Step-by-Step Guide to Craft an Effective SPO Strategy

Supply path optimisation stopped being a hygiene line item in 2026. Real benchmarking data now shows a measurable, reportable monetisation gap between direct and rebroadcast paths, which means an SPO strategy is no longer optional housekeeping, it’s a line-item revenue decision.

Most SPO advice stops at “reduce the number of SSPs you work with,” which is directionally right and practically useless without a method for deciding which ones to cut and why. Here’s the actual sequence, grounded in what’s currently measurable.

Why SPO moved from hygiene to strategy

Through 2022 to 2024, supply path optimisation was treated as ad-ops housekeeping while the industry’s strategic attention went to identity and cookie deprecation. That’s reversed. Jounce Media’s April 2026 supply path benchmarking found rebroadcasting supply chains, paths where the same impression is resold through an intermediary rather than reaching a publisher directly, carry a roughly 50% monetisation deficit compared to maximally direct paths, a gap that’s now reportable path-by-path on every major DSP. Which supply path a buyer routes through has become a direct, measurable line-item impact on campaign economics, not a background technical detail.

Step 1: Audit current supply paths with log-level data

Start with actual bid-level log data from your ad server or header bidding wrapper, not the summary reporting your SSPs provide, since summary reporting rarely surfaces reselling relationships an SSP has no incentive to highlight. Jounce’s 2026 benchmarking finds the average RTB-enabled publisher now integrates with 25-30 sell-side platforms directly, up from roughly 24 a year earlier, and authorises 16-17 of them to initiate resold auctions on top of that. Most publishers underestimate this number substantially until they actually pull the raw data.

Step 2: Identify and flag rebroadcasting paths

Rebroadcasting supply chains, where the same impression is being recycled through multiple resold paths rather than representing genuinely unique inventory, now account for roughly 41% of display auctions and 26% of video auctions according to Jounce’s 2026 data. This is the exact structural pattern behind the bid duplication problem covered in Bid Duplication Risks and Challenges for Marketers, and it’s worth flagging that self-declared ads.txt and sellers.json labels aren’t fully reliable here either, Jounce identifies roughly 15% of the bid requests it classifies as wasteful rebroadcasting as incorrectly self-labelled DIRECT.

Step 3: Consolidate toward directness, not toward fewer partners for its own sake

The goal of consolidation is path quality, not simply a smaller partner count. Jounce’s SPO Monitor found the average number of SSP partners per DSP dropped from 18 to 12 over two years, a real consolidation trend, but the metric that actually matters is what share of remaining paths are direct versus rebroadcast, since a publisher could cut partner count while keeping the worst-performing paths and lose ground on actual monetisation. Whether to build this evaluation capability internally or rely on a vendor’s SPO reporting tool is a genuine build-versus-buy decision, covered from the general framework side in Our Guide To Making Wise Marketing Technology Investments.

Step 4: Verify with ads.txt and sellers.json, then keep monitoring

Given that self-declared transparency labels aren’t fully reliable on their own, verification needs to be an ongoing process rather than a one-time setup task. Reconcile ads.txt and sellers.json declarations against actual observed auction behaviour periodically, since the whole point of an SPO strategy is catching the gap between what a supply path claims to be and what the log-level data actually shows it doing.