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How to calculate viewability for programmatic display & video ads

How To Calculate Ad Viewability for Programmatic Display & Video Ads

In programmatic advertising, viewability is a key metric that determines whether or not an ad was actually seen by a user. If you’re investing in digital ads—whether on Pinterest, Google, or other programmatic platforms—you want to ensure your ads are visible to the audience. In fact, viewability is often directly tied to campaign performance metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and return on ad spend (ROAS).

In this guide, we’ll explain how to calculate viewability and offer insights into how it affects the success of programmatic display and video ads.

What is Viewability in Programmatic Advertising?

Viewability measures the percentage of served impressions that were in a visible area of the user’s screen. In programmatic advertising, viewability is especially important because many ads are automatically served across multiple publishers and placements. To optimize your campaigns, you need to ensure that these ads are actually being viewed—not just served.

Let’s look at an example, if a programmatic video ad loads at the bottom of a webpage but isn’t visible to the user, it counts as an impression but not a viewable impression.

Why is Ad Viewability Important?

  • Campaign Performance: High viewability ensures that your ads are seen by your target audience, leading to higher engagement, more clicks, and conversions.
  • Ad Budget Optimisation: Low viewability leads to wasted impressions, where you pay for ads that users never see. Optimising for viewability reduces ad spend waste.
  • Brand Safety and Trust: Advertisers who focus on viewability build trust with publishers and platforms by ensuring that their ads meet quality standards.

How to Calculate Viewability for Programmatic Ads

To calculate viewability for programmatic display ads, you need to access the data provided by the platform you are using (Demand Side Platform, Ad Exchanges, Supply Side Platform, etc).
The process can vary depending on the specific platform you are using, but generally, you would need to log in to the platform and navigate to the campaign or ad group level.

Once you have accessed the data, you can calculate the viewability using the following formula:

Viewability formula
  • Viewable Impressions: The number of times an ad was served and met the industry standard for viewability.
  • Total Impressions: The total number of times the ad was served, regardless of whether it was seen or not.

For display ads, the Media Rating Council (MRC) standard requires at least 50% of the ad’s pixels to be in view for at least one second. For video ads, at least 50% of the video player must be in view for at least two seconds.

Example Calculation:

If you have:

  • 50,000 total impressions
  • 35,000 viewable impressions

Then, your viewability rate would be:

Viewability = (35,000 / 50,000) x 100 = 70%

This means that users actually saw 70% of your ads, while 30% of impressions went unseen.

Understanding Platform-Specific Viewability Tools

It’s important to remember that different platforms and vendors may have other methods for measuring viewable video advertising, so you must check with the specific platform’s documentation or support team if you have any doubts. Additionally, some platforms may have their proprietary viewability measurement tools, and they may provide you with a viewability score rather than a percentage.

Conclusion: Why Viewability is Key for Programmatic Success

In programmatic advertising, viewability is not just a performance metric—it’s a measure of the effectiveness of your ad spend. Higher viewability rates lead to better campaign results, as more of your ads are actually seen by the intended audience. By continuously monitoring and optimising for viewability, you ensure that your programmatic display and video ads deliver meaningful impact and higher engagement.

If you’re ready to take your programmatic advertising to the next level, speak to our team who would love to help!

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Display banners Programmatic

Data-Driven Programmatic Display Advertising Agency for Brands

Data-Driven Programmatic Display Advertising Agency for Brands

We are a data-driven programmatic display advertising agency that can help you reach your target audience with accuracy.

With a deep understanding of your market, audience and competition from in-depth research into the latest technology (like Pinterest Programmatic) trends as well as our own expertise across industries, we help you reach more potential customers with display ads.

We’ll build out your campaign from the ground up across all display channels. We’re experts in finding creative ways to reach potential customers.

Display Platforms

Display Platforms

  • Google DV360 & Xandr
  • Google Ads – Google Display Network
  • Facebook Ads
  • Apple Search Ads
  • Taboola
  • Pinterest
  • Quora
  • LinkedIn

Display Advertising Case Studies

We have worked with many different clients to increase the number of impressions using Display Advertising. Here are two examples from Chelsea FC and Aegean Airlines. You can click on them to learn more about the campaigns. 

Chelsea FC Aegean AirlinesRead more on the page: programmatic agency

Benefits of Display Advertising

Advant’s technology-driven growth marketing solutions are designed to deliver measurable results with an unprecedented return on investment. Our innovative strategies underpinned by data, as well as creative and informed media buying, will ensure your display ads reach the right audience at just the perfect time!

We’re not just a display advertising agency.

We create engaging campaigns that get results for some of the best-known brands in the world across digital channels, and we’ve been doing that since 2014.

What Is Display Advertising?

Display advertising is a type of online advertising that comes in several ad formats, including display banner ads, video ads, native ads, Connected TV and programmatic audio Ads.

Programmatic Advertising Agency

Display advertisements can be bought through programmatic advertising technology called a Demand Side Platform (DSP). Ads are normally bought in real time and paid for on a CPM basis.

Programmatic Advertising Agency

Why Use Display Advertising?

There are many benefits of display advertising when used as part of an integrated marketing campaign.

Some of the key benefits include:

  • Reaching a large audience with your message
  • A cost-effective way to reach potential customers
  • Increase brand awareness and recall
  • Drive traffic to your website or landing page
  • Generate leads and sales

Build Brand Awareness

The journey to purchasing begins when you have first exposed the brand, and because display advertising has a high reach and excellent targeting, it is a useful tool for building that initial awareness.

The power of display ads can’t be overlooked. These innovative and creative formats help you reach new customers and build positive brand perceptions among consumers who see your advertisement on any device they use throughout the day – even if it’s not their computer!

The more visibility created, the better the recall rates for brands.

Reach Your Target Audience

With display advertising, brands can reach the right audience at scale with a range of ad formats that are relevant for every stage of your customer’s journey. The targeting capabilities of the display through programmatic are endless and go way beyond the Google Display Network (GDN), which is what most agencies use when running display campaigns.

Story Telling: Display advertising is a great way to tell your brand’s story and engage with customers in new and creative ways. Because there are so many different ad formats, you can really get creative with your display campaigns.

Rather than blending in with the other content on your site, display advertisements are designed to stand out and attract attention.

Adding animation allows you to tell a more complex story, which is great for B2B brands.

Display Retargeting Campaigns

Retargeting is one of the most effective uses of display advertising, and with our data-driven solutions, we can help you set up responsive display ads so that not only are you targeting the right audiences, you’re doing it with the right ads. Retargeting is great for moving users down the purchase funnel.

Display Formats our Agency Offers

Display Formats our Agency Offers

The most common type of digital advertising that can be used to drive awareness and consideration with the highest reach across internet users. They have lower CPMs and are, therefore, great for use across the marketing funnel.

Video Ads

A fantastic way to create awareness, they are predominately used in the mid to upper funnel. Video is very powerful and can be used to tell a story (in 30 seconds or less) that engages viewers in an interactive way. We are experts in buying both instream and outstream and even offer video ads on a cost-per-completed view (CPCV).

Dynamic Display Ads

A great way to drive conversions as they are personalised for each user. They can be used as a retargeting tool or to increase brand awareness and consideration.

