7 Best Self Serve Programmatic Advertising Platforms

Last Updated: March 19, 2023
Category: Advertising
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In the present times, consumers are utilizing a variety of devices and platforms to make purchases. As a result, a significant amount of customer data gets deposited in various silos, providing marketers with the opportunity to engage with their customers across the entire ecosystem, regardless of geography.

Self-serve programmatic advertising platforms, put simply, is a platform that enables advertisers to specify campaign requirements and buy digital ad inventory without engaging with a sales representative or a publisher. The entire process of tracking customer journeys and showing relevant ads can be complex, but it becomes more accessible with programmatic self-serve advertising. Self-serve programmatic advertising is the automated and self-reliant ability of the advertiser to place their ads without assistance from a third party. Available on multiple platforms, the format supports easy purchasing and quick campaign launches, notably cutting down on costs and offering greater convenience for advertisers when it comes to ad placement. This newer approach to advertising is prevalent and continuously expanding. We have a list of the best self-serve programmatic advertising platforms that can help maximize revenue and reduce manual work.

Summary
  • Best Self Serve Programmatic Advertising Platforms
    • 1. BidMind
    • 2. Eskimi
    • 2. SmartyAds
    • 4. StackAdapt
    • 5. Spotify
    • 6. AdVendio
    • 7. Kavanga

Benefits of Self-Serve Programmatic Advertising Platforms


Self-serve programmatic advertising platforms offer several significant benefits, and is a great help to anyone that is involved in the sales equation:

  • They put all the control in the hands of the advertiser, and can be easily customized to fit any and every aspect of the advertising strategy. The control does not end when the purchase has been made. It also grants the flexibility to revisit and make adjustments if something isn't yielding the desired results.
  • Self-serve programmatic platforms help minimize the time required for advertising and are very cost-efficient - they aid in expanding market share without incurring additional internal expenses.
  • They help maximize the effectiveness of your campaign. Advertisers can easily manage the demographic and contextual targeting options within their budget, guaranteeing the highest degree of effectiveness and profitability.
  • Self-serve platforms represent a new frontier in online advertising, creating space for both opportunities and improvement. The concept is continuously evolving, and providing greater benefits along the way.

How to Choose the Best Self-Serve Programmatic Advertising Platform?


Advertisers have a plethora of options available under the notion of the “best self-serve programmatic advertising platform”. However, knowing that one platform worked well for one business does not guarantee tangible results for your own. Therefore, considering the extensive diversity in business models, one of the best ways to choose a platform is to resort to research. It is essential to know what you are looking for and what would be suitable for your business. Following this, you can test all of these platforms and conduct a thorough analysis. Ultimately, you should opt for the one that yields the best results.

7 Best Self-Serve Programmatic Advertising Platforms


Here are some of the best self-serve programmatic advertising platforms that are worth your investment:

 1. BidMind

Programmatic-media-buying-platform

BidMind is an omnichannel programmatic advertising platform delivering ads across CTV, DOOH, digital audio, in-app, and web channels. We offer fully transparent and ads.txt/sellers.json/schain compliant supply that one can buy using advanced features like media planner, first- and third-party audiences, geofencing, and 24/7 reporting..

Key features:

  • Omnichannel approach with unique media planning tool
  • Digital channel, platform, location & geofencing, content type, and dayparting targeting
  • First-party audience uploading feature & 100,000+ tailored third-party audience segments available for targeting.
  • Antifraud shield powered by Pixalate and Double Verify
  • 24/7 access to reporting
  • Hands-on customer support
  • Ability to add custom features upon request

Additionally, BidMind clients have the flexibility to manage users, adjust commissions, and incorporate their own white-label clients along with their advertisers.


2. Eskimi

Eskimi

Eskimi is a global demand-side platform that helps top brands and agencies with programmatic media buying. You can stay ahead of the advertising race with innovative targeting options, engaging creatives, and a dedicated ad operations and client services team. It comes with advanced targeting and helps get a global reach. It helps capture up to 15X more attention with highly engaging, dynamic and interactive ads. You also get access to global ad operations, creative services and support.

Key features:

  • Offers advanced targeting to reach global a global audience
  • Offers custom engaging rich media ad formats or ready-to-use templates 
  • Helps reach goals faster with their global teams spread across 30+ countries and global offices.


3. SmartyAds

SmartyAds

Smartyads is one of the best self-serve advertising platforms designed for programmatic real-time ad buying. It helps advertisers configure precise targeting and get the highest click-through rates. On this platform, everything is up to advertisers: inventory selection & placement, the configuration of targeting options, and campaign management, and they can achieve more by buying and organizing their ad campaigns independently. Advertisers can launch as many campaigns as they want and change them in accordance with their budget, schedule, and objectives.

