Basis DSP - highly functional, worth the effort of an API integration
March 20, 2019
Basis DSP - highly functional, worth the effort of an API integration
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Basis DSP
We use Basis DSP to reach members of our advertising network across other relevant mobile apps that they're using. It is used exclusively by the ad operations department, but is part of every client campaign that we deploy. Basis helps us reach grocery list app users while they're engaged with other apps they use, such as games, weather, and news apps, due to its ability to bid on the major mobile exchanges simultaneously.
Pros
- Provides access to lots of data/user segments in addition to the ability to upload network audiences. User and interest level targeting is easy and powerful
- API integrations with Basis DSP make it easy for publishers who are using bespoke and/or plug-and-play DMPs, CRMs, or other DSPs to manage campaigns without living in yet another interface.
- Ad tag integration with DART/DFA ensures that trafficking ads with third-party impression tags/pixels is easy and only needs to be done once.
Cons
- More detail on how and when the exchanges review submitted ad tags would help us set better expectations for our clients and client success teams during launch. Often a delay in ad approvals can result in lagging campaign metrics that must be made up later, often at the cost of performance.
- More predictive tools / the ability to stop a campaign from bidding when a certain impression threshold is reached (in addition to the dayparting and budget rules that are currently in place and used for every campaign).
- For some reports, such a geolocation reports, being able to visualize it on a map of some kind would make the data export more meaningful and less manual for our operations and client success teams seeking to explain to clients where their campaign was exposed.
- Basis DSP allows us to reach users in many different places while controlling costs - access to major exchanges at a competitive bid rate allows us to provide a lot of added-value to clients without dramatically increasing the cost they incur.
- The team is friendly, helpful, and responsive, so we don't have a lot of situations where we're locked in campaign downtime due to a customer service issue with negative downstream impacts to the bottom line.
- Periodic reporting outages have resulted in campaigns that overpace and incur needless costs (however, this is certainly an exception, not the rule).
We've previously tested Pocketmath and evaluated Beeswax.
Pocketmath and Basis are roughly the same in terms of cost and inventory. However, Pocketmath's interface, while very attractive, is very difficult to use to deploy large scale campaigns quickly. It is definitely better-suited for a small organization with niche or very specific goals. The workflow and reporting are not what I would describe as familiar for someone who has previously used a DSP. That may be an attraction for some people, as DSPs are typically not user-friendly, but the interface makes reporting and optimizing at-a-glance more difficult, and there are many arbitrary controls in place to prevent archiving, removing, or resuming campaigns after a status change. For businesses that move quickly and reopen existing client relationships, this taxonomy can be challenging.
Beeswax's interface is similar to that of Basis, but at a considerably higher cost. The main benefit we found to that technology during our trial were the predictive and visual reporting tools that enabled proactive optimization and easy to understand reports for the client success/services team.
Pocketmath and Basis are roughly the same in terms of cost and inventory. However, Pocketmath's interface, while very attractive, is very difficult to use to deploy large scale campaigns quickly. It is definitely better-suited for a small organization with niche or very specific goals. The workflow and reporting are not what I would describe as familiar for someone who has previously used a DSP. That may be an attraction for some people, as DSPs are typically not user-friendly, but the interface makes reporting and optimizing at-a-glance more difficult, and there are many arbitrary controls in place to prevent archiving, removing, or resuming campaigns after a status change. For businesses that move quickly and reopen existing client relationships, this taxonomy can be challenging.
Beeswax's interface is similar to that of Basis, but at a considerably higher cost. The main benefit we found to that technology during our trial were the predictive and visual reporting tools that enabled proactive optimization and easy to understand reports for the client success/services team.
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