Essential navigator to Programmatic Advertising: What You require to recognize

Making the most of your marketing efforts takes trial and error. Your ad campaigns must reach the correct people at the correct period in the correct place. In traditional ad buying, this procedure is manual, with marketers bidding on the placements where they desire their ads to appear—online or offline. This procedure, however, can receive period and attempt. Thankfully, programmatic advertising has changed the game.

Programmatic advertising allows marketers to automatically serve ads to specific segments of your target spectators across the internet—all within seconds. Instead of buying ads on websites individually, you can buy ads wherever the data shows your customers visit. It’s no wonder programmatic advertising is projected to make up nearly 85% of the digital ad spend worldwide by 2029.

discover how programmatic advertising works and how to borrowing it for your next ad campaign.

What is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising, or programmatic media buying, is a way of buying ad space on websites via programmatic advertising platforms. There are many places where ads can appear online, including websites, search engines, and social media. Typically, programmatic advertising refers to ads placed in online publications through display networks such as Google Display Network (GDN). But the habit of programmatic advertising can apply anywhere on the Internet. Put simply, it’s the habit of automating how and when marketers display their ads online.

Traditionally, media buying involved marketers manually adjusting ad placements and bids. They would choose particular websites, set bids, and adjust them based on act. With programmatic advertising, marketers instead set top-level parameters like strategy, target spectators, and campaign goals, then let the programmatic platform’s algorithm do the rest.

Components of programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising has three components:

• Ad exchanges
• Supply-side platforms
• Demand-side platforms

Ad exchanges

Ad exchanges facilitate transactions between SSPs and DSPs by selling ad inventory to the highest bidder. This is done through an automated procedure called real-period bidding (RTB).

The ad trade matches the bidder’s parameters to available placements, matching the correct inventory (supply) with the correct advertiser (demand). This procedure happens within milliseconds, making it faster and more accurate than manual bidding. Essentially, ad exchanges are the facilitator between supply (publications) and demand (advertisers).

Some examples of ad exchanges include:

• Google Ad trade
• Amazon
• Xander (Microsoft)

Supply-side platforms

A supply-side platform (SSP) helps websites manage and sell ad spaces by connecting them with multiple ad exchanges. SSPs provide publishers a central location to set bidding ranges for their ad inventory and control the types of paid ads displayed on their websites.

Some examples of SSPs include:

• Google Ad Manager
• Amazon Publisher Services
• StackAdapt

Demand-side platforms

A demand-side platform (DSP) is where a marketer goes to make their programmatic ad campaigns. It allows marketers to automate the ad-buying procedure. In a DSP, marketers set up ad campaigns with specific parameters like spectators targeting, exclusions, and strategy. Marketers bid on and purchase ad inventory across multiple ad exchanges in real-period. The DSP uses algorithms to place ads on relevant websites with the highest impact.

Some examples of DSPs include:

• Google Display & Video 360
• Amazon Advertising
• Adobe Advertising Cloud

A complete ad network, such as Google, includes all three elements: Google Ad trade, Google Ad Manager (SSP), Google Display and Video 360 (DSP).

Tips for successful programmatic advertising

• Set obvious targeting parameters
• Optimize for the correct conversion
• Avoid fraud
• Avoid placement on junk sites
• borrowing customer data

Consider these best practices when developing a programmatic advertising procedure for your business:

Set obvious targeting parameters

Unlike traditional advertising, where marketers choose to advertise on specific websites, programmatic advertising allows you to choose your ideal audiences and then finds them. You simply instruct the platform: “I desire people who fit this profile—discover more of them.”

DSPs allow you to set spectators parameters, including:

• Demographics, including age, gender, profits, education level, etc.
• yield profiles like fitness enthusiasts, tech pros, or travelers
• Behaviors like browsing and purchasing history
• Geographic location from broad to hyper-local areas
• Devices used like desktop or mobile

Parameters can be layered, resulting in hyper-specific personas. Making use of these advanced targeting capabilities ensures your programmatic ads are placed where your spectators is most energetic and engaged. That way you don’t waste ad spend on reaching irrelevant users.

Optimize for the correct conversion 

Your conversion objective determines how the algorithm will allocate your strategy. Optimizing for the correct conversion allows the algorithm to make more informed decisions about which users to target and which ads to bid on. If you choose the incorrect objective, your ad may drive the incorrect traffic to your website.

Conversion goals can include:

• boost purchases
• boost leads
• boost engagement actions (such as collection page visits)

Align your goals with business objectives. For example, if your objective is brand awareness, your conversion might be video views or click-throughs. If turnover is your north star, optimize for purchases.

Avoid fraud

While programmatic advertising gives you a high level of control over the types of people to target, you don’t have control over which websites your ad is placed on. This means there’s potential for inflated bot clicks or click fraud, which mimic human interactions and drive the ad costs up without real interactions.

Programmatic advertising platforms assist marketers try to prevent fraud, but they aren’t perfect. A excellent way to avoid fraud is by using a fraud detection tool like ClickCease or Fraud Blocker. These tools integrate with programmatic ad platforms like Google Ads and identify suspicious activity, like repeated clicks from the same IP address. They also block invalid traffic and IP addresses that may be linked to fraud or malicious competitor activity.

Avoid placement on junk sites

Since you can’t choose the websites on which your ads are placed, there’s some uncertainty of ending up on a site that doesn’t align with your brand values. Most programmatic advertising platforms propose category exclusions, which avoid placing your ad on websites with sensitive content (like gambling or politics).

You can also choose specific domain exclusions by uploading a list of URLs to your DSP to prevent your ads from being served on them. You can also do keyword exclusions to avoid ad placements on pages containing specific controversial content.

borrowing customer data

DSPs allow you to upload customer data lists, then discover more users with similar traits—similar to lookalike audiences on platforms like Facebook Ads. If you’re a Shopify merchant, you can also use Shopify Audiences to generate lists of potential customers likely to buy your product. Shopify Audiences is available for businesses on Shopify Plus.

“We assist merchants run their existing campaigns on existing channels better,” Andrius Baranauskas, Shopify’s director of product, says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast.

Andrius recounts the achievement that bath and body worry corporation joyful Hippo found.

“They reached 70% lower expense to acquire recent customers and [nearly] five times yield on ad spend by leveraging the Shopify spectators product,” said Andrius.

joyful Hippo also saw an 86% earnings in recent customers, a 200% boost in conversion rate, and a 51% lower expense per thousand advertising impressions (CPM) for its ad campaigns.