Native Ads

As the name suggests, these ads look very similar to the content that surrounds them on the publisher’s website, which can help to create a less intrusive experience.

Interactive Ads

Using specialist ad-serving technology to create ads that are highly engaging where users can fill out forms, play games and more, all inside the walls of a banner ad.

Audio Ads

A new, emerging ad format that enables brands to reach consumers through audio channels. Programmatic audio ads are generally non-clickable and are, thus, mostly a branding tool. They run across mobile apps such as Spotify, Deezer and Acast.

Connected TV Ads

The future of TV is here with the use of connected TV devices such as AppleTV, Amazon Firestick and Roku. CTV ads can be served across connected TV ads. 

Free Paid Media Review

We are a world-class programmatic marketing agency that can generate more sales and leads for you. Leave your email address, we will contact you for your free paid media review.

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Programmatic

Programmatic Agency London: Meet the Experts

Programmatic Agency London: Meet the Experts

Advant Technology is a programmatic advertising agency founded in 2014 and has quickly grown to be one of the most successful agencies in London, working with some of the world’s most sophisticated marketing teams globally.

Display Advertising Agency

We specialise in digital display, video, audio and native advertising, which means we buy ad space to help brands engage with their potential audience through paid ads that are served to consumers based on their browsing habits and other user behaviour.

We use the most effective technology tools to reach potential customers, such as Google Ads, DV360 and Xandr, allowing us to run on the Google Display Network across mobile devices and desktop devices.

As a global player in display marketing, our account management team will help you define your audience and develop a tailored display advertising strategy. 

Display Advertising 

The online advertising ecosystem started with the classic display ad, a banner ad in a simple JPEG image format. Today the digital space encompasses much more. 

Our programmatic display agency has access to many formats that help our clients generate brand awareness which include web banners, rich media such as skins and wallpaper, video including pre-roll and out-stream, native, connected TV, social, search and programmatic audio. 

London-Based Digital Marketing Agency

London is the leading digital marketing hub globally. It has a unique position where US companies wanting to enter Europe do so through London, and leading European companies take their first step through London. The result is the epicentre of digital marketing with access to the best ad-tech service providers. That talent and drive unique to London has laid the foundation for excellence in programmatic display advertising.

Target Audience

Your target audience is the foundation for launching a successful digital display advertising campaign. Advant Technology will help you determine who they are using a proprietary approach; this data is then translated into a custom strategy, ensuring we get the right message to your potential customers and advising you on how best to convert your website visitors.

Remarketing Display Advertising Services London 

We provide remarketing services to our clients; this means that even if someone has visited your website but hasn’t completed their purchase, you can target them again with the right message at just the right time. This will help increase conversions and improve ROI on display ad campaigns. 

Benefits of Display Advertising

There are many benefits to using display advertising as part of your marketing mix.

Some of these benefits include building brand awareness, increasing website traffic, generating leads and driving conversions.

What’s more, display advertising can be targeted at specific demographics (location, age, gender) or interests (travel, technology) so you can ensure your message is being sent to the right people.

Benchmarks That Matter

Online display advertising is complex, and it can be easy to get lost in the data. We simplify this by giving you access to market-leading dashboards. They are customised on a per-client basis. You can expect to see impressions, clicks, cost-per-click, conversions, CTR, viewability, time in view, completion rate, win rates and many other benchmarks. 

Display Advertising Campaigns

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a programmatic agency?

A programmatic agency is an advertising agency that specialises in programmatic display advertising. Programmatic display advertising is a form of digital advertising that uses software to buy ad space on websites and apps in real-time.

How much does programmatic cost?

Clients typically have a budget in mind; typically, we work with clients who are spending at least $5000/. £4000 a month on paid media. If you are already running paid search / PPC campaigns, programmatic advertising could help you extend your potential audience reach.

What are display advertising platforms?

Display advertising platforms are typically referred to as demand-side platforms or DSPs. They enable agencies to buy programmatic display campaigns through a complex infrastructure that connects advertising space from ad-funded publishers in genres such as news, entertainment and gaming mobile apps etc. to advertising buyers who buy the space through an auction that takes place in an ad exchange. 

Is Display Advertising Paid?

Yes, display advertising is paid, unlike organic marketing channels such as SEO. 

Do You Run Ads on the Google Display Network

Yes. Advant Technology has access to multiple DSPs, which allows us to run display advertising on a wide range of websites, including through the Google Display Network across all regions. We are also experts in other enterprise-level platforms such as Google DV360 and HAWK by Tabmo and Zeta. 

Benefits of a Display Advertising Agency

A programmatic agency’s main focus is planning and buying digital media. 

Agency Account Managers: Our agency account managers work closely with you to create a marketing plan that best suits your needs and budget and manage the campaign during its duration.

Digital Marketing: As a client-side marketing team, you have a lot on your plate. Our programmatic agency has a team of digital marketing experts who are able to run and analyse effective online ad campaigns for you, allowing you to focus on other areas of your business.

Data Targeting: We use data-driven targeting methods to target specific demographics, interests, and even locations with laser precision. We have access to partnerships and tried and tested methods to avoid unnecessary experimentation and wasted budget.

Campaign Management: Managing a digital marketing campaign can be a difficult task. For our programmatic agency, this is daily life. We monitor the performance of each ad for it to reach its full potential.

Data-Driven: Data-driven marketing techniques allow our advertisers to see what’s working and what isn’t, which means that they spend less, get more, and ultimately get a better ROI.

Reporting & Measurement Analytics: We offer detailed reports on all aspects of digital marketing campaigns so that our advertisers can track progress and see what needs to be improved upon.

ROI Tracking: We offer ROI tracking software to track site visitors and, importantly, how much money is made from online ad campaigns.

Multiple Channels: Our programmatic agency-managed service allows clients to advertise across various digital advertising channels, whether it’s Google ads search, display or social media advertising.

Creative Strategy: As a rich media agency, we have access to a wide range of creative agencies who will create the perfect ad campaign for your business or for simple banners; we can build the creative in-house.

Free Paid Media Review

We are a world-class programmatic marketing agency that can generate more sales and leads for you. Leave your email address, we will contact you for your free paid media review.

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Guide Programmatic

The Complete Guide to Understanding Programmatic Digital Advertising​

The Complete Guide to Understanding Programmatic Digital Advertising

The world of online advertising is changing rapidly. There are new technologies that are emerging every day to give marketers more ways to target their potential customers through the buying of ad space.

One of the most well-known techniques is programmatic advertising. If you’re not familiar with this type of advertising yet, this guide will help you understand what it is and how it can benefit your business.

Digital marketing experts need to understand so many audience touch points. Buying advertising space is not as simple as it once was. The automated buying process of programmatic advertising is a response to this complexity.

Programmatic advertising explained

The first step in understanding programmatic marketing is learning about its definition – what exactly does “programmatic” mean?

To put it simply, programmatic advertising relies on automated software and algorithms to make decisions quickly and efficiently. In digital advertising, programmatic means using technology to deliver ads automatically based on a number of different factors, including but not limited to location, time, and browsing history.

It means you can reach out to individuals who are already interested in your product or service without having to pay for broad advertisements that may not necessarily be relevant to your target audience, aka in-market audiences. 

