Programmatic advertising and digital marketing are closely intertwined. Because of the efficiency of programmatic advertising, many people say it is going to be the future of digital marketing.
Programmatic advertising or programmatic ad buying, in simple terms, is the use of software to purchase digital advertising. The traditional method includes requests for tenders, proposals, quotes and human negotiation. Programmatic buying uses machines and algorithms to buy display space. However, it is not the total automation of the ad buying process. Traditionally, you would have prepared ad tags or insertion orders manually. This could be menial but labor-intensive. With programmatic ads, humans have more time for the improvement and optimization of ads.
In the 15 plus years ever since the birth of programmatic marketing, it has really delivered on its promise to become the future of advertising on the internet and digital marketing. One good thing about programmatic advertising is that as technology develops, marketers are getting exposed to more and more opportunities for finding and engaging key customers. Naturally, programmatic marketers are going to need to stay on their toes to keep up with the latest innovation and trends.
The Success of Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is successful simply because it is efficient. In 2015, 62% of marketers were making use of programmatic ads to meet core brand objectives expecting to boost this budget by an average of 37% in a matter of two years. At present, 65% of digital marketing media is going to be programmatic with a projected budget of $45.94 billion by the end of 2019.
According to Lauren Fisher, principal analyst of eMarketer the growth of programmatic advertising boils down to the private exchanges offering buyers more control over the spending. Private setups give buyers as well as sellers greater control over their automated buy. Private setups may have initially served to bring in reluctant buyers and sellers, but now they drive much of the change as well as the momentum in the marketplace, as both parties find greater control from their programmatic efforts.
The system is used and works because of the efficiency in use of both resources and time. Programmatic advertising is said to be designed to do away with old-fashioned, hit-or-miss campaign design. The old system was well-known for costing marketers too much money. Now, you can depend on an algorithm that is going to determine where your ad money can be best spent. All you need to do is enter some data into your programmatic advertising solution as well as key performance indicators and you are ready to go.
The system is just not going to launch your campaign, it is also going to monitor your ad spend and find areas for improvement. The effectiveness of programming advertising is irrefutable. Programmatic advertising allows us to understand the media journey better than ever before and have one-to-one conversations with individuals. With regards to ad spend optimizing, ROI and the means of being relevant to your target audience, it is quite clear that programmatic advertising has a lot of potential to modern brands looking to survive in the digital age.
Ways to do Programmatic Advertising
The first step is quite straightforward. Be comfortable with what you’re doing. As a person going into a new field of advertising, you are going to be faced with a lot of new terms and ideas. You should take the time to know them. There are software and websites with a comprehensive list of programmatic advertising terminology. They will empower you with ideas and become references that you can use throughout your journey.
Like the pursuit in digital marketing, it is important to have your goals set from the start. In order to do so, you have to use existing data to determine what kind of advertising awareness you need and set the right strategy. This will let you determine short as well as long-term goals. Don’t dive straight to programmatic advertising without knowing why you are doing it.
Just because programmatic advertising depends on algorithms and machines, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t require human investment. There are various types of platforms, some of which provide fully or half-managed services. Others merely provide technical platforms, which lets you run your programmatic purchasing activities on your own.
From there, you will need to deploy skilled people to plan, control, and optimize your buying. The point here is that, to enjoy the utmost success, you are going to need to find the perfect union between intelligent human intervention and technological automation. So, don’t simply depend on the algorithm alone to yield the best results for your campaign.
One challenge of programmatic advertising is that its dependence on algorithms could lead to ads showing up in the wrong place. To avoid this, you should ensure that your demand-side blacklist is regularly monitored and updated for inappropriate sites. Some platforms allow for excluding whole categories from ad spends. This can be really helpful.
One alternative, if your product is sensitive, is to use a whitelist. This is going to give a list of approved instead of denied sites. It is going to narrow your capacity to reach your audience and probably make it pricier but will make sure there is no unwanted material in your ad. When you use an agency, make sure that they are doing everything they can to exclude sensitive and low- quality sites from having your ads catered on them.
Usually, programmatic ads can be seen between 44% and 55%, but Mediative estimates bot fraud is going to cost digital advertisers $6.5 billion every year. However, programmatic ads have an average of 16% fraud, which is lower than other display advertisements. While the natural threat of fraud is lower in programmatic advertising, it is still something that you need to watch out for during all of your initiatives and campaigns.
Programmatic advertising opens up an avenue of opportunities, which will not be possible if ad placement was manually done like in the past. It lets advertisers procure media without any pre-negotiation of a price, so they pay only for the relevant impression that they get.
