What is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of online advertising. In essence, it’s an automated system through which advertisers buy ad impressions on publisher sites and apps.

It’s a powerful way of ad placement since the inventory is essentially unlimited (97% of websites opt into the open exchange for ads to be placed on their site). This allows for advertisers to become more sophisticated with how they’re reaching individuals, including extensive targeting types that take into account online behavior, demographics, geographics, and more.

What Are The Benefits?

Programmatic advertising helps buyers and sellers make data-driven decisions, removing the guesswork from the ad buying process. By creating efficiencies using machine learning to optimize campaign success, advertisers avoid ineffective inventory and maximize their campaign budget. Other benefits include:

• Better targeting. Marketers can show the most relevant ad to the right person at the right time. In theory, this is relatively straightforward. However, the technology behind its inner workings is spectacularly complex. Ads can be shown to different people based on their interests and browsing history, all in a matter of milliseconds across a multitude of tactics and devices, in real time.
• Streamlined campaign management & analysis. Consolidating campaigns to one system across devices and formats allows marketers to visualize success in one place. It also allows for instant optimizations across multiple campaigns in one dashboard instead of across several. This consolidated tracking and reporting allows for marketers to gather robust apple-to-apple insights that have the power to change the direction of a business, increase ROI and identify the highest converting customers.
• Cost-efficient, data-driven reach & results. Advertisers are able to access the optimal inventory across a variety of exchanges at once for a fraction of the cost compared to other forms of advertising. To make an impression on 1000 targeted prospects can cost as little as $1. Information gathered from each impression and interaction is carefully analyzed to make more informed marketing and business decisions.

There are several types of programmatic advertising solutions & placements.

These include Programmatic Guaranteed, Preferred Deals, Real-Time Bidding (RTB), and Private Marketplace (PMP) deals that all offer unique and sophisticated solutions to buying ad inventory. Through these buying methods, advertisers can run a variety of tactics including:

• Display Ads
• Video Ads (In-stream ads, Pre-roll, Mid-roll, Post-roll, Out-stream Ads, In-display ads)
• Audio Ads
• Native Ads (In-Feed Units, In-article Ads, Recommendation Widgets, Promoted Listings, Sponsored Content, Rewarded Video Ads, In-Ad (IAB Standard) with Native Element Units)
• Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) like digital billboards

How can programmatic drive results?

As you probably have gathered at this point, programmatic advertising is loaded with data. The audience insights alone can justify the cost of running a test campaign.

Over longer periods of time, programmatic can become one of the most important, core advertising tools every business should be utilizing in their marketing mix. Using this data, marketers can optimize campaigns to encourage prospects to discover your business, take deeper action on-site, and ultimately purchase a product or take a desired action.

Running in conjunction with paid search ads, programmatic can lower advertising costs while also making ads more powerful. With programmatic advertising, Google Ads can see a decrease in CPM by 30% and an increase in audience reach by 30%. By optimizing the bidding process and ad spend, your ads across other platforms become more powerful and see performance boosts, too.

Give Your Marketing a Boost

Programmatic advertising is a powerful tool to add to your digital advertising strategy. Whether alone or in conjunction with other tactics, it provides powerful audience insights and can be fairly inexpensive. It also helps boost performance of other campaigns to drive the actions you want.

Whether you’re seeing a lag in conversions or you just want to know more about your audience, programmatic advertising can help your business achieve a higher ROI than ever before.