8 Ways Marketers Use DSPs Across the Funnel: From Awareness to Retargeting

Take a close look at your current digital advertising strategy. Are you using your DSP simply as a bottom-of-the-funnel conversion tool, or are you unlocking its full omnichannel potential?

In this article, we will talk about the ways to expand the use of programmatic technology. We’ll dive into high-impact tactics that allow you to bid smarter and ultimately own the entire customer journey without increasing your manual workload.

What is a DSP Marketing?

Before the introduction of DSPs, when a company or an ad agency wanted to buy digital ads, they needed to deal with individual publishers or salespeople via email or phone calls. Time-consuming negotiations were an integral part of this process.

Today, a DSP plays the role of an automated media buying platform. It connects with multiple ad exchanges and networks simultaneously. As a result, it allows you to purchase inventory (like banner ads, video, mobile, and connected TV) across thousands of websites and apps from a centralized dashboard.

How DSP-Based Programmatic Advertising Works

DSPs are the engine behind programmatic advertising. When a user visits a web page or opens an app, the publisher makes the ad impression available through programmatic marketplaces, which may include real-time auctions, private marketplaces, or programmatic deals.

With a good internet connection, it takes just milliseconds for the page to load. And during this short time period, the DSP analyzes the user’s profile, decides if they match the required target audience, and automatically places a bid on your behalf via real-time bidding (RTB). If your bid wins, your ad is served instantly.

Here is why DSPs are often viewed as a cornerstone of modern digital marketing:

• Centralized management. Instead of managing campaigns across a range of different platforms, businesses can control their entire media buying strategy from one interface.
• Precision targeting. DSPs allow advertisers to target audiences using first-party data, contextual signals, geographic data, identity graphs, and modeled behavioral segments.
• Cost efficiency. Automated bidding allows advertisers to compete only for impressions that match their targeting criteria, improving media efficiency and reducing wasted spend.
• Real-time analytics. Marketers can track campaign performance, win rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS) in near real time. This allows for rapid adjustments to strategy.

DSP in Marketing: How It Supports Every Stage of the Funnel

There is an opinion that programmatic advertising is only good for bottom-of-the-funnel conversions or pure brand awareness. However, it is not true. In reality, a modern DSP is a full-funnel engine.

DSP marketing consolidates many different ad formats and targeting data points into one dashboard. Thanks to this, marketers can efficiently guide users from their first interaction to the final sale.

Let’s take a closer look at how a DSP marketing platform can support each stage of the funnel.

1. Top of Funnel (Awareness)

At the top of the funnel, the key goal is to cast a wide net to introduce a brand to new prospects who haven’t heard of it yet.

DSPs are highly helpful at this step as they ensure contextual targeting (placing ads on websites relevant to your industry) and demographic/interest targeting (it enables reaching users based on broad behavioral data).

What ad formats can be used?

• Connected TV (CTV),
• digital audio,
• premium pre-roll video.

Key metrics to track are:

• Cost per mille/thousand impressions (CPM),
• reach,
• video completion rate (VCR).

2. Mid-Funnel (Consideration)

When users already know who you are, your goal shifts to bringing them to your website to research your products.

Modern DSPs rely on versatile data to build lookalike audiences. It means that you can target people who share characteristics with your best customers.

Another approach is in-market targeting. In this case, the platform can identify users whose recent browsing behavior suggests they are actively researching a purchase in your category.

Ad formats to use:

• Native advertising,
• high-quality display banners.

Key metrics to rely on:

• Click-through rate (CTR),
• cost per click (CPC),
• landing page views.

3. Bottom of Funnel (Conversion)

At the bottom of the funnel, the objective is performance. Now, you need to turn an interested prospect into a paying customer or a qualified lead.

This is where retargeting has the biggest power. The DSP can identify users who visited your site but didn’t convert and serve them highly specific ads across the web.

You can also utilize CRM onboarding. This allows advertisers to upload your own first-party customer lists to target them specifically. Conversely, you can exclude them from seeing acquisition ads.

Instead of standard ad formats, you can apply dynamic creative optimization (DCO) here. The DSP can automatically build customized display ads in real time and show the user the exact product or service page they recently viewed.

Key metrics to pay attention to:

• Cost per acquisition/action (CPA),
• return on ad spend (ROAS),
• conversion rate.

Top 5 Ways Marketers Use DSPs Beyond the Funnel

DSPs demonstrate great efficiency throughout the entire acquisition funnel. But limiting their use to just this purpose would be wrong.

First-party data integrations, advanced targeting capabilities, and emerging ad formats help marketers drive value far beyond the initial point of sale.

Let’s take a closer look at the top 5 ways to maximize your DSP outside the traditional funnel.

