Programmatic advertising is a powerful force in online advertising. And as brands invest in digital ads, the programmatic purchasing of digital display is only going to rise. Last year programmatic accounted for $1.8 billion of digital ad spend in the UK – and analysts predict it will reach $4.78 billion by 2018.
There are two key fundamentals to programmatic you must get right; attribution and distribution.
The key to attribution is to ensure you have a centralised system that gives everyone full visibility on performance and makes programmatic comparable with your other activity.
Determining your distribution method is equally important. You can either work with buying platforms (DSP’s) directly or choose a managed service to help with strategy.
Your strategy should evolve to cover 3 core areas. You’ll want to start of retargeting your current audience. Then model your core customers and target people similar to them at scale. Finally use prospecting to engage with new digital customers.
Retargeting is the process of identifying current customers and engaging with them in other contexts. This typically involves identifying users on landing or conversion pages through their IP or advertiser IDs and re-engaging those individuals in the open market. It’s an effective approach but despite high interaction rates it’s a short-term measure with limited coverage.
Predictive analytics, also known as look-alike targeting, is where you build a profile of your users based on interactions and buy inventory based on this assumed model. To do this, you need to analyse site visits and ad engagements to find the right parameters to target (e.g. handset, time). Predictive analytics increases the scale of your activity but you compromise relevancy when you expand your reach.
Prospecting is the process of identifying your audience without previous user bias from ads served. This can help brands to identify new customer demographics that fall outside of standard models. Prospecting allows you to adapt to market trends but needs scale to work effectively.
The recent rise of machine learning has hugely improved the effectiveness of predictive analysis and is the only way to consider prospecting. As the systems evolve to analyse efficiency and dynamically engage with users, the focus will soon shift to universal insights that enrich your entire digital brand. But whatever your approach and goal is, you need to focus on 3 core points:
- Understand your digital audience
- Adapt to user trends
- Automate your activity
