How Can You Utilize Programmatic Advertising Better?

Making a plan to improve your ROI sometimes requires taking a step back and analyzing from an elementary level to see if any of the fundamental building blocks to success are letting you down.

Breaking it down, the ultimate digital marketing campaign will require two main things:

• The right customer at the right time.
• The right creative (and the right offer).

The right customer

Programmatic advertising can help to put you in front of the right person at the right time, but it also requires you analyse large amounts of your own customer data to look for commonality between not only the best customers, but worst customers that you have.

In the sports betting realm for example, there are a range of possibilities for customers as punters vary – some may actually be costing money to the bookmaker. Horse racing punters tend to generate the most revenue for practically all bookmakers, followed by greyhound racing, soccer, and so on. But even within each of these interest groups, you can segment further by age, sex, location, employed/unemployed, annual salary etc. Data analysis may show that the ideal customer for a bookmaker is aged 40+, male, living in NSW, employed and earning over $100,000.

Interestingly, bookmakers may also notice trends for what they deem as unprofitable customers either due to being a professional punter or someone that bets on their behalf (a “bowler” account), or someone that simply uses the free bets and other offers to extract profits. Female punters accounts may be set up by the spouse or relative of a punter in order to bypass blocked accounts, to gain multiple accounts with a single bookmaker, or as a bowler to place additional bets or bet higher amounts.

Through a deeper understanding of your user base, you can map out a clearer picture of the type of customer you want to target with your advertising dollars.

The right creative

Using interactive creative will help to assess how many people are actually seeing your ads. Sure, when the page loads up it counts as an impression, but whether or not your potential customer actually notices your ad is an entirely different question. Making your ad stand out and get noticed is key to getting it right. This may take some trial and error, split test your ads until you’ve finely tuned it down to the best performing creative you possibly can.

Don’t forget about mobile

According to Whistleout.com.au over 1 billion people use Android phones worldwide. That’s not to mention Apple and other smartphones. In a 2015 Nielsen study, it was shown that 76% of Australians now own a smart phone. Look around when on public transport, or pretty much anywhere really, and a large proportion of people are glued to their screens. Targeting mobile users with mobile specific creative in an intelligent way isn’t too bad an idea?

Or video…

Estimates range from 12 million to 14 million+ Australians viewing online videos each month, and much like smart phone usage this number is on the rise. When you note that practically every video is preceded by an ad, or has small ads during the video, or places a video at the end, there is a lot of potential to be placed in front of your target market, at a time when they are viewing videos related to your brand in some way. Continuing on with the sports betting theme, it would make sense to target videos that are placed around horse racing events and shown to the ideal customers for your brand.

It may require a larger budget when you factor in the cost of producing the ad, but it can be worthwhile for branding purposes as well as customer acquisition with the right offer to attract new members. Also, video advertising can overcome the drawback of some display campaigns. While internet ads can be an annoyance at times for people that just want to watch that must see video of a baby laughing, or a grown man getting kicked in the balls, they will notice it since the ad is right in their plane of site at a moment they are engaged with content, not below the fold or off on the edges somewhere they are not looking.

It is crucial to work with an experienced team that has expertise in the field of all forms of digital marketing and can help to guide you towards running successful online campaigns.

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