Unified Omnichannel Orchestration

In the past, buying a radio spot, a billboard, and a website banner required three different vendors and three different contracts. A DSP consolidates these into a single workflow.

This helps businesses tell a synchronized story to their target audiences. Just imagine: a user hears your ad on a podcast during their commute and sees your display ad on their laptop an hour later. The effectiveness of your marketing efforts can skyrocket.

Moreover, you can use cross-device attribution to analyze how a video ad on a tablet influenced a search conversion on a desktop.

Large-Scale Creative and Messaging Testing

Before investing millions in a linear TV commercial or a massive print spread, businesses use their DSP as a testing laboratory.

Programmatic advertising allows for rapid A/B testing. You can test the efficiency of different headlines, color palettes, value propositions, and video formats.

By running micro-campaigns to see which creatives generate the highest engagement rates, you can confidently roll out the winning concepts to more expensive and non-biddable media channels.

Strategic Win-Back Campaigns

Retention focuses on active customers. Meanwhile, win-back campaigns target those who have churned or gone dormant.

You can analyze CRM data and identify users who haven’t made a purchase in six months or a year.

Instead of writing them off, you can use the DSP to serve highly tailored messaging. It is recommended to pair it with a discount or an update about a new product feature that addresses their previous pain points.

Global Frequency Capping

When you buy ads from five different websites directly, a single user might see your ad 10 times on each site. As a result, it can be 50 impressions for one person. This leads to ad fatigue.

With a modern DSP, you can set a frequency capping across multiple publishers and devices when identity resolution allows it.

It means that you dictate exactly how many times a single human sees your brand across the entire internet and ensure you reach more people rather than the same person too many times.

Employer Branding and Talent Acquisition

A DSP marketing platform is typically applied to sell products. But such solutions can also be powerful recruitment engines.

HR and marketing teams can collaborate to run programmatic campaigns aimed at attracting top-tier talent. By using contextual targeting on niche industry websites, or geofencing university campuses and competitor headquarters, companies can serve their ads to the exact professionals they want to hire. In such messages, they can highlight their company culture, benefits, as well as share open roles.

How to Choose the Right DSP for Your Marketing Goals

Selecting a DSP in marketing is a serious step, as this is one of the most important technologies that your team will rely on. There is no such notion as the “best” platform. There can’t be one-size-fits-all options. You shouldn’t try to find a platform with the most features. Instead, it’s vital to concentrate on defining a DSP that aligns with your specific business objectives and data infrastructure.

Based on our practical experience in AdTech and MarTech, we recommend considering the following aspects:

Step 1. Define Your Inventory Needs

Not all DSPs have the same reach. For example, if your strategy relies heavily on CTV, ensure the DSP has direct integrations with specific premium exchanges.

While analyzing your goals, you need to define whether you need a generalist platform or one specialized in mobile-first or video-heavy inventory.

Step 2. Evaluate Data Integration Capabilities

Your DSP must be well-integrated with your existing tech stack, including, but not limited to, your customer data platform (CDP) and CRM.

Also, pay attention to the security of such integrations.

Step 3. Analyze the Algorithm (AI & Optimization)

The heart of the DSP is its bidding algorithm. Some platforms prioritize the lowest possible cost, while others optimize for high-value conversions or viewability.

It is crucial to verify whether the platform allows for custom bidding scripts. For advanced B2B marketers, the ability to train the AI on your specific conversion goals is often a massive competitive advantage.

Step 4. Focus on Transparency and Brand Safety

Ensure the platform provides log-level data and has built-in protections against ad fraud.

Evaluate supply path optimization capabilities to minimize unnecessary intermediaries in the programmatic supply chain.

You should know exactly where every dollar is spent.

Is Off-the-Shelf DSP Always Enough?

For many enterprise brands and agencies, standard DSPs come with limitations. For instance, they may introduce high monthly minimum spends, rigid user interfaces, or an inability to integrate proprietary data models.

To overcome such restrictions, you can turn to custom DSP development.

Building or customizing your own programmatic infrastructure allows you to:

• Eliminate middleman fees. Reduce some platform margins and gain greater control over the programmatic supply chain.
• Own your data. Keeping your sensitive first-party data within your own cloud environment, instead of uploading it to a third-party vendor, is a weighty advantage.
• Custom algorithms. You have the possibility of implementing proprietary bidding logic that recognizes your specific goals better than any generic solution ever could.

Conclusion

DSPs offer marketers control, transparency, and targeting power across the entire customer journey. These platforms can cover all stages of interaction with a client, from the very first touchpoint on a CTV to a highly personalized retargeting banner.

With all the benefits of a DSP in marketing, there are no questions about the need to use it. The main questions are related to the ways to do it effectively.

The 8 approaches discussed in our article, from full-funnel orchestration to employer branding, will help you turn advertising from a cost center into a powerful growth engine.