Basis DSP vs. OpenX

Basis DSP is well suited to every type of campaign imaginable. My firm specializes in outreach and education campaigns and we use Basis DSP in order to turn people out to events and to take specific actions. Basis has changed how we do business for the better. The hyperlocal campaigns, native campaigns, and audio campaigns have all added excellent additional capabilities to our tool box and have allowed us to complete very compelling campaigns for our clients.

Incentivized

This is a wonderful product that is well supported and fully backed by OpenX. If you have green staff that require some training to get their foot in the door for basic ad management, this is a great tool. We've never utilized the OpenX ad market so I can't speak to the quality of the ads in that open market, but for in-house ads in complex networks with its targeting tools, this software would be more than suitable to fulfill your needs.

• Customer Service and Support is fantastic. Always willing to educate our team and help us get the most value out of the platform.
• The ad fraud features are great. Through DV360 we need to use a third-party which comes with additional costs.
• Easy to use platform.

Incentivized

• When it comes to RTB and spending on the open exchange market, the number one reason why we spend in one exchange over another is simple performance
• When Open X doesn't perform which it tends not to, we have to shut that exchange off. This exchange tends to not perform at a CPA or CPC KPI and tends to not have the safest sites either.
• Because I only use Open X as an exchange which I tap into from a DSP I can't speak to it's other capabilities.

• Managed service is a little pricey and tends to have slightly lower performance
• interface is very 90's, could use a real facelift purely from an aesthetic perspective
• Reports are continually being updated but could use some refinement in output for client-facing reports

Incentivized

• Propagation could be improved; ad units that need to go live immediately could take up to 45 minutes to propagate.
• Over-complexity can be confusing. There are multiple tiers before assigning ad units per order and it seems unnecessary.
• Real-time reporting or a status dashboard would be great.

I would renew use of OpenX as it is a solid ad serving platform that is easy to use, install, and maintain with some great advanced features that give more control to publishers ad ops teams large or small while reducing the costs associated with managing, serving, and delivering ads from third party vendors.

It's pretty basic, nothing is hidden and nothing ever moves so you can count on finding what you are looking for each day

Incentivized

I was given the system to use as part of setting up a whole new site from scratch in less than 2 months, with a large number of specialty hub pages to run ads on and lots of content I needed to run disease specific ads on. The system was easy for me to learn on the fly in a very compressed time frame. I would have loved more chance to really dig in under the hood to see all that it could do, but given how fast I had to work, I got everything up and running and looking great. And I did it ahead of my launch deadline too. My only reservation might be for people who are not as patient as I am in picking things up, or as hands on. Customer service was great if I needed them, and a quick start guide with the essentials would be ideal for those people.

We have a dedicated account rep. She makes it seem like we are her only client, she is very responsive, helps each time we have a question and understands our campaign goals. Anytime we need support, our rep is available either email or call and if she is not going to be available, she will let us know ahead of time to provide back up and inform them of our current campaigns so they can better assist us.

Incentivized

They went above and beyond without ever asking for additional money and we met our launch date and immediately started to meet and even surpass our business goals. Nothing was too much trouble, which really stood out compared to other companies I had and was at that time also working with. Customer service can really make or break any business; if i expect my staff to give good customer service, I expect to get it too, and Open X gave it.

There are a ton of tactics and strategy to implement in the DSP platform. There isn't really a selection of the different types of campaigns or tactics to choose from, you just have to learn as you go. Once you figure out the strategy and goal of the campaign it is very easy to implement the tactic and to achieve its goals.

Incentivized

Basis [DSP] has much better fraud control than SmartyAds DSP. Even though they do not have the amount of supply inventory as Smarty, they have much more controls for invalid traffic and bots which is very important to minimize discrepancies and issues with clients. Compared to other DSPs though, it lags on performance solutions.

Incentivized

Double Click, Adbrite before it became sitescout. We chose Open X because it was easy to integrate into the back end of our site and we liked the reports it provided and the ease of use. Double Click is a Google company, and frankly, while they are good at some technology, their products can be clunky failures AND we are not so sure we want to give them so much data about the inner workings of our business and keyword universe

• 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).

Incentivized

• OpenX made it easy to manage online advertising. At the time I used the product I was the lead developer in charge of implementing the solution but quickly was put into the role of managing the traffic and training other users. It was really easy for a technical user to become a traffic manager. Getting other users trained and up to speed was very efficient.