Programmatic advertising is a complex sub-section of digital advertising, which is why most programmatic ad spend is transacted by programmatic agencies.

What is a programmatic agency?

Since most programmatic is traded by agencies, let’s define what a programmatic agency is. 

They are normally responsible for the entire programmatic process on behalf of the advertiser. From planning programmatic advertising campaigns to strategy to trafficking and buying ad space, a good programmatic agency will take care of everything for you.

They should have a deep understanding of the different programmatic advertising technology platforms in the programmatic ecosystem so that they can offer you the best advice when it comes to your campaign goals.

Benefits of data-driven advertising for businesses

Targeting potential customers using programmatic advertising is extremely efficient because it uses data to target the right individuals.

When executed correctly, programmatic media buying can lead to higher click-through rates (CTRs) and conversion rates, as well as increased brand awareness.

Programmatic ad buying benefits also include improved efficiency and automation, better creative optimization for performance based on data collection and analysis as well as enhanced transparency through detailed analytics reporting.

Who should use programmatic marketing? 

This type of media buying is ideal for advertisers who want to run targeted campaigns and reach their target audience quickly and efficiently.

However, it’s important to note that programmatic marketing is not a one-size-fits-all solution – it requires significant technical know-how in order to be executed properly.

If you’re not familiar with programmatic advertising or don’t have the resources to execute a programmatic campaign yourself, it’s best to leave it to the ad-buying experts. A good programmatic agency will be able to help you take advantage of all the benefits that programmatic advertising has to offer.

What are the main components of programmatic?

The next step in understanding how programmatic advertising works is learning about the main parts that make up this type of digital marketing:

  • A supply-side platform, or (SSP), is a technology platform that allows publishers to sell ad inventory directly to advertisers and agencies.
  • A demand-side platform (DSP) is a form of internet advertising technology that provides bid management systems for marketers to buy advertising inventory programmatically.
  • Ad exchanges are a platform for advertisers and publishers to interact with each other using real-time bidding. An ad exchange is responsible for the mediation of matching bids and requests as well as reporting on delivery statistics.
  • Real-time bidding (RTB) is a real-time auction system. In RTB, the highest bid wins and inventory is sold on an impression-by-impression basis as opposed to being sold in advance or through some other prearranged means of purchase.
  • Data management platforms (DMPs) are used by marketers to collect, organize and activate customer audience data. They allow for the activation of first party data (data that is collected directly from customers), as well as the buying and selling of third-party data.
  • Private exchanges are ad marketplaces made up of advertisers and publishers that operate independently from the open ad market. Using private exchanges, brands can select audiences they wish to reach using their own data.
  • Ad Servers are technology solutions that help to serve ads to web pages, mobile apps, and other digital media. They provide a way for ad agencies and advertisers to manage their advertising campaigns, as well as measure their effectiveness.
  • Programmatic direct enables marketers to buy media from publishers directly using technology.
  • Ad Tags are snippets of code that are placed on web pages that allow marketers to track the number of times an ad is viewed or clicked, as well as other interactions, they are served through an ad server.
  • Header bidding is a process that allows publishers to offer inventory to multiple ad exchanges simultaneously before making a call to their ad server. This improves the chances of getting the highest bid for the inventory.

What is an example of programmatic marketing?

Check out some of our work for many case studies and examples of programmatic ads.

Is Google Ads programmatic?

Programmatic is not just one system. It’s an umbrella term that describes many different types of systems, including but not limited to RTB (real time bidding). Google Ads is not an example of RTB, but it is a programmatic system. The Google Ad exchange is an example of an ad exchange its main competitor is Xandr.

Should I buy from a programmatic ad network?

Ad networks are still a big component of programmatic advertising, they group publisher inventory and instead of selling to media agencies directly, they offer their inventory into supply side platforms, which then sell that inventory into the programmatic advertising ecosystem.

What is the difference between programmatic and traditional advertising?

The main difference between programmatic and traditional digital marketing is the use of technology in programmatic to automate human tasks.

How are machine learning and artificial intelligence used in programmatic advertising?

Machine learning and AI are used in programmatic advertising to optimize campaigns, target audiences, and personalize ads. They help to automate the decision-making process by making predictions about future events.

For example, they can predict whether or not a user is likely to click on an ad. Machine learning gathers data and “learns” from it, while artificial intelligence applies human-like cognitive functions to that data.

Key programmatic technology platforms include:

  • Google DV360 – A DSP that is a part of the Google Marketing Platform.
  • Adobe Media Optimizer – A programmatic DSP that is a part of Adobe Advertising Cloud
  • Xandr – An ad tech company and marketplace that sells and buys ads programmatically on behalf of advertisers and publishers. 
  • Viant- A digital marketing platform that provides tools to create audiences, build targeted campaigns, use data management platforms (DMPs) to activate first party data.

Each programmatic technology has its advantages and disadvantages. When choosing a programmatic platform, make sure to review all of your options and consider your specific needs. A programmatic agency can help you choose the right technology partner.

What are the main formats of automated advertising?

Digital Display Advertising – targeted ads that are delivered across many devices in the form of a banner or rich media ad. It is the prevalent form of programmatic advertising.

The benefits of display advertising are that it has a huge scale, and you can communicate a lot of information in a small space through multiple frames of your ad. Generally, you have up to 15s but make sure your ad is catchy so people notice it.

Video Advertising – ads that are delivered as pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll videos. The benefits of video advertising are that this creative format allows you to tell stories and create immersive experiences; it’s great for branding or awareness campaigns.

Native Advertising – a format of digital advertising that matches the form and function of the environment in which it is delivered. Also huge scale, it feels more natural to the user and makes it less likely to get into issues with ad blockers and banner blindness.

Connected TV Advertising – TV ads that are delivered across over-the-top (OTT) platforms, including Roku players and smart TVs. Connected TV has grown in popularity because it has a high reach because people spend so much time watching TV.

Digital Audio Advertising – a type of programmatic advertising that delivers audio ads to users through their phones, computers, or other devices. The ads can be delivered as pre-roll, mid-roll, or post-roll audio ads, or as banner ads that play audio. They are served in apps such as Spotify. Learn about all the benefits of Programmatic Audio Advertising.

Programmatic Digital Out of Home Advertising – a type of programmatic advertising that delivers digital ads to users through physical displays, such as billboards and transit shelters. It is a growing sector because it offers location-based targeting capabilities.

How do you succeed with programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is not a “set it and forget it” solution. In order to succeed with programmatic, you need to continuously optimize your campaigns.

This means regularly testing different targeting options, creatives, and bid strategies to find what works best for your business. You also need to ensure that your data is up-to-date and accurate.

Regularly cleaned and aligned customer data will help you achieve better results with programmatic advertising.

Expert knowledge in the digital advertising space will give you a head start, but even the savviest of digital advertising professionals will need to regularly test new strategies and tactics in order to keep up with changing algorithms, regulation changes, and market trends.

To make programmatic advertising work, you should keep a close on campaign analytics to measure their effectiveness and make changes when needed. Set up real-time dashboards, which will help you take action immediately when needed.

Keep an eye on programmatic ad fraud, which is bad for your business and the industry as a whole. You can protect your business from digital ad fraud by working with an ad fraud vendor who will be able to report fraudulent impressions and prevent you from bidding on potentially high-risk impressions.

