How Programmatic Advertising Works
Understand the programmatic ecosystem — publishers, DSPs, SSPs, ad exchanges, and RTB.
The Programmatic Ecosystem Overview
Programmatic advertising automates the buying and selling of digital ad inventory through technology rather than direct human negotiation.
The ecosystem connects advertisers (buyers) who use Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) to bid on inventory, and publishers (sellers) who use Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) to monetize it, with ad exchanges facilitating the transaction in real time.
Real-Time Bidding Auction Mechanics
When a user loads a webpage, the publisher's SSP sends a bid request containing information about the available impression — the user's anonymized profile, the page context, the ad slot dimensions — to connected ad exchanges.
DSPs evaluate the bid request, determine the value of the impression to their campaign goals, and submit a bid in the roughly 100 milliseconds between the page request and the ad rendering.
All lessons in this course
- How Programmatic Advertising Works
- Demand-Side Platforms and Real-Time Bidding
- Audience Segmentation and Data Management
- Programmatic Campaign Optimization