The Trade Desk Reviews & Insights

Score9 out of 10

19 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for The Trade Desk are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Advanced and Comprehensive Programmatic Media Tools: Many users have found The Trade Desk to offer a full suite of advanced and comprehensive programmatic media tools. This has allowed them to effectively optimize bidding across various factors, resulting in increased win rates and successful campaign performance.

Data Management Technology: Several reviewers have praised the data management technology provided by The Trade Desk. They appreciate its continuous improvement and evolution in the industry, which enables better targeting and more effective ad campaigns.

Wide Reach and Global Coverage: A common positive sentiment expressed by users is the wide reach and global coverage offered by The Trade Desk. This allows for reaching a wide audience through cookie matching, expanding campaign reach, improving user engagement, and achieving successful campaigns in various regions.

Reviews

8 Reviews

The Trade Desk - Solid Option

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 21, 2025

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Trade Desk is great at helping us scale our advertising especially targeting those in specific geo areas or interest groups. It's great to see so much in a big picture kind of way but then also drill down into so much display potential. It can be challenging to get a hang of especially knowing the cost to get a seat, not for the small advertiser!

Pros

programatic advertising
display advertising
digital advertising

Cons

cost - it's very expensive
search advertising
linear tv

Likelihood to Recommend

Programmatic advertising has its fits, especially when looking at audiences at scale and specific targeting. If that's what you're looking for, consider alternatives, but ultimately, The Trade Desk is the best option for a reason. I love its self-service ability, but the CTRs can sometimes be lower than what you can achieve in other platforms.

Verified User

Executive in Marketing (1-10 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

The best DSP on the marketing for ad agencies

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Trade Desk is our agency's preferred demand-side platform and data management platform to manage our clients' programmatic advertising campaigns. We use The Trade Desk (TTD) across our Client Services department. We have licensed TTD's platform since 2015. We use TTD to develop data-driven media plans for our clients - this includes developing an analysis of the best ways to target our clients' audience(s) and to forecast available impressions, CPM rates, and the optimal allocation of media budget across a variety of targeting tactics. Our Client Services department develops customer audiences in TTD's DMP. We then set up and manage campaigns and the underlying ad groups in a "full service" capacity for our clients. We use a third-party reporting dashboard that imports performance data from TTD to report on programmatic performance for our clients.

Pros

RTB media buying technology
Full suite of programmatic media tools for ad agencies
Advanced bid and budget management technology
Data management technology that's improving/evolving
Industry leading bidding technology and optimization grains
Access to the most third-party data in the industry
Open source technology with API integrations with the most third-party platforms
Ad impression and media spend forecasting tools

Cons

More hands-on sales support for agency clients
Media spend threshold incentives for agency clients
Advancing/improving the DMP product

Likelihood to Recommend

After extensive research of DSP and DMP platforms in the market, our agency made the wise decision to license TTD's platform and develop a long-term partnership. TTD continues to innovate and offer cutting-edge media buying solutions, access to more audience data segments, and access to new and emerging media channels like CTV/OTT and digital-out-of-home. We couldn't be happier with TTD's technology and is one of the most advanced agency users of TTD is a key differentiator for our agency.

Phil Parrish

Co-founder, Managing Director in Corporate at PrograMetrix (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience

View profile

Great DSP

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

September 17, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Trade Desk is a fantastic DSP that can be used to extend your reach on branding and performance campaigns worldwide. We have found them to have exclusive inventory and vast reach and that has allowed us to run user acquisition and retargeting campaigns to add to the DSP mix that we are already using.

Pros

Unique ID to track users across the web.
Different bidding techniques.
Premium supply.

Cons

Reporting not granular enough.
Not transparent on their take rate.
Lots of CTV inventory.

Likelihood to Recommend

The Trade Desk works especially well for CTV campaigns in the US. Even though you can run mobile campaigns, their focus on the last few years has been on connected TV and that is why they have a lot of premium inventory. I would not recommend running desktop campaigns with them as it is not their primary focus.

Verified User

Manager in Sales (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Great value

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

September 17, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marketing dollars are extremely limited and The Trade Desk allows us the visibility and metrics to spend them wisely. We believe we have a good ROI here. They have been a good programmatic resource for our many campaigns. We leverage their technology and breadth of reach to penetrate our target markets. The Trade Desk has been useful and adaptable to a variety of metrics we like to monitor for each campaign. It appears to do well in digital marketing among the top paid search engines. Although we don't yet have experience in using it in secondary markets, we look forward to expanding its usage to meet the growing needs of our diverse company. Usage began in just our USA division, but we expect to begin rolling it out to other divisions and countries soon.

Pros

User engagement - Cookie matching provides better engagement and effectiveness
Reporting of campaigns - Great reporting on display advertising & platforms
Dashboard reporting - Scalable to global deployment & campaigns

Cons

Look and feel could be updated. Ease of navigation and dashboard could improve.
Improve clarity on fees and other costs

Likelihood to Recommend

We are a large company, but The Trade Desk seems like it would also work well for small companies. In our limited deployment, we focused on the USA market and Digital Marketing, but we see this platform working for global markets, multi-language, and across all paid search engines. They provide great user engagement and dashboard reporting to help us manage each campaign in real-time. The Trade Desk seems to do all of these things well and would work for most companies. I have yet to see a campaign and/or executive initiative that The Trade Desk can't handle. We have had a favorable experience and believe it has met every objective we have.