Lastly, to keep up with the pace of programmatic advertising, you should have a dedicated team in place who can constantly review campaign performance and make changes quickly according to results or use an agency, like Quora Advertising Agency.

What is programmatic advertising in simple words?

Programmatic advertising is the use of technology to automatically deliver advertisements based on a number of different factors, including location, time, and browsing history.

What is direct programmatic advertising?

This is a type of programmatic advertising that allows buyers to purchase ads directly from publishers. It offers more transparency and control over the buying process, but it can also be more expensive than other types of programmatic advertising.

What is an ad exchange?

An ad exchange is a place where buyers and sellers can come together to find each other. It’s a marketplace for advertisers, publishers, and technology companies that work in the programmatic advertising space.

How much does programmatic advertising cost?

Programmatic buying costs will vary depending on the advertiser’s budget. So you can invest as little or as much as you want in a programmatic advertising platform.

What’s next for programmatic advertising?

Programmatic advertising is constantly evolving. The next steps for programmatic include more transparency and better controls for buyers, as well as the development of new technologies that will make the buying process even more efficient.

New formats will emerge, such as out-stream video developed just a few years ago, which will provide new opportunities for advertisers and publishers.

The industry will continue to face challenges from ad fraudsters who are always looking for new ways to exploit the system.

Consumer data and privacy is probably the biggest challenge that the industry will face in the years ahead.

Advertisers and publishers will need to find ways to use data responsibly while also protecting their customers’ privacy. All of these challenges make it an exciting time to be involved in programmatic advertising!

What is programmatic creative?

Programmatic creative is a term that refers to the use of technology to automatically create and serve ads. It can be used for everything from creating simple text-based ads to generating animated videos.

Programmatic creative makes it possible for advertisers to quickly and easily create and test multiple versions of an ad, which helps them find the most effective version faster.

So what exactly is the difference between RTB and programmatic?

Real-time bidding is a type of programmatic advertising that allows buyers to purchase ads through an auction system.

Programmatic is the term used for all types of automated buying, not just RTB.

So programmatic includes both RTB and non-RTB methods like programmatic direct, PMPs or programmatic guaranteed.

Want to learn more about programmatic media buying?

Check out our blog. We have tons of content to help you learn more about programmatic ads.

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We are a world-class programmatic marketing agency that can generate more sales and leads for you. Leave your email address, we will contact you for your free paid media review.

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Guide Native Programmatic

Getting Started With Programmatic Native Ads on DV360

Getting Started With Programmatic Native Ads on DV360

Programmatic strategies are constantly changing due to emerging formats, product features, and advancements in measurement and KPIs.

Many clients are seeking guidance on both short-term and long-term strategies for programmatic native ads on DV360.

Today, we are sharing with you the top five strategies our very own programmatic managed service buyers are implementing right now.

What is Google DV360?

It is a demand-side platform (DSP) and is part of the Google marketing platform (GMP). It’s an enterprise-level software different from Google ads.

Google Display & Video 360 (DV360), formerly DoubleClick, is a key component of Google’s marketing platform (GMP). Through a single dashboard, it enables campaign management & media buying across several multimedia channels, such as native, audio, video, display, and CTV.

Google’s machine learning technology powers DV360 and lets marketers work together more easily across teams while maintaining control of their marketing investments, creating faster and smarter marketing.

This article will use DV360 as a reference when learning about an effective way of buying programmatic native ads on the internet across web publishers and apps. However, the principles also apply to other demand-side platforms such as MediaMath, Xandr and The Tradedesk. 

How do you run Google’s Native Ads on DV360?

There are several steps marketers need to follow before they can start running native ads via Google’s platform:

  1. The first step for marketers is to create ads that meet the advertising specifications.
  2. Create the first campaign via the dashboard.
  3. Next, select the “Native” placement type for your ads.
  4. Once that is done, set up your bids by adding daily or lifetime budgets or using automated, rule-based bidding to optimize ads delivery across different placements.
  5. Define the campaign duration by setting a start and end date.
  6. Ensure you select all the right targeting options so your native ads are displayed to a relevant audience that is likely to purchase your product or service.
  7. Select an appropriate bidding optimization. There are several types of bidding optimizations available that we list below.
  8.  The last step marketers need to take is to sit back and watch as Google’s platform takes over, serving your ads across the internet. The best part of running native ads on DV360.

Bidding optimizations:

  • CPM Bid Strategy: A bidding optimization that uses a cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) bid.
  • Flat Bid Strategy: A flat bid strategy sets the maximum price per ad impression based on the total budget for all ads in an ad group or campaign.
  • Target CPA Bidding Strategy: bidding optimization uses a target cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid.
  • Custom bid strategy is an automated bidding method in DV360 that optimizes the bids by considering various factors like campaign priority, time of day, device type etc. This custom bid strategy can enhance the overall performance of the campaigns. It can provide an edge over other competitors participating in the same auction. This is a data-led approach for advanced advertisers only.
  •  The last step marketers need to take is to sit back and watch as Google’s platform takes over, serving your ads across the internet. The best part of running native ads on DV360.

Main Modules

There are five main modules on DV360. They include campaigns, audiences, creatives, inventory, and insights. Each of these modules plays a unique role and has its own management tools.

Campaign

The campaign module is where advertisers create and also execute cross-channel media campaigns. You can create, monitor, optimize, and plan campaigns.

Audiences

The audience module is where marketers can create and manage their audiences and maintain optimizations based on the reporting module across their campaigns. An experienced programmatic agency, advertiser or individual expert can set up audiences with Google’s tools in the audience module.

Creative

Start creating native ads by uploading an image for your ad. Click on the “Create Native” button and upload an appropriate file or enter text manually using the editor provided below. You can create native ads by customizing both the title and description of your ad.

The format gallery also allows advertisers to browse and find innovative formats and templates to test custom solutions. You can use the campaign manager to host native creative.

Inventory

An inventory module is where experts can discover and manage inventory from top publishers and broadcasters. This section offers the possibility to negotiate deals and explore opportunities in the marketplace.

Google’s DV360 native ads are exceptionally scalable. They are a mixture of remnant inventory and premium, which can be bought through PMPs, programmatic direct and programmatic guaranteed. 

Insights

The insights module allows users to access all the information and metrics needed for their campaigns. Customizable features inside the insight panel allow experts to analyze performance and act on those results.

These are available in easy-to-visualize reports and interactive dashboards. With the new 360s query workspace, you’re able to instantly access all of the data and insights that you need to create superior ad campaigns and first-class user experiences.

We recommend using Google Data Studio, which has a direct connection with Google DV360, allowing you to visualize data quickly and faster, encouraging stakeholders to refer to the data and making informed decisions about campaign optimizations.

 

FAQs

Can I run native ads via DV360 on Programmatic Direct?

Yes.

Can I run native ads via DV360 on programmatic guaranteed?

Yes.

Can I run native ads via Real-Time-Bidding (RTB)?

Yes.

What are some of the  programmatic native ad exchanges?