Key features:

  • Offers a single transparent, one-view dashboard to manage campaigns in one place, optimize media budget and obtain full information 
  • Helps set up ad campaigns easy with a simplified and optimized flow
  • Helps run AI powered programmatic ad campaigns across channels , formats, geos, and business verticals
  • Allows you to build your own creative library 
  • Helps reach your target audiences exactly when they need a product or service you offer with varied targeting.


4. StackAdapt

StackAdapt

The industry-leading self-serve programmatic advertising platform, StackAdapt, offers omnichannel solutions to its clients with the benefit of unique targeting through custom segments for niche or narrow categories. They help advertisers accelerate customer engagement and acquisition. They deliver intent-based targeting, automation intelligence, and real-time campaign optimization to maximize campaign ROI.

Key features:

  • Offers extensive targeting capabilities like contextual and dynamic targeting to achieve utmost precision of targeting and performance 
  • Takes responsibility to ensure a trusted environment 
  • Offers a dedicated team to provide tailored implementation and rollout plans with best training.


5. Spotify

Spotify

With Spotify Advertising,  businesses of all sizes reach engaged listeners as they stream what they love. It is a known programmatic audio advertising platform. They help advertisers deliver their message at the exact moment people are primed to hear it, and their targeting capabilities enable you to reach listeners across locations, devices, moments, and formats. They provide insights into ad delivery, engagement, and audience with every campaign, and their reporting dashboard makes it easy to track and optimize ad performance.

Key features:

  • Helps scale the reach of your programmatic marketing by reaching millions of Spotify’s logged-in users.
  • Helps share messages through engaging audio, video and display formats
  • Helps enhance your audience targeting capabilities with contextual data.


6. AdVendio

Powered by Salesforce, AdVendio offers self-service for managing cross-media ad campaigns. They help you create direct relationships with publishers and execute effective omnichannel ad campaigns and analyze spending across all channels. With their data-driven tools, it is easy to create digital campaigns to satisfy all targets and budgets and streamline the entire process of campaign planning with their ad management solution. Their programmatic ad management ensures data accuracy and reduces manual efforts by booking deals directly to integrated DSPs and Exchanges. They provide real-time reporting and save advertisers from the time-consuming manual analysis.

Key features:

  • Offers a unified channel control to set up, execute, optimize, and report on all your buying activities from one central system.
  • Helps save time and prevent manual data entry errors with seamless integrations
  • Offers powerful analytics and dashboards to import your media inventory, work with a well-structured database and easily manage your prices
  • Helps store and manage all your customer and transactional data.


7. Kavanga

Kavanga

Kavanga is a 100% programmatic ad platform that helps advertisers increase the performance of their display ads in a powerful, self-serve interface. Their machine learning algorithms choose the most valuable opportunities. They are integrated with the major traffic exchanges and run both a wide reach and precisely targeted campaigns. Advertisers can run ads in your personal account yourself and monitor your campaign's yield in real-time. They provide numerous advertising capabilities packed in a simple, easy-to-use, and intuitive interface.

Key features:

  • Helps run both a wide reach and precise targeted campaigns
  • Helps run ads in your personal account yourself and monitor campaigns in real time
  • Offers a user-friendly interface to enjoy various advertising capabilities
  • Helps boost your advertising effectiveness by using the interest segments from the leading data providers integrated into the platform, create your own self-defined custom audience segments, take advantage of the fully transparent pricing.
  • Offers complete transparency with complete and actual information on pricing, traffic, bids, wins, users and websites without any distortion.
  • Offers tools for quick launch and easy conducting campaigns 
  • Offers precise targeting options to hit your target audience.

There are so many opportunities and platforms available in advertising that it has become extremely difficult to identify what truly holds value and what does not. It is important to recognize that self-serve programmatic advertising platforms will always carry value - it gives advertisers better control and flexibility, with concrete ways to maximize revenue. This compilation of the top self-serve programmatic advertising platforms serves as an excellent entry point into the self-serve programmatic market, offering valuable opportunities for businesses to leverage.

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Editorial Staff at Publisher Growth is a team of blogging and AdTech experts adept at creating how-to, tutorials, listings, and reviews that can publishers run their online businesses in a better way.

Frequently Asked Questions

In self-serve platforms, publishers have absolute control over their ad buys. These tend to be DSPs and grant you access to ad channels, publishers, and more. Managed programmatic is where third parties manage and operate your campaigns.

Self-serve programmatic advertising platforms have a steep learning curve and it requires a full-time and constant in-house dedication.

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