4 Things To Take Care Of When Buying Advertisements Programmatically

Marketers opting for advertising programmatically is on an all-time high! According to a recent study by eMarketers,  by 2019, as much as 84% of total digital advertising spend will be made programmatically, which is projected to reach $46 Billion. And it makes sense as well, programmatic advertising gives 10x better control to advertisers and publishers over their digital assets as compared to traditional advertising.

While we have already talked about why programmatic is the way to go in the future if you’re looking to advertise digitally and mentioned some common threats to the programmatic industry as well. Today, we will talk about some things to take care of when you’ll be actually buying advertisement spaces over the web programmatically, which will help you spend your marketing budget wisely. So, when it comes to programmatic ad buying services, here are some things you should take care of to get the best out of your efforts -  

Defining a clear strategy

Defining a clear, cut strategy before venturing into the world of programmatic is an absolute must not just for buying advertisements programmatically, but marketing in general. You must know well in advance the type of ads you want to vouch for, the biddings you are willing to make, the audience you want to target and the type of creatives you’d create that would resonate with your target audience. Doing this would help get you the most bang out of your advertising bucks.

In programmatic, it’s not just about buying banner spaces on publisher’s websites, you can place your ads on Youtube videos, Facebook in-stream advertisements, mobile ads and every other form of advertisements you see on the web. So, making a strategy and choosing the right platforms is important.

Moreover, you can choose to go for a RTB approach, buy advertisements from private marketplaces or directly buy advertisement spaces from advertisers through direct programmatic. While each of these buying methods involves different approaches, selecting the best method is vital for efficiently spending your marketing budget. Also, knowing in advance the audience you want to serve will help you choose the best platforms in the marketplace to actively advertise on. DMPs or data management platforms can help you with that and most of the DSPs are integrated with DMPs as well to provide a holistic view to advertisers of their audience. They combine first and third party data to form look-alike audiences for your campaign which you can use to attract more customers.

Focus on your audience

When it comes to defining a programmatic strategy, you absolutely have to focus on impressing your audience with your creatives. And that includes having stunning visuals and stellar content on all your Ads that resonates well with your target audience and makes them click! Fail on doing that, and your audience will not even bother to give your ad a second look. So, creating buyer personas is important to target the kind of audience you want to reach and it requires extensive audience research as well to figure out where your audience really resides on the web.

Again, DMPs can come to your rescue here as they usually have all the audience information you’d require to create great ads that would resonate well with your target audience. Focus on understanding your audience more than the quality of your creatives. Don’t get me wrong here, while quality visuals are important for your ads, it will not be beneficial to you in any way if they are appearing at the wrong places and in front of the wrong people.

Include a mix of creatives

It’s all about the creatives when it comes to making people click on your ad. But like most of the advertisers out there, don’t fixate all your programmatic efforts on a single ad creative. Instead, make 5-6 creatives for a single campaign with different visuals & content. That way you can easily A/B test the performance of each of your ad by making small tweaks to the ads that are not performing well. Doing this will give you a better idea about what kind of content works best with your unique audience and you can double down on that information by reiterating everything that is currently working with your audience in all your future digital advertising campaigns. 

Monitoring performance is key

Talking about A/B testing, one of the main advantage of going programmatic is the impressive analytics DSPs provide for measuring performance of your each and every running ad, which was never heard of before in traditional advertising and probably is the reason why a majority of marketers are shifting to programmatic ad buying and you should too! Monitoring performance is not just necessary to excel programmatically, doing it will help you optimize your each and every marketing effort in general. Keeping a close eye on the actual performance of your ads will help you discard in an instant the ads that are not performing up to their mark and save a few extra bucks of your advertising budget. Like I said above, when you closely check the performance of all your ads, you can easily point-out the ads which are not performing optimally and tweak it a bit to bring it back on track, which is always a good thing to make sure the ROI of your whole campaign doesn’t take a hit! So, there you go!

Before you step into the complex but extremely quick-paced world of programmatic, keep in mind the above-mentioned points to take the results of your programmatic efforts to a whole another level. Work on your strategy, figure out the people you want to target who are interested in availing your services and platforms where they actively hang out on the web, create an intriguing ad (and 4-5 versions of it) for them and constantly measure its performance based on KPIs that matter and watch your programmatic efforts bring in a ton of exposure for your business… and users of course! But which top platform should you use to begin advertising programmatically? Stay with us as we’ll be tackling this exact question in our next blog where I’ll tell you about some of the best DSPs out there that will make programmatic a piece of cake for you!