  1. Google Exchange
  2. Open Exchange (Adhese)
  3. PubMatic
  4. MdotM (Mobfox)
  5. Sovrn (Sovrn Holdings Inc.)
  6. Smaato
  7. Mopub
  8. Nexage
  9. Adyoulike
  10. Teads
  11. Sharethough
  12. Triplelift
  13. Taboola
  14. MGID
  15. OutBrain

What are the advertising specifications for Native ads on Google DV360?

Agencies and media buyers should refer to the following link.

What types of native campaigns can I run on the DSP DV360?

App install

App install ads are a great way to increase your app’s installs.

Traffic campaigns

Traffic ad campaigns are a great way to drive traffic to your website and increase conversions.

Native video

Ads are a great way to tell stories through the power of video.

Can Advant Technology help to run native ads for me?

Yes, this is our bread and butter. We have run hundreds of native ad campaigns and can run native ads on Google DV360 and potentially other native ad tech platforms depending on the objectives of your campaign and the KPI metrics you have set. 

If you don’t know the objectives and KPIs to look at, reach out to our team, and we can develop them in collaboration with you based on your business goals. If you want to run with a different DSP for whatever reason, we can facilitate this for you.

I’m interested in native ads. Does Advant Technology work with advertisers and agencies?

Yes, we work with advertisers directly or via many types of agencies, including

  1. SEO
  2. Creative
  3. Traditional Media Buying agencies / Offline Media Agencies
  4. PPC agencies
  5. Social media agencies
  6. PR agencies
  7. Full-service agencies
  8. Branding
  9. Influencer
  10. We even partner with other programmatic agencies

Conclusion

The possibilities for digital marketing are endless. What is your business goal? Do you want to generate more leads, convert more visitors into customers, or increase the average lifetime value of customers?

Getting started with programmatic native ads on DV360 isn’t so tasking once you know what it’s all about. However, delivering profitable advertising and returning a positive ROI with programmatic isn’t easy to do well. 

We hope this article was useful but if at the end of reading this you need help, consider hiring a marketing agency that allows you to obtain all of the value offered by DV360. You will be one step closer to delivering faster and smarter marketing campaigns.

Let our team of international media buying and planning experts help you deliver.

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Case Studies Display banners Native Programmatic Video Advertising

Gerard: Native, Display And Programmatic Video Ads

GERARD: NATIVE, DISPLAY AND
PROGRAMMATIC VIDEO

INDUSTRY:
Construction
MARKET:
Hungary​
SERVICES:
Native, display and video

Gerard Roofing: Targeted Awareness Through Native, Display

We’ve had the pleasure of working with Hungarian roof manufacturers, Gerard, for many years. The work we do together is mostly focused on raising awareness for their products among untapped audiences through native, display and video advertising.

NATIVE, DISPLAY AND PROGRAMMATIC VIDEO

Challenge
As a roofing manufacturer, Gerard’s target audience is broad and could apply to any homeowner but the timing of when you may make a purchase makes the audience niche, not everyone will be in the market for a new roof in the near future. We’ve been using display banners, native and video formats to raise awareness among users currently in the market for a new roof.

Solution
Our team uses contextual targeting to reach out to untapped audiences through display banners. The list of publishers is typically pre-set and targets people aged 30-64 currently constructing or renovating their homes. A typical campaign gets well over 1m impressions through whitelisted premium publishers.

Results
To us, client retention is the biggest proof of success and something we’re incredibly proud to say we’re smashing! We’ve been managing Gerard’s campaigns since we were just one year old (back in 2016), and look forward to many more years of collaboration together.

Check out our case studies from some of our other long-standing clients including Austrotherm.

You might also be interested in
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Programmatic

An Introduction The Best Various Programmatic Ad Formats That Generate Sales

An Introduction To Various Programmatic Ad Formats That Generate Sales

Are you a media buyer working for an agency? Perhaps you’re a client-side digital marketer? This article is for anyone looking to get a deeper understanding of online programmatic ad formats. Don’t forget to check out bonus content at the end of this article.

As a programmatic agency, we have first-hand expert experience using all of the ad formats listed in this article. We wanted to share the love about the numerous ad placements available for purchase across various ad exchanges.

We’ll talk about the differences between native, sponsored content, display, remarketing ads and other major advertising formats that you can use in your programmatic ad campaigns.

Before we get started, remember that you should think about these formats in the context of online media planning and channel strategy and the importance of using a mixture of channels to deliver a performance-driven programmatic advertising campaign. There is no ‘right’ format; you’ll need to use a mixture of formats to deliver the most effective campaign. So think carefully about crafting a media plan that leverages each format for the benefits you require specific to your use case.

Suppose you are looking to run a multi-market (as opposed to national) programmatic campaign. In that case, it’s important to understand the various digital advertising formats available, as you’ll need greater flexibility to reach your audiences through the ad space eco-system, which varies by market.

Programmatic Advertising Formats Guide

At the London-based programmatic agency Advant Technology Ltd, we use a combination of the formats listed here to reach the ideal customer at the right point in the buyer journey and ultimately deliver the best possible ROI.

So let’s begin by looking at some of the differences between the various ad formats to run an effective programmatic campaign, whether that be display, native or video, which can all be bought through multiple platforms, using automated bidding across programmatic DSPs.

Programmatic Advertising Formats include:

  1. Native Ads
  2. Display Ads
  3. Interstitial Ads
  4. Audio Ads
  5. Video Ads
  6. Connected TV Ads
  7. Digital Out of Home Ads

Programmatic advertising examples

Programmatic Native

Defined as “ads that live within a publication but have been formatted to match the look and feel of the site on which they reside.” Programmatic technology has enabled this technology to scale over the past ten years and is now the prevailing format in online advertising.

Generally, for programmatic native ads you need an image, a headline, a logo and a short description

Programmatic Display Advertising

Defined as “any marketing message that is displayed to users whether in an online publication, email, or mobile app. Display ads appear in many forms including images and rich media.” They typically are not sold on a pay-per-click instead they are sold on a cost-per-impression model (CPM) available through demand-side platforms (DSP).

Interstitial Ads

Interstitial ads are defined as “ads that appear on a website page and block the content for a few seconds before allowing it to be read.” Interstitial ads, also known as full-screen takeover advertisements, work within a user’s window of attention by temporarily blocking out all other content displayed on their device. Interstitial ads work well for advertisers who want to maximize the screen real estate available when a user browses the internet, and they can come in many forms such as video or banner.

Interstitial ads are known for having a higher click-through rate (CTR) than other types of advertisements because they take up such a large portion of the screen, although some argue that many of the clicks are accidental.

In the early 2010s, a significant portion of websites implemented interstitial ads on their sites to make revenue.

While interstitial ads are still used to this day, the desktop advertising space has shifted away from this format due to its intrusive nature. Apple and Google have made efforts to phase them out there possible.

Example Interstitial Full Screen Ad
Example Interstitial Full Screen Mobile Ad

Audio Ads

Audio ads are defined as “ads that play before or during audio content.” Audio ads work by playing within the user’s window of attention. It’s a format that is newer in the programmatic ad buying industry, and more and more agencies are adopting it as part of their marketing strategy.

There are many ways for advertisers and agencies to effectively use audio ads to target ideal customers, including podcast sponsorships and pre-roll advertisements. The key difference between audio ads and other types of ads is that because they take up the user’s sense of hearing rather than sight, they are slightly more passive than other types of advertisements.

