You may not have realized it, but you’re seeing programmatic ads every time you visit a website, listen to a podcast, or log into an app. In the past, marketers and agencies would have to negotiate each ad buy and rates separately—a very time consuming and tedious process. Today, programmatic Demand Side Platforms, or DSPs, take the manual work out of the equation. Programmatic advertising automates the ad buying process, making it faster and more efficient. Instead of manual negotiations, programmatic platforms use algorithms to purchase ad space in real-time, allowing for precise targeting and optimization.
In this article, we take a deep dive into programmatic advertising, including strategies for getting the most out of your campaigns. First, let’s get familiar with terms and acronyms associated with programmatic advertising.
Just like most things in marketing, programmatic comes with its own specific language. Let’s begin by understanding the different terms you will need to know.
Types of Programmatic Advertising
There are two primary types of programmatic ads:
Secondarily, some marketers may also be able to purchase ad inventory on private marketplaces at a fixed price even before it’s available on public DSPs or at closed auctions on an invite-only basis. These opportunities are less common and usually only available to exclusive partners.
Why Use Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic is ideal for targeting specific audiences, interests, behaviors, and locations. That leads to highly personalized ad experiences that increase relevance and engagement.
When to Turn to Programmatic Advertising
The beauty of programmatic is that it can be deployed at multiple touchpoints throughout the consumer journey.
For most brands, programmatic is an economical option to reach scale within budget while reaching your target audience.
Developing a Programmatic Strategy
Here’s where we get into the nuts and bolts of your campaign. It’s important to address each step to ensure that your strategy is on point.
Set Clear Objectives: Define clear goals for your campaign, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or driving conversions.
Programmatic uses different types of audience data to target:
Using detailed buyer personas to understand your target audience’s needs and preferences can help further refine your targeting.
Include programmatic in your integrated marketing strategy: Programmatic advertising should complement other marketing efforts, such as search engine marketing (SEM), social media, and content marketing.
Fill gaps in your media plan by:
Ensure creative best practices: Engaging and relevant ads capture attention and drive higher engagement. Follow these best practices:
Select the right formats and channels. Ensure that you’re creating the right media mix to reach your consumer. Ads can be placed on:
Use dynamic retargeting creative: this uses data to automatically generate personalized ads for different audience segments. It allows for real-time adjustments based on performance and audience behavior. Benefits include:
Measuring Programmatic Success
Once your campaign has launched, monitor key metrics to evaluate the success of your campaigns. Here are the metrics that you should be tracking to determine how well your campaign is working.
It’s important to regularly conduct A/B tests while your campaign is in market to compare different ad creative, targeting strategies, and bidding methods. Analyze the results to identify what works best and implement changes for continuous improvement.
Emerging Technologies and Innovations
Two of the most talked about innovations are coming to programmatic, AI and audio. AI and machine learning will enable marketers to enhance targeting and optimization by analyzing vast amounts of data and predicting user behavior. This will allow marketers to see faster results and make better targeting decisions. Further, programmatic TV and audio channels will expand the reach of programmatic channels to include podcasts and other connected channels.
Privacy and Data Protection
The growing focus on data privacy has led to stricter regulations like GDPR and CCPA. Advertisers must stay compliant while leveraging data for targeting. To do so, we recommend implementing systems to obtain and manage user consent and clearly communicating any data policies to users–transparency is always the best policy. Even before you begin gathering data, ensure that you have robust security and data protection measures in place and have systems to quickly communicate with consumers in the event of a data breach.
Today, marketers have more options than ever before to build relationships with consumers along the buyer journey. At Inspira, we take an integrated marketing approach to ensure that we’re creating those touchpoints when and where it matters most. Reach out today to learn how our team of marketing strategists can help your brand to grow and thrive.
This article has been published in the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) Marketing Knowledge Center. Click here to visit their blog.
Written By: Alexa Sorensen