Programmatic advertising is a useful and effective tool for increasing the reach of a valuable audience for a brand. This solution can be used by businesses in any segment today. However, programmatic advertising still requires certain settings if you want to achieve a high fill rate. In this article, we will look at how to avoid mistakes when working with programmatic advertising.
How Programmatic Advertising Works
Programmatic is similar to contextual advertising. Both tools work through automated platforms for purchasing advertising impressions. The difference here is in the approach.
Context is based on keywords. When a user types “find a flower shop in Paris” into a search engine, the context will show him relevant advertising.
Programmatic works through targeting. If a user is interested, for example, in gifts for a woman, the DSP platform will analyze his interests, gender, age, and income, and then display a relevant banner that is highly likely to attract the attention of a potential buyer.
By the same principle, a man in Amsterdam will see an advertisement for an electric bicycle, which is sold in a store in the capital. And a woman from Rome who is interested in oriental cuisine will be shown a banner advertising a restaurant with an Asian menu located in Rome.
The programmatic advertising scheme includes several elements:
- An advertiser is an advertising customer who seeks to reach the target audience. He or his representatives (ad buyers) use demand-side platforms (DSPs) to buy advertising inventory and manage campaigns.
- The publisher is the owner or administrator of a site that puts advertising spaces up for auction through the Supply Side platform (SSP).
- DSP (demand-side platform) is software designed to buy advertising placements on exchanges.
- SSP (supply platform) is a software solution that makes advertising space available to exchanges.
This is how programmatic works:
- The advertiser sets the settings of the advertising campaign: parameters of the target audience and the maximum cost of impression.
- The user who will be shown the ad in the future goes to the publisher’s website, which is connected to the SSP platform.
- The platform informs customers connected to the DSP about what page the user is on, what advertising format is needed, and customer data from cookies.
- DSP buyers determine how well the user meets the audience parameters, and then set the minimum bid from the campaign settings.
- While the site page is loading, an auction takes place within a few milliseconds: the SSP collects bids from the DSP and determines the winner with the highest bid.
- The user sees on the website an advertisement for the company that won the auction.
How to Avoid Mistakes When Working With Programmatic Advertising
You shouldn’t think that programmatic is a universal tool that will select an audience, develop a media plan, set campaign goals, and launch it. As with any marketing activity, the advertiser must clearly understand the goals of working with programmatic, and know his audience and their interests.
Let’s look at a few common mistakes that prevent beginners from achieving high fill rate when working with programmatic advertising.
Mistake 1: Thinking of programmatic as a performance tool.
It often happens that an advertising customer sets a conversion goal – for example, to get N conversions from a banner to a website. But programmatic is the solution for brandformance. Displaying advertising through an auction helps warm up the audience, increase brand awareness among the target audience, and involve users in communication with the company.
How to avoid making a mistake:
To analyze traffic, post-view and post-click analysis should be performed. This will help track user behavior on the site, the percentage of failures, and the depth of site viewing. Such data will help optimize your programmatic campaign and make it more effective.
Mistake 2: Running ads to too wide an audience
Newbies often target advertising to too wide an audience. For example, only gender and age are taken into account in programmatic settings. Thus, categories of users that are valuable for business may fall out of impressions.
How to avoid making a mistake:
Before launching an advertising campaign, you should conduct research on your audience: their values, interests, and pains. This will align programmatic with your marketing strategy goals. By the way, such research can be done with the help of a team of experts.
In addition, when setting up programmatic advertising, you should formulate several hypotheses. Testing them will help you more likely get the expected results.
How to avoid making a mistake:
Before launching an advertising campaign, you should conduct research on your audience: their values, interests, and pains. This will align programmatic with your marketing strategy goals. By the way, such research can be done with the help of a team of experts.
In addition, when setting up programmatic advertising, you should formulate several hypotheses. Testing them will help you more likely get the expected results.
Mistake 3: Relying too much on ready-made white sheets
Sometimes advertisers set whitelists for the DSP platform – lists of sites on which banners should be displayed. As a rule, customers here focus on large sites with active users. However, this approach may limit the target audience.
How to avoid making a mistake:
When setting up programmatic, the main thing is to accurately define the relevant audience. Next, the platform itself will select sites with a low rate of robots, and clean and active traffic. It is important to pay attention to the volume of available sites.
Final Thoughts
Programmatic advertising is a popular advertising tool that effectively combines two mechanics: displaying banners and targeting. Often companies are afraid to test this solution because it seems too complex and expensive. In fact, a minimum of action is required from the advertiser. Algorithms and advertising platforms do most of the work. If you strive for a high fill rate when working with programmatic advertising, we recommend paying attention to SmartyAds. This is a reliable developer of solutions for working with programmatic advertising for digital advertisers, publishers, ad agencies, etc. SmartyAds solutions are based on AI, which increases the efficiency of working with programmatic advertising several times.