This is why they are often used in conjunction with other media types. Audio ads are particularly effective when you do not have a landing page or generating traffic is of low priority.

Try to make audio ad creative attention-grabbing to keep users focusing on the ad through our the duration resulting in great success.

Programmatic Audio Advertising
Programmatic Audio Advant Technology

Video Formats

Video formats/video ads are clips that play before, during, or after the user’s desired content. Video formats vary significantly in length and style, but they typically range from ten seconds to two minutes.

The key to effective video advertising is capturing the viewer’s attention within the first few seconds of play.

Video Advertising

Search Ads

Search ads work by allowing advertisers to bid on specific keywords related to their product or service. The ads then appear in various placements depending on which platform. For example, if you use Google Ads, they will appear at the top of SERPs in Googles search engine. They can be highly effective for advertisers who want to drive sales to their website because there is intent behind a users search.

Email Ad Formats

Email ads are defined as “ads that appear within email inboxes.” These ads work by popping up within an inbox, and they are highly effective because marketers can use email data to determine which campaign should be targeted at which person.

So there you have it, a quick guide to various programmatic ad formats.

As a bonus, let’s also take a look at some of the targeting methodologies you can apply across these formats to reach your audience efficiently, reducing advertising costs and increasing your ROI.

Advanced Targeting Methodologies

Programmatic Remarketing

Remarketing ads are defined as “ads that show up when a user browses the web after having visited a brand’s website.”

The key difference between remarketing ads and other types of ads is that remarketing ads are designed specifically to target people who have already visited a site or product before.

This makes remarketing great for eCommerce sites, as they can show follow up ads with personalized offers and discount codes to people who have browsed but not yet completed a purchase.

Remarketing works by analyzing the browser history on a site and then displaying related ads based on the information it finds.

Programmatic experts will generally plan a spend allocation of 10-20% of the total campaign to this targeting strategy.

Contextual Programmatic

Contextual ads are defined as “ads relevant to the context of the website in which they are placed”.

The content on the webpage determines the context of the website. This targeting strategy can be used across display, native, text and video advertising formats.

Contextual advertising has become popular for its efficiency and ability to generate accurate results for advertisers. Contextual advertising is also GDPR compliant because it is a form of online marketing that does not require any personal data to be transferred.

Since the context of the webpage only triggers the ad, no personal data is transmitted to either party, which means that it does not fall under GDPR.

Contextual advertising has become increasingly popular because it provides users with ads relevant to their interests and needs. Contextual advertising is expected to grow in popularity because of its efficiency compared with other online programmatic formats.

IP-Targeting

IP-targeted ads are defined as “ads targeted to a specific location based on IP address.” IP-targeting works by collecting data from the user’s computer or device IP.

IP targeting is widespread in B2B marketing, where you want to target a specific company list. They are an efficient way to reach target account lists (TALs) great for driving cost-efficient lead generation.

Geo-Targeted Ads

Geo-targeting allows advertisers to choose the region of the world in which their ads will be shown.

The advantage of using geo-targeted ads is that advertisers are able to show the ad only to the people in their location. For example, if an advertisement for a restaurant is displayed on google.com/maps to someone based in New York City, it cannot be seen by anyone else in the world.

 

Programmatic Advertising FAQs

Programmatic ads definition

Let’s begin with a quick definition of programmatic, which is defined as “ads purchased programmatically through software automation it can be purchased via real-time bidding (RTB) or programmatic direct”.

Programmatic ads use technology to decide where, when and even how much they should be shown to the viewer based on the advertiser’s criteria set by the agency that manages the campaign.

Did you know that programmatic advertisements became popular with publishers because they allowed for increased revenue and better optimization of display advertising space?

Benefits and features of programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising is good for both buyers and sellers because it helps them know what they are doing. Marketers no longer have to use guesses since using data to make decisions is good. Advertisers can also reach people who are on their mobile phones more quickly than advertisers can on computers.

Let’s dive into some quick tips which apply no matter the advertising format.

Set your objective

For example, are you launching a new product or service which you want to raise awareness for? Or do you have an existing product/service that needs to re-engage with its consumers because it is being outsold by the competition?

Set your ad spend budget

When planning where you will spend your advertising dollars, you need to make sure you are spending a sufficient amount per channel so you can test the channel/platform or programmatic ad format properly.

A programmatic agency will help you plan a reasonable budget per platform.

It’s important to balance your budget and make sure that the media/channel you are using can deliver on the ROI required for your campaign – this is where researching before starting an advertising campaign will help.

Programmatic DSPs Demand Side Platforms

There are many DSPs to choose from; some DSPs only offer display, whilst others will provide a full range of formats from programmatic audio ads to good old banner ads. Note, enterprise-level DSPs usually have a monthly fee of about $10,000 USD, which equates to $100,000 in ad spend, although this varies from DSP to DSP.

Know the target audience

Knowing whom you are targeting, what’s important to them and where they are spending their time online is key if you want your advertising campaign to be ROI-driven. Think about what channels are popular with the people who fit your target audience.

Think about the creative

Think about the context of the product you are selling. Do people need to see it visually, or perhaps they only need to hear about it? A programmatic audio ad on the likes of Spotify could be more efficient.

Maybe a combination of the two will create the most significant impact, the highest brand awareness and the most sales.

Programmatic advertising costs

Bigger impact formats like desktop skins and pre-roll video are obviously more expensive than display ads, which are less likely to garner a user’s attention, so think about this trade-off when considering what formats will deliver the biggest bang for your buck!

Unlike search and many social platforms, most programmatic display ads are not sold on a pay-per-click instead, they are sold on a cost-per-impression model (CPM).

You need to consider the effective CPM, the total media cost, any additional DMP fees, and ad tech fees when buying ad space.

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Programmatic

11 Benefits of Programmatic Audio Advertising

Benefits of Programmatic Audio Advertising

With programmatic audio advertising, you can reach valuable and highly engaged audiences with advertisements while they are listening to their favourite online audio content. It allows brands to use yet another digital touchpoint throughout the buyers’ journey to deliver highly tailored messaging at scale.

Digital audio is booming in popularity. According to eMarketer, 2020 was the year digital audio surpassed terrestrial audio. This has opened a massive opportunity for SSPs, supply-side platforms and ad exchanges to take advantage of this listenership and monetise audiences at huge scale.

What drives the growth of digital audio ads?

That growth comes from the increase of music streaming services and podcast listeners. Most of the digital audio content is streamed on mobile devices across apps such as those listed here.

  • Apple Podcasts
  • Google Podcasts
  • Audible
  • Stitcher
  • TuneIn Radio
  • Spotify
  • Amazon. Prime Music
  • Deezer
  • YouTube. Music
  • SoundCloud
Programmatic Audio Advertising
Programmatic Audio Advant Technology

11 Reasons Why You Should Do Programmatic Audio Ads

Our programmatic media agency can help develop a marketing strategy that leverages programmatic audio buying at scale globally. Send us a note with your campaign budget, and we’ll be happy to look at a digital radio ad campaign for you so you, too, can reap the benefits of this valuable audience.

If you’re still not convinced programmatic audio ads are the right choice for you, we’ve compiled a list of 11 reasons why you should include it in your next advertising budget.

