A demand-side platform (DSP) buys ad impressions in real time on behalf of advertisers: exchanges and supply-side platforms send bid requests, the DSP decides in milliseconds whether to bid and how much, and the winning ad is shown. Building one from scratch takes years. A white-label DSP gives you the bidding, targeting, reporting and client panel under your own brand. Here is how to start one with GoAdserver.
1. Brand your platform
Your advertisers log in to your panel, on your domain, with your logo and colours. Ad-serving and tracking domains carry your brand, and emails come from your company. Clients never see the technology provider. See what white-label ad serving is.
2. Connect supply
A DSP needs bid requests to buy from. In GoAdserver you connect each exchange or SSP as an RTB demand campaign with the partner's endpoint, over OpenRTB 2.6 or the partner's JSON/XML feed. The built-in endpoint tester sends a test bid request so you can confirm a partner answers correctly before you go live. Bid floors are set per country, ad type, device and connection.
You can also combine RTB supply with your own publishers' ad zones and direct deals, so your advertisers can buy from all of them in one place.
3. Offer the formats advertisers buy
- Banner in all standard sizes, as image, HTML or iframe.
- Native ads that match the look of the publisher's content.
- Video in-stream through VAST, and outstream.
- Push and pop, the high-volume performance formats.
See all ad formats.
4. Give advertisers precise targeting
Advertisers target by country and region, device, operating system, browser, language, connection type, ISP, time of day, content category and retargeting audiences, with frequency capping and per-placement bid adjustments. Allow-lists and block-lists keep their budget on the inventory that works.
5. Optimise automatically
- Creative and URL pools rotate several creatives and landing pages and send traffic to the best performers.
- Source Optimizer finds the sources that hurt CTR, CPA or bounce rate so you stop buying them.
- Bid rules raise or lower bids by performance.
- Conversion tracking with postbacks and conversion APIs, so you optimise on results, not clicks.
6. Report and bill
RTB statistics show bid requests, bids, wins, win rate, spend and eCPM by exchange, country and device. Advertisers see their own real-time statistics, you can send them shared reports, and they top up and pay inside your panel.
7. Choose your business model
Charge advertisers on CPM, CPC or CPA, take a margin on media, sell managed campaigns, or offer self-serve. The platform cost is a predictable monthly plan; see pricing.
DSP, SSP or ad network?
- A DSP buys impressions for advertisers across many exchanges.
- An SSP sells a publisher's impressions to many buyers.
- An ad network brokers between its own advertisers and publishers.
With GoAdserver you don't have to choose: the same platform can run your DSP, sell your publishers' inventory as an SSP and run a classic ad network, each as far as your business needs.
Launch checklist
- Brand, panel domain and ad-serving domains set up.
- At least one exchange connected and answering in the endpoint tester.
- Bid floors and allowed formats decided per country and device.
- Fraud filtering and ad scanning switched on before real spend.
- Conversion tracking tested end to end with a test campaign.
- Advertiser pricing, top-up methods and invoices ready.
Ready to start?
A white-label DSP is the fastest route into programmatic buying. GoAdserver works as both DSP and SSP, so you can buy traffic for your advertisers and sell your own inventory to outside buyers in the same platform. Read more about RTB in GoAdserver, running your own white-label ad exchange and the checklist for launching your own network.