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Programmatic advertising is on the rise, with the number of options constantly growing. Online advertising, streaming, TV, are just some of the options you can choose from. Programmatic advertising is what enables companies to bring their ads to their target customers at the right moment of time.
For this purpose, they use a demand-side platform (DSP) which helps them decide what impressions they should buy and how much they should pay for them. On the other side, publishers use a supply-side platform (SSP) to sell space to companies.
By buying space from publishers, companies get guaranteed impressions at a previously defined price. When there’s a need for getting to a different audience than the defined one, companies bid for real-time impressions.
One of the biggest digital marketing trends – Programmatic advertising
The software that performs these processes has enormous amounts of data about users, like their location, demographics, what sites they visit, what they like to read, what they buy and how much, etc. All this information is available to marketers who use it to send out targeted ads.
For example, when you want to sell shoes, you choose to show your ad to fashion websites. This way, you are targeting people who are actually interested in fashion instead of paying to show your ad to others who might not be interested in it. Programmatic advertising will enable you to create the need before they even thought they needed shoes.
Programmatic advertising has been one of the biggest digital marketing trends in the past few years. According to eMarketer, automated buying and selling will be 86,3% of the total number of display ads by 2020.
Maybe you want to incorporate programmatic into your marketing strategy, but all this seems too complicated. Don’t worry, it’s much simpler than it looks.
Here’s when you should start thinking about programmatic as a way to advertise your business:
When you need your ads to be relevant
Traditional advertising means showing the same ad to a lot of different users who happen to stop by at the site where you’re showing it. This is more suitable for large companies that might be looking for brand awareness.
However, when it comes to smaller companies with a limited offering, traditional advertising can’t complete sales goals entirely. Showing your ad to people who aren’t part of your target group means losing resources.
Programmatic advertising can fix this. Programmatic is a way of advertising that can make your ads more relevant, displaying them on websites where your potential customers actually go to. It can be pretty weird when you see a dental floss ad at a website that sells cars.
When you want to save time
Traditional advertising also means setting everything up manually, which often takes a lot of time. Programmatic advertising is automatic and completes all processes much faster. Moreover, it collects larger amounts of data than you could possibly collect if you’d do everything by yourself, using more sources and more precise parameters.
When you want to boost your content strategy
If you have an existing content strategy, you could incorporate programmatic to boost your post views and eventually, your conversion rate.
When users are searching for something, the data about their interests get collected and programmatic advertisers use it to target them. When a user is looking for something, but not yet close to buying, programmatic advertisers show them content in order to educate them on the problem they want to solve or the product they are looking for. This way, they can respond to their searches and eventually influence their buying decision.
When you want to find new customers
In this case, programmatic is used more as a tool to target customers who are at the top of the funnel than it is for direct selling. That’s why it can easily attract new customers who are looking for similar things like the ones you’ve already targeted.
For example, if you have a book publishing house and want to promote your newest teen love story, your main target would probably be girls aged 14-18. Programmatic advertising takes your ad beyond your target and shows it, for example, to parents who want to buy a present for their teen daughters or to the boyfriends of these teen girls who are looking for a birthday gift for their girlfriends.
However, note that in this case, the conversion rate might not be so high at the moment someone has seen the ad. It often happens that they take your ad in mind and visit your website later to buy your product.
When you need precise targeting and retargeting
Programmatic advertising might sound the same as Google Ads, but there’s one crucial difference. Programmatic uses cookies that offer countless types of information and behavioral data is one of them. You can use it to precisely target people who’ve been to your website and were interested in something but didn’t make a purchase for some reason.
For example, if you have a sports gear online store and someone is looking at your items, they get a cookie on their browser which allows you to retarget them with your ads when they browse the internet later. You can make ads with the specific products they were looking at, reminding them of the options your store has to offer or offering them some kind of discount so they’d come back.
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Although programmatic advertising can be often more expensive, it brings much more specific and concrete results than traditional online tools. Costs will, however, depend on the campaign you create and the programmatic advertiser you choose to execute it.
Programmatic advertising is definitely changing the way we place our ads online, but companies shouldn’t think of it as something too complicated or impossible to do.
It can actually offer a lot of benefits that release them from the manual placing of ads while targeting more precisely and showing better results. It’s up to you to decide whether this option is the best one for the stage your business is at.