11 Reasons Why You Should Do Programmatic Audio Ads

1. Reach New Audiences

With all of the available digital channels at businesses’ disposal today, it can be difficult for advertisers to maximize their marketing budgets. A well-rounded media plan should reach audiences at scale and efficiently. Programmatic audio does exactly that.

2. Highly Engaged Listeners

What makes programmatic audio advertising uniquely effective is its ability to connect with listeners.

Listeners are not distracted or interrupted by digital audio the same way they are when watching television programs or online videos; therefore, they are less likely to switch to an alternate activity. Programmatic audio ads provide greater freedom for listeners since the ads are played in the background or while they are engaged in another activity.

3. Low CPM Costs

On the surface, programmatic audio advertising offers low cost-per-thousand (CPM) rates comparable to other digital media channels.

4. Advanced Analytics

Advertisers are able to track the effectiveness of their campaigns in real-time by leveraging advanced analytics capabilities within platform dashboards. These metrics allow brands to measure campaign performance, such as the number of impressions and exposure times, in addition to monitoring ad engagement levels-including the percentage of users who listened through a complete audio ad and those who heard part of an entire audio ad.

5. Improved Sales and ROI

As always, the ultimate goal in any advertising campaign should be to improve sales and ROI. Fortunately, programmatic audio advertising enables brands to target their ads to likely customers by leveraging specific data points, such as geographic location or website interests. This valuable insight can give advertisers a valuable edge in reaching key people who are more likely to purchase.

6. Audio Ad Creative Flexibility

The more customisation and personalisation applied to audio ad content, the more effective it will be in reaching interested listeners. You can now use tools that allow you to deliver dynamic ads based on who the audience is, so you can deliver hundreds of ad variations that are highly targeted.

7. Low Creative Costs

Programmatic audio ads can be created quickly and at a low-cost thanks to standardised formats. As audio requires no visuals, it has the potential of being a lot cheaper. An opportunity for companies to get in front of new audiences without committing a lot of time or money-and with potentially high returns.

8. Greater Brand Awareness

Programmatic audio ads are designed to make brands more familiar with listeners who do not have time to read long-form content or watch longer video ads when they want to hear an informative message about a certain brand, product or service. With shorter forms of media becoming the preferred means of communication, it’s no surprise that brands are increasingly turning to programmatic audio ads as a way to reach millions of listeners.

9. Real-Time Measurement

As with all digital advertising, one of the best advantages is the ability to easily measure campaign performance and ROI. Because marketers can track ad exposure and engagement levels in real-time, they can make adjustments and improvements as needed.

10. Brand Safety and Trustworthiness

Through the use of brand safety and fraud tools you can monitor and any fraudulent impressions and switch off traffic sources that are not meeting standards.

11. Flexibility with Media

Ads can be targeted to music apps or podcast audiences across allowing brands to engage better with their audience depending on the context of their message.

The benefits of digital audio ads are clear, targeting consumers in new ways as they consume content across the web.

Programmatic Audio Advertising Word Cloud

FAQs

Let’s take a look at some common questions about programmatic audio ads.

Which music streaming services are available to target?

Major audio platforms include Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Tidal, SoundCloud, Pandora, Slacker Radio, iHeartRadio, TuneIn, and others.

What are the specifications for audio ads?

The specifications you need to consider will ultimately depend on which DSP you use but try checking out the following from Google DV360 as a guideline.

What are the typical CPM costs for audio ads?

CPMs generally vary between about $5-$40 CPM depending on the target audience, availability of inventory, competitiveness of other advertisers targeting the same user and the app/environment. Many factors contribute to the final CPM.

What marketing budget do I need?

As a programmatic agency, we recommend not less than around $5,000-$10,000 per campaign,which typically lasts 2-6 weeks. However, the final budget depends on your campaign goals.

Can people click on my audio ad?

Yes, sometimes.

It depends on where the ad has been served, which app you target, and whether they accept companion banners. In our experience, only around 0.25% of audio ads are served with a companion banner. So, if you’re running an audio ad campaign looking to generate traffic, we suggest you look at another channel.

Conclusion

As a programmatic advertising agency, we have found that audio ads are an effective way to built brand awareness and boost engagement.

Digital audio ads are a bit different and whilst you won’t generate huge traffic there, they can be a great way to garner interest and increase brand awareness.

They are a great way to target a specific demographic and can be highly effective when partnered with a strong marketing strategy.

The increased use of technology and consumers appetite for adopting these trends has led to a rise in digital audio consumption, naturally, where users go online, ads will follow.

By broadening the channels you use to include digital audio advertising, you may reach people on a level that fits their listening habits in an environment that does not have huge ad frequency thus combating banner blindness. Perhaps one day, the new norm will be audio ad deafness?

In conclusion, there is no denying that digital audio advertising can be an effective channel for brands looking to target their online audiences in new ways. To discuss the possibilities of your campaign, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us today.

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Increase Your ROI with Programmatic Contextual Targeting

Increase Your ROI with Programmatic Contextual Targeting

If you want to increase your ROI on programmatic advertising, contextual targeting is a great place to start.

In online advertising, contextual targeting allows marketers to deliver highly targeted programmatic ads across a wide range of platforms. This can greatly improve campaign performance because it lets you deliver these highly targeted, relevant ads across a wide range of platforms without creating multiple ad copies.

Programmatic Ad Buying in 2021
Programmatic Ad Buying in 2021

Programmatic Background

Programmatic ad buying is growing, with $155 billion spent globally in 2021. So it’s not surprising that more marketers are starting to experiment with programmatic campaigns.

One of the easiest ways to get started with programmatic advertising is through contextual targeting – using keywords that describe your product or service.

Contextual targeting is one of the most powerful and cost-effective ways to engage new customers at scale. Contextual targeting is powerful for display ad campaigns, including video and native ads. It’s long been used in search ads, but it is perhaps underutilised in programmatic advertising until recently.

So let’s dive in on how to use contextual targeting in your programmatic campaigns.

Contextual advertising explained

Contextual ads deliver specific messages to customers when they are most likely to take action. Contextual advertising is powered by keyword targeting.

Programmatic campaigns aim to turn the question “who?” into “when” and “where?”. Contextual keyword targeting does precisely this. It asks which keywords best describe your product or service or your audiences’ interests and then places ads where those keywords appear: on websites, within social media feeds and in a mobile app.

Contextual Advertising Explained Word Cloud
Contextual Advertising Explained Word Cloud

Why use keywords for contextual targeting?

With keywords, you can easily identify specific groups of prospects who have an interest in certain topics related to your brand. For example, when someone searches for “waterproof-breathable rain jackets,” they may be in the market for a new jacket and could make a purchase soon after clicking through an ad about waterproof fabrics.

Why has contextual targeting grown in popularity – 3rd Party Cookies?

Consumers are becoming savvier about their data, and many are opting out. GDPR, the General Data Protection Regulation and other initiatives such as the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act).

Initiatives like these have made it more difficult for ad tech platforms to collect data on consumers for use in digital campaigns. As a result, marketers are turning to new forms of advertising that are less reliant on data collection and cookies.

