Many marketers find it difficult to explain programmatic advertising in layman’s terms. Simply put, programmatic advertising is using software to purchase digital ads. While the traditional way of buying advertising included lots of research, negotiation, placements, and deals with salespeople, programmatic advertising is making things much simpler. Using artificial intelligence to automate the ad buying process, programmatic advertising leaves marketers more time for optimizing their tactics.
Now, according to EMarketer’s estimates, programmatic digital display ad spending will reach $45.94 by 2019. And, there are two major reasons for such a rapid growth of programmatic advertising. First, it’s efficient. The process of buying and selling ads is much simpler when done by software. Second, the rising relevancy of ad targeting. Programmatic generates customer data from multiple sources providing them with highly personalized experiences. Based on factors like demographics, psychographics, and buying intent, programmatic determines not only where the ad will be placed, but also who will see it.
Set clear goals
No matter if you’re just entering the programmatic waters or you’re refining your advertising objectives, you need to set clear goals first. Keep track of the industry trends and use the marketing data you’ve gathered so far to set clear short- and long-term goals and build a strong strategy around them. Just like with any other aspect of marketing, make sure your goals are SMART- specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. In the world of digital marketing, making rational, data-backed decisions is the basis of success.
Choose a reliable DSP
A DSP stands for a demand-side-platform, the basic technology you need when entering the programmatic buying waters. Most reputable DSPs have similar features and, once you set clear objectives for your programmatic strategy, you’ll be able to choose the right one. Here are a few questions you need to ask yourself when choosing the right vendor:
- Do they have a customer support team to help you when the need arises?
- What about their transparency? Always ask a vendor about the transparency of their placements, inventory sources, as well as the costs.
- How good are their targeting options? Make sure you’ve chosen a vendor that lets you use the targeting options to the fullest extent.
- Does it allow you to track your performance effectively? Most DSPs provide you with the basic ad tracking. However, some larger platforms are powered by more tools and create detailed reports on your media spend.
- Does the technology the platform uses aligns with your business’ goals?
Provide personalized experiences
With the rise of your competition, the mere notion of brand loyalty has changed. Today, to inspire people to buy from you and stay loyal to your brand, you need to provide them with a highly targeted user experience. If you’ve started investing in organic search, then you know that creating highly personalized and interactive content is one of the major points on any SEO checklist.
And, this is where programmatic advertising can also help. It allows you to segment your target audiences effectively and create highly targeted messages for each of your customers at every stage of your sales funnel.
The Economist is the right example of how important targeting is for programmatic buying. Namely, to reach new readers interested in their content, they started using subscriber data to find more about them. This included the readers’ preferences, popular types of content, and personal information that helped them choose highly targeted content and divide the publication into key sections.
Most importantly, they started creating intriguing titles and assessing viewer profiles in real-time. This way, they managed to provide each customer with an appropriate and relevant ad. And, the results were amazing, as they improved their brand awareness by 64%.
Protect your brand
Programmatic advertising is not perfect. As it is based on numerous algorithms, your ads can sometimes appear alongside inappropriate content. Of course, you don’t want your brand to be linked with low-quality sites. Precisely because of that, you need to choose a programmatic vendor with prebuilt blacklists for such sites, as well as continuously monitor for undesirable websites.
Additionally, you could also take advantage of whitelists. In short, these are lists of authoritative and acceptable sites where you want to run your inventory. Even though this option will help you ensure that no inappropriate material is linked with your ad, it will significantly narrow your exposure and the ability to reach your target audience.
Track the right metrics
Once you set clear goals and know how you want to implement your programmatic strategy, you need to choose the right metrics to keep you on track. To see if your strategy is improving and choose the right KPIs to track, you first need to determine the purpose of your campaign.
For example, if you’re running an audience campaign, you need to focus on the KPIs related to your brand awareness, such as the time people spend on your site or branded search results. On the other hand, contextual campaigns are perfect for you if you want to choose the channels that work for your target audience and they’re based on the KPIs like conversion rates, CTR, and ECPC.
Over to you
Programmatic advertising may seem too complicated to you right now, but gives you a great opportunity to rise above your competitors and provide your customers with a highly targeted approach. And, the tactics mentioned above will help you refine your standard programmatic practices and deliver greater results.
How do you use programmatic advertising?
