, requirements, and the number of tools purchased
• Supported Ad Inventory: Display, video, audio, mobile apps, Digital out of Home (DOOH), TV, native, and social
• Audience Targeting: Audience segment, device type, location, browser, and more
• Anti-fraud/Safety Measures: Offers page screening for detecting faulty inventory and pre-bid filtering for detecting fraud, suboptimal viewability, and brand violation.

MediaMath

Launched in 2007, MediaMath is one of the best programmatic advertising platforms (DSPs) in the industry. Today, it partners with over 3,500 advertisers to help them run omnichannel campaigns across mobile, display, OTT, native, video, audio, and more.

Its SOURCE ecosystem is designed to help advertisers achieve better supply-path optimization and algorithm decision. MediaMath is also recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech.

• Price: Custom
• Supported Ad Inventory: Connected TV, display, mobile, video, audio, native, and DOOH 
• Audience Targeting: Audience segment, contextual, first-party data, site list, location, daypart, technology, video, and audio.
• Anti-fraud/Safety Measures: Uses its SOURCE ecosystem to ensure supply-chain trust through pre-bid IVT protection and onboarding tools.

AdRoll

AdRoll is known for its simplicity and the quality of its ad templates. The platform focuses on helping brands expand their reach through video, social ads, display, native, email, and more.

Recognized as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Ad Tech, AdRoll uses a broad spectrum of data to determine where and when to deliver ads to prospects.

• Price: Offers a free package for starters as well as a custom pricing package for enterprises
• Supported Ad Inventory: Video, social ads, display, native, and email
• Audience Targeting: Contextual, lookalike, demographic, interest, lookalike, and CRM targeting 
• Anti-fraud/Safety Measures: Has a Trust and Safety Team for automatically and manually filtering invalid traffic

2. Supply Side Platform (SSP)

A supply-side platform (SSP) focuses on helping publishers (website owners) sell ad space on their apps, websites, and other digital properties.

These platforms use automation to determine the optimal price for each ad space and sell to the best bidder. SSPs work with ad networks to connect publishers to a broader pool of advertisers.

Let’s take a look at a few of the leading SSPs in the industry.

PubMatic

PubMatic offers services for both media buyers and publishers. As an SSP, it provides an impressive collection of tools to help publishers optimize the monetization potential of all their digital assets.

This includes tools for header bidding, RTB advertising, Private Marketplaces (PMP), and ad quality.

• Supported Ad Inventory: CTV, OTT, display, video, addressable, mobile, native, and more
• Anti-fraud/Safety Measures for Publishers: Uses real-time scanning and strategic partnerships to safeguard publisher’s audiences across ad formats, channels, and screens

Google Ad Manager 

Programmatic publishers utilize an average of 6 SSPs to sell ad space to advertisers. Despite this, Google remains the most popular SSP among publishers, claiming 51% of the industry’s market share.

In fact, 75% of ad impressions in the US come from Google Ad Manager. More insights in the Twitter thread below.

Google Ad Manager exists for large publishers with significant direct sales. Some of the tools it offers include server-side header bidding, managed PMPs, advanced dashboard and reporting system, and more.

• Supported Ad Inventory: Video, mobile, display, and native.
• Anti-fraud/Safety Measures for Publishers: Google supports popular safety standards, initiatives, and protocols such as the IAB ads.txt standard, SafeFrame, and HTTPS to protect against unsuitable ads and invalid activity

Criteo

Criteo offers a retail media service to help publishers monetize their site content by leveraging first-party data and audiences.

Unlike Google Ads Manager, Criteo makes its services available to publishers with lower traffic numbers. As an SSP, Criteo focuses more on retargeting.

More info in the thread below:

• Supported Ad Inventory: Social media, video, display, web, and mobile
• Anti-fraud/Safety Measures for Publishers: Criteo uses advanced image recognition technology to filter unsafe content from publishers’ digital properties

3. Ad Exchanges

Ad Exchanges position themselves as the intermediary between advertisers and publishers. 

Publishers come to ad exchanges to submit ad impressions which are then presented to advertisers for bidding in real-time.

Here are some of the best ad exchanges in the industry.