Verified User

Manager in Finance and Accounting (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

A lot of muscle for the price

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 28, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a Digital Marketing Agency serving Automotive Dealerships across the United States. We manage all of their digital marketing--paid search in Google, Bing, and Yahoo, Facebook, and of course Display Advertising. We used The Trade Desk to manage all the Display advertising for our clients. We were given an agency-level account and were able to manage all of our clients' accounts under it.

Pros

Manage multiple client accounts for Display Advertising
Manage multiple clients' Display Advertising across an array of Display Platforms
We were also able to manage clients' Video and Native Advertising Campaigns

Cons

I honestly can say that The Trade Desk hit all the marks on their offerings.
There is not really anything negative about The Trade Desk.
The only minor point would be the pricing as they charge a %, which needs to be added to clients' costs.

Likelihood to Recommend

As with all SaaS platforms, there is a steep learning curve, but if you take the time to really learn its functionality and processes, The Trade Desk can be a real life-saver when it comes to managing multiple client campaigns for Video, Display, and Native advertising across multiple display platforms.

John Kobel

Paid Search Specialist in Marketing at CF Search Marketing (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Your programmatic partner

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

August 23, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Trade Desk is a great partner and we have worked together on a number of campaigns. They work as our programmatic arm and they are a great DSP that leverages their technology to achieve very good CPAs while taking advantage of their vast reach. We have never encountered any problems working with them.

Pros

Their technology is very good. We have gotten great results working with them.
They have vast coverage across the globe.
They are able to do cookie matching, vastly increasing the reach of the campaigns.

Cons

They are not very transparent in terms of margins and fees.
They need to get more video inventory, there is not enough.
The reporting they provide is a bit limited.

Likelihood to Recommend

The Trade Desk is best suited for campaigns that are performance oriented. They are able to provide good CTRs and low CPAs. I would not use them for branding as those kinds of campaigns mostly need connected TV inventory as wells as videos and there are better alternatives in the market for that niche.

Gabriela Band

Sales Specialist in Sales at Ogilvy (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

View profile

Programmatic Juggernaut

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

August 17, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The Trade Desk is a great programmatic partner. We have used them to run mobile and desktop campaigns. They helped us run campaigns on different GEOs across the globe. Their level of service is really good and they have a unique supply which helps us achieve our client goals, no matter if they are brand goals or performance targets.

Pros

They provide a unified ID that allows you to identify users across the web.
Their performance algorithms work really well, meaning campaigns usually hit their desired CPA.
Plenty of reach across the globe in all GEOs.

Cons

More data providers.
I would love to get faster support via email.
The platform is not very easy to use.

Likelihood to Recommend

The Trade Desk works very hand in hand with agencies and they are suited for performance and branding as well. However, it is still hard to merge that data on an independent ad server and centralize it on an independent reporting hub to understand the full customer journey with search, programmatic, and social.

Verified User

Director in Sales (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

Industry Leading Product - Great Supporting Cast

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

February 22, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

TheTradeDesk is being used by one department to extend the reach of our campaigns. We buy media against our first party audience pixels to gather additional insights about our users and expand our mono-lingual network into a bilingual network.

TheTradeDesk allows us deliver our campaigns in full at scale often focusing on in-view targeting metrics.

Pros

Allows you to very optimize and control bidding across pretty much every factor that impacts win rate/delivery.
Engaged, hands-on account services team is readily available to provide insights, demonstrations, and quality assurance.
Auto-optimization and pacing tools allow for less manual campaign management.

Cons

Reporting platform leaves a lot to be desired. Requires a lot of trial/error to pull exactly what you need to drive optimizations/learnings.
The "stop"/"continue bidding" feature for sitelists, devices, player sizes, etc is awful. When you set something up specifically, you should not have the AUTOMATIC option to serve beyond those parameters.
Trafficking video (VAST/VPAID) tags requires a manual insertion of a click URL. Completely redundant ask and is not provided by advertisers as that URL lives within the ad tag. Should not require multiple actions traffic a video tag.
Creative approval process (manual) doesn't seem necessary and is not a part of peers' platforms. There is no "pause/deactivate" feature for creative, you remove them or adjust the end date.

Likelihood to Recommend

All programmatic buying of media online can be done in TheTradeDesk which is why we brought it in-house. The option to go into CTV and podcast environments is of future interest.

We are able to launch campaigns faster in other platforms (DataXu, in particular) so if time is critical we do not start here. From a creative approval to meaningful spend in Day 1, TheTradeDesk is outperformed by DataXu.

Verified User

Supervisor in Marketing (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

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The best DSP on the marketing for ad agencies

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

July 12, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

RTB media buying technology
Full suite of programmatic media tools for ad agencies
Advanced bid and budget management technology
Data management technology that's improving/evolving
Industry leading bidding technology and optimization grains
Access to the most third-party data in the industry
Open source technology with API integrations with the most third-party platforms
Ad impression and media spend forecasting tools

Cons

More hands-on sales support for agency clients
Media spend threshold incentives for agency clients
Advancing/improving the DMP product

Likelihood to Recommend

Phil Parrish

Co-founder, Managing Director in Corporate at PrograMetrix (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience

View profile