Programmatic advertising is disrupting digital sales and marketing efforts, improving efficiencies, lowering costs and allowing for more precise targeting, ensuring the right audience receives the right messages at the right time. Artificial intelligence promises to make it even better. Still, technology is just one aspect of programmatic advertising. Success depends on partnering data and algorithms with creativity to create compelling content that captivates and drives conversions.
Programmatic advertising is disrupting digital sales and marketing and creating a competitive advantage for brands that fully embrace it.
The automated buying and selling of digital ads improves efficiency, lowers costs, increases return on investment and allows for highly precise targeting, ensuring the right messaging reaches the right audience at the right time. Artificial intelligence promises to make it even better in the not too distant future. By 2026, global programmatic ad spend is expected to surge past US$700 billion up from US$407 billion in 2022.
However, technology is just part of an effective programmatic advertising campaign. Success depends on partnering data and algorithms with creativity to create compelling content that captivates and drives conversions.
For sales and marketing professionals, this requires working with the right data vendors to develop highly customized data-driven content strategies.
Here Postmedia shares best practices to establish successful programmatic advertising campaigns.
Establishing a successful programmatic advertising campaign
Know your target audience
As with all marketing campaigns, the cornerstone of a successful programmatic ad campaign is a deep understanding of your target audience. Take the time to create an audience persona. This research-based fictionalized profile represents a group of similar people within your target audience. It describes who they are, what they want, their challenges, interests and how they make decisions. The audience persona will allow you to personalize and segment all of your marketing and advertising campaigns based on criteria you choose, such as demographics, browsing history, interests, preferences, etc. For business-to-business brands, be sure to take job title, industry and company size into consideration as well as associations they may be part of and industry forums/newsletters they subscribe to.
Set clear goals
Establish specific goals based on existing data. This requires a deep dive into your website traffic, who your current audiences are, how they engage across your sites and other digital channels, your cost to acquire new customers and to keep them engaged and buying. Use this information to determine short and long-term measurable objectives for your programmatic advertising campaigns and to determine your ad budget.
Some common programmatic advertising goals include: promoting specific products and services, increasing mobile app engagement, establishing brand credibility, encouraging more people to sign up for email marketing outreach, and increasing sales.
Create engaging ads
This begins with a clear message for each stage of the sales funnel and buying journey. Use the insights you’ve collected about your target audience and their interactions with your brand to create specific messaging that leads them to the next stage of the sales funnel.
There are a wide variety of ad formats to showcase your messaging. These include:
- Traditional display or banner ads are static, image-based and come in half-page, small and large rectangular, and leaderboard sizes. They can also be optimized for mobile. There are no bells and whistles such as audio or video.
- Animated ads use animation to create movement and increase the likelihood of capturing your target audience’s attention. These ads are often combined with audio and provide the ability to tell a story using your brand’s unique voice.
- Interactive display ads have embedded features that allow users to test out your mobile app (e.g., playable ads), fill out a form, respond to a survey, or somehow interact with a brand.
- Video ads are especially popular. For users, they are informative, fun and shareable on any device. For marketers, they are affordable, flexible, and drive better engagement. Video display ads are distributed on YouTube, display ad networks, Netflix, and social ad networks, such as Facebook and LinkedIn.
- Rich media display ads (also known as expandable display ads) start small on a page, but when users interact with them, they expand and can double or triple in size. Some expandable ads are programmed to grow in size when a page loads. They are not a go-to choice for marketers, but that seems to be changing. Their novelty makes them more interesting to users who tend to ignore standard banner ads (a behavior known as banner blindness).
Determine where you want your programmatic ads to appear
To ensure your programmatic ads show up on the sites your target users visit, take advantage of the option to set up a whitelist or blacklist to control where your ads will appear. A whitelist is a listing of domains and apps that are allowed to display your ads, while a blacklist is a listing of website domain names and apps that are not allowed to host your ads. Deciding on which type of listing to use comes down to who you want to see your ads. If you have a niche target audience, you likely want to implement a whitelist. If you want to reach as many people as possible, a blacklist will provide maximum reach while avoiding spam and inappropriate sites.
Measure and track progress
Once you are clear on what you want to achieve, establish metrics that will help you ensure you are on track. Key Performance Indicators could include: social media responses, website traffic, bidding win rates. These data points will help guide content development and let you know if your programmatic ad campaign is delivering the desired results. If you are not hitting the metrics you’ve outlined, you can use what you learn to adapt.
Choose the right data vendor
At the heart of an effective programmatic advertising strategy is selecting the right demand-side platform (DSP) to help you realize your objectives. A DSP is a digital advertising tool that makes the ad-buying process faster, cheaper and more effective. It does this by allowing advertisers and ad agencies to bid automatically and in real-time on display, video, mobile and search ad inventory from a range of publishers. One of the most significant advantages of using DSPs is precision targeting for ad placement. There are a number of aggregate and trusted-party DSPs offering a range of functionalities. Generally, DSPs allow ad buyers to set out targeting criteria such as users’ location and past browsing behavior, pricing, frequency and other important details as well as the ability to manage multiple exchange accounts using the same interface. Ad buyers are not limited to buying inventory on any one publisher’s site. In some cases, a DSP will also provide performance data allowing advertisers to adapt campaigns in real time. The effectiveness of your strategy depends on the capabilities of the DSP provider you select. Make sure the data partner you choose aligns with your goals.
Striking the right balance between high tech and human touch will allow you to optimize your programmatic ad campaigns on an ongoing basis. This is what will drive the results you want.
