Programmatic ad buying explained
Getting your ads in front of the right people at the right time is key to generating sales. For years, the best way to do this was to find the right type of websites to advertise with and hope that your target audience would visit the site and notice your ads. It required sourcing potential websites, sending out lots of emails, and then a lot of back and forth to iron out details, and hoping that the traffic data they’ve quoted you is genuine.
Programmatic advertising allows marketers to get away from the large and wasteful ad campaigns and needless views on ads by people with no interest in ever purchasing from you, and focus in on highly targeted spending that performs better. It is better for both viewers and advertisers, because people see more ads that are suited to them.
Imagine you are in a niche vertical, selling men’s basketball shoes. Advertising to the general public may not yield a good result. With programmatic buying, you can use audience data to infer details that would fit in better with your user-base. You can look at programmatic buying based on factors like Age: 18-35 year olds, Sex: male, Interests: basketball. Through real-time bidding that happens in a fraction of a section before a website loads, you can set up programs to automatically bid for you against other potential advertisers to show your ad to this user.
Through 1st and 3rd party data which builds highly detailed profiles of customers, this can help you to focus in on the best people out there that are potential customers. Being highly automated, it is a much more efficient way to run digital advertising campaigns. There is less reliance on manual tasks such as finding suitable sites, many emails back and forth, seeking managerial approval on each individual ad campaign, signing IO’s etc. By running a programmatic campaign, a lot of this is unnecessary, saving time and efforts which can be used elsewhere like producing higher quality creatives, more interesting promotions, and analysis on who your top clients are and how to gain more like them.
Programmatic ad buying continues to grow both in Australia and around the world and it is often described as the future of online marketing. Making the change to programmatic can be overwhelming at first, and it may take a bit more background reading to fully understand the concepts involved. Working with an experienced team like iCumulus can help to make it a smooth transition, with expertise and openness to help guide the way. As the marketplace is always evolving, you will be tweaking and improving your campaigns to get the best ROI, and partnering with the right digital marketing team is the first step in the right direction.
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