Karolina BendrykSSPs need two things to scale: premium publishers and DSPs with big budgets. But even with both, achieving real success is nearly impossible if ignoring supply path optimization (SPO). Why?
Without it, you cannot build trust with DSPs or guarantee high profits for your publishers. For any SSP that has yet to recognize this, it’s time to pause and reassess your entire approach.
Not just another feature
It is a common practice, mostly among small supply-side businesses, to consider SPO a “nice-to-have” option rather than a priority. That is a suboptimal strategy
First of all, SPO is not just a feature or an option—it’s a demand for transparency from DSPs. They want to ensure they are paying for adequate inventory without wasting money on duplicate bids or bot traffic.
If an SSP wants to stay competitive, it must react by optimising its supply paths. Modern supply path optimization may include machine learning models that score paths by win rate, bid response time, or bid CPM volatility.
Our SPO Toolkit empowers your team with this and more. It operates autonomously in the background, continuously analyzing the supply chain to identify inefficiencies and hidden waste. This eliminates the need for manual AdOps intervention. Instead, they get precise reports to know what and how to improve. The result is an optimized and transparent supply path that delivers a clean, high-value bid stream to buyers—free from bots and fraudulent traffic.
Sounds like a benefit solely for DSPs? This is not: in reality, everyone wins. Specifically for SSPs, this approach serves as a springboard to boost and scale their businesses.
How exactly can SPO help SSPs to grow?
DSPs’ algorithms prioritize SPO-oriented SSPs and tend to offer higher bids to them. Publishers also prefer to partner with such SSPs as they get direct access to demand and higher revenue, not just leftovers from intermediaries’ fee-cutting.
The result? An SSP becomes a magnet for both premium publishers and large DSPs. This triggers more ad requests, higher bids, a stronger CPM, better bid intensity, and, ultimately, maximum revenue.
These are not just mere words. At TeqBlaze, we have seen clients increase their revenue by 10% or more, depending on their SPO configuration. Another way SPO boosts revenue is by weeding out unverified supply chains—paths that DSPs cannot verify and therefore may automatically reject. By identifying and eliminating flawed routes, SPO directly enhances key performance metrics, which in turn drives revenue growth. This requires custom SPO configurations depending on partners' requirements, as well as their inventory and geolocation specifications.
Hidden benefits
By embracing SPO principles, SSPs provide additional performance benefits to their partners, including clean traffic and reduced ad latency.
Providing clean traffic lifts a significant burden from DSPs, helping them achieve their campaign goals faster and without overpaying for bot traffic.
High latency means lost impressions and lost revenue—it’s a silent killer for both publishers' and SSPs' earnings. By reducing the number of intermediaries (hops) in the supply chain, an SSP can deliver ad requests to DSPs more quickly. The sooner the DSP receives the request, the more time it has to make a high-quality decision and send back its bid. As a result, ads will also appear more quickly on the page, increasing the likelihood that users will see and react to them.
Let’s imagine a supply path with three intermediaries (hops), each adding 50-100 ms of latency. In this scenario, it takes 225 ms for an ad request to reach the DSP.
But with SPO, an SSP can try to establish a shorter or even direct connection. If successful, a direct connection cuts the latency to just 75 ms—a full 150 ms faster. Feel the difference.
This, in turn, impacts overall auction performance, leading to higher fill rates, better win rates, and improved viewability—precisely what you need to skyrocket your scaling.
SPО for traffic curation: priority or not?
Curated deals are fundamentally built on traffic curation—without it, they fail to deliver on their promise. Traffic curation, in turn, requires SPO. Without SPO, it's impossible to guarantee an efficient, brand-safe supply path. And without that guarantee, the very concept of "curation" becomes meaningless. It devolves into just another Open RTB path, indistinguishable from any other. Therefore, SPO is more than just a priority for traffic curation; it is the foundation of its success.
Scaling without SPO is like flying blind.
In 2025, both publishers and DSPs demand transparency, stability, and responsiveness from SSPs. Without those qualities, an SSP literally won’t survive. And that is why it needs SPO.
It provides quicker supply paths, simplifies their analysis for DSPs, and thus improves overall auction performance—exactly what SSPs need for scaling. This is why SPO is more than just a technical checkbox; it is a fundamental strategy. The sooner an SSP adopts it, the sooner it will enhance its performance and, consequently, its growth.
Explore our ML-based SPO Toolkit and learn how it integrates with Curated Deals logic. Book a demo or join the waitlist.