Xandr

Originally called AppNexus, Xandr is a leading programmatic advertising company offering a full stack of programmatic advertising services. This means it provides services, such as a DSP, SSP, and an Ad Exchange.

As an Ad Exchange, Xandr serves over 11.4 billion ad impressions daily.

One of its most notable features is its header bidding wrapper, which makes header bidding more convenient and efficient for publishers. The platform supports different ad inventory, including video, banner, audio, native, and more.

Xander partners with White Ops, an MRC-accredited company, for ensuring brand safety across its marketplace.

SmartyAds

SmartyAds provides a white-label ad exchange platform, Smart Hub, which has recorded over 25,000 publishers and 2 billion impressions daily.

It also serves as a full-stack programmatic ad tech platform, offering services as a DSP and SSP to both advertisers and publishers. The platform is compatible with a wide range of traffic types and ad formats, including video, banner, audio, native, push, pop, and more.

Compared to Xandr, SmartyAds offers a more comprehensive collection of security and anti-fraud features and partnerships to make the marketplace safer for publishers and advertisers.

PubMatic

PubMatic makes a second appearance in this guide, thanks to its incredible capabilities as a full-stack ad tech platform.

As an ad exchange, PubMatic has established itself as an industry leader with over 171 billion ad impressions per day. Publishers benefit from its ease-of-use, DMP integrations, and open-source header bidding.

On the advertisers' side, PubMatic offers integration with various security tools to prevent fraudulent practices and ensure brand safety.

4. Data Management Platforms (DMPs)

DMPs are less talked about in programmatic advertising platforms realm. But they're equally as important. Advertisers use all kinds of data when developing a campaign strategy to ensure their ads are relevant to their prospects.

DSPs automatically place bids for ad spaces in the marketplace, but to ensure that the purchased ads are aimed at the right demographic, these platforms take advantage of data supplied by DMPs. Publishers, on the other hand, use DMPs to store and analyze user data to get a better understanding of their website visitors.

Here are some of the most popular DMPs in the industry.

Audience Studio by Salesforce

Salesforce is widely known for its CRM system. However, the company also offers a Data Management Platform for advertisers.

Formerly known as Salesforce DMP, Audience Studio allows advertisers to capture data from any source and segment this data using machine learning algorithms. It also offers a native consent management framework to help advertisers maintain transparency and trust with their customers.

Lotame

Lotame is an industry-leading DMP that offers a wide range of services, including audience management, data marketplace, and identity resolution.

It allows its users to access first-party data from sources like emails, CRMs, social media, apps, and more. It also provides the opportunity to expand on available data through its data marketplace.

Lotame’s DMP, however, lacks live reporting features and loads relatively slowly. 

The Trade Desk

Alongside a DSP, The Trade Desk offers a DMP to help advertisers and publishers collect, manage, and activate their data in one place.

One of its most popular features is its lookalike modeling which allows you to discover new audiences based on insights from your existing audiences. It also offers a data marketplace where users can access high-quality audiences from data providers.

TheTradeDesk is actively expanding in the DMP sector. For example, TikTok and theTradeDesk launched a partnership not long ago. This collaboration will drive more brands to the platform and stimulate the growth of advertising on TikTok.

Moving Forward: Automating Programmatic Analytics

Programmatic advertising, with its variety of platforms and ad placement options, generates a large chunk of data that marketing teams have to work with. Without a well-thought analytics system in place, it becomes overly challenging to understand which campaigns or platforms drive your growth and which of them just drain your marketing budget. ‍

Improvado addresses these challenges head-on by providing a comprehensive data management and marketing intelligence solution. The platform seamlessly connects to all your programmatic advertising solutions, extracting data and standardizing it into a unified format. This consolidated data is then effortlessly pushed to the BI tool of your choice. 

To ease the analytics setup, Improvado provides a pre-built programmatic advertising dashboard template. By eliminating all aspects of manual reporting, you can save hundreds of hours on manual data collection, ensure the correctness of your reports, and spot trends with ease with automated dashboards.‍

Get a demo call to see how Improvado can simplify the analysis of cross-platform advertising data and allow for more effective campaign management.

Frequently Asked Questions