Contextual targeting, AI and relevant advertising

AI technology will help to create more precise advertiser campaigns. Advertisers are now able to focus on contextual targeting, which will enhance their programmatic campaigns. AI will provide advertisers with the personalisation and optimisation necessary to properly target their campaigns and increase revenue. AI technology can take your keyword targeting and broaden this based on many factors, thus widening your reach whilst still keeping campaigns accurate.

Written language can be interpreted in many different ways if it is not properly analysed, so using AI technology will help the advertisers to get a better interpretation of the data which will help them to target their campaigns better.

How to use contextual to increase brand safety

Contextual targeting is an important tool for ensuring brand safety. By excluding ads from appearing on unsafe websites and pages, contextual targeting can help to keep your brand safe from negative associations online.

Technology tools that are more sophisticated than basic keyword matching aid marketers in taking a more nuanced approach. Thus, allowing them to pick and choose the environments they want.

A reliable tool will keep you away from non-brand safe categories such as:

  1. Suggestive
  2. Sensitive social issues
  3. Profanity
  4. Tragedy
  5. Derogatory
  6. Downloads & sharing
  7. Weapons
  8. Violence
  9. Alcohol
  10. Drugs
  11. Tobacco
  12. Religion
  13. Transportation accidents
  14. Sexual
  15. Gambling

An excellent use case of how contextual data can protect your brand.

How can marketers use contextual targeting in their campaigns?

First, determine some keywords for your campaign. These could be subject matter keywords or keywords about your target audience’s interest. Once you have your keywords, create ads relevant to those keywords and place them where they will be seen by people interested in what you have to offer.

You can do this with DSPs like DV360. If you don’t have access to such a platform, work with one of the best programmatic agencies that will be able to develop a digital advertising strategy.

Prominent op contextual ad tech platforms

Grapeshot

Grapeshot is a great technology that Oracle bought. Having used Grapeshot in the past, we can verify that the technology works and the self-service tool are great at helping you build relevant keywords. All you need is a few seed keywords, and then Grapeshot suggests others it thinks are relevant.

Grapeshot works by using machine learning to understand the context of keywords. For example, suppose you were advertising for a new SLR camera. In that case, Grapeshot might find that it has also been advertised for in other contexts like “best travel camera” or “best family holiday camera”. The solution then suggests all these other relevant keywords to your original seed word. This is great news because it’s easy to scale ad performance with contextual targeting!

Peer 39

Another US ad tech firm, Peer39, uses patent-pending machine learning algorithms, which it claims can analyse a publisher site’s entire page content and assign each article with a score for its contextual relevance.
For example, suppose a user is reading about Paris. In that case, the algorithm may determine that “the Eiffel Tower” or “Parisians” are contextually relevant keywords that would make them more likely to show interest in travel.

Using this technology, advertisers can target their audiences with highly-targeted display ads across multiple publishers by specific keywords within the page content. This allows brands to expand their reach and keyword targeting beyond what they could do through typical search engine marketing (SEM) and down to the individual web page level (contextual targeting).

This near-endless combination of potential brand keywords makes contextual targeting the logical platform choice for advertisers looking to maximise their return on investment, especially in the programmatic world.

DSPs That Offer Contextual Targeting
DSPs That Offer Contextual Targeting

What DSPs offer contextual targeting?

A few DSPs utilise their own contextual targeting technologies. These include:

  • Zeta
  • Google DV360
  • Adform
  • TripleLift

The future of contextual targeting

As technology advances, so does the way we target our audiences. Programmatic advertising is already a very powerful tool, but it is becoming even more effective with the rise of contextual targeting. With privacy concerns and personal data being headline news daily, brands need to find new ways of reaching users. Contextual targeting is one way of ensuring ads are relevant to the user, and it is set to become even more important in the years to come.

Contextual Ads Targeting vs Behavioral Ads Targeting
Contextual Ads Targeting vs Behavioral Ads Targeting

Difference between behavioral advertising and contextual advertising

Behavioural targeting is a well-known method of targeting online users that tracks their browsing habits and interests. It uses this data to create user profiles that then serve ads to the user based on this data. This includes their age, gender, location, what they have browsed and searched for. This precise targeting is something many internet users are not happy about, and it’s one of the reasons for the death of third-party cookies.

On the other hand, a contextual ad does not use personal data when serving ads.

Conclusion

Though not quite perfect, contextual targeting is one of the most powerful ways to advertise to consumers at scale.

With a few simple steps, marketers can take advantage of this opportunity and improve their overall digital marketing performance.

If you need help planning your next contextually targeted programmatic ad campaign reach out to us. Our team of planners and buyers can help you identify the keywords to target, the right messaging and deliver ads to the right audience.

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Comparing Cost-Per-Mille (CPM) vs. Cost-Per-View (CPV): Which is Best?

Comparing Cost-per-Mille (CPM) vs. Cost-per-View (CPV): Which Is Best?

Are you wondering if CPM or CPV is the appropriate pricing model for your video advertising campaign

If you’re looking to run a video ad campaign, there are a lot of different factors that come into play.

One of those factors is which pricing model will work best for your needs. We’ll go over what each one means and how they differ from each other so that you can make the most informed decision possible.

There are two main types of pricing models that we cover today. Cost-per-mille (CPM) and cost-per-view (CPV). Understanding the difference between CPV and CPM is essential for evaluating which model aligns with your campaign goals. Each has its benefits, but it’s important to understand how they work before deciding which one is right for your business.

If you plan to run a video campaign and need to run on either pricing model, our team can help.

Whether you go for cost-per-mille (CPM), cost-per-view (CPV), or mix them with the many other models such as CPC cost per click, CPE or cost per engagement or even CPCV cost per completed view, they all have their pros and cons.

Pricing models have changed significantly in the past few years. For example, Facebook ads were traditionally priced on CPM/CPC, but you can now run on a CPV bidding model.

Online advertising is shifting towards cost per engagement (CPE) or cost per action (CPA). So, rather than paying to show your ad 1,000 times, you only pay when your ad is clicked or engaged with, e.g., cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-engagement (CPE).

What is CPM advertising?

CPM ads are priced at a dynamic or flat rate for every thousand impressions. An impression refers to every ad shown on a user’s screen, whether above or below the fold, whether seen or not, whether engaged or not.

It is the most widely adopted pricing model in programmatic advertising.

The reason it’s important is that when you understand this pricing model, you understand that the higher the revenue per thousand impressions, the more money the publisher who is displaying the ad will make.

For publishers, they use the acronym revenue per mill or RPM because, for publishers who are sell-side, it’s revenue, whereas on the other side, the buy-side, for advertisers, it’s a cost hence the RPM and CPM, respectively.

The main drawback of this pricing model is the lack of flexibility, no matter the quality of the ad impression the advertiser pays.
The vast majority of programmatic advertising uses CPM bidding and pricing to value impressions, and the real-time bidding ecosystem, which is prevalent in programmatic, uses this pricing model.

For reach and awareness campaign’s on LinkedIn, Facebook Ads Manager and Pinterest, you will be charged a CPM model.
This model draws advertisers due to its simplicity. They know precisely how much their campaign will cost them and for what length of time they need to pay, e.g., if 1,000 people see your ad, you’ll be charged a set amount per thousand impressions, which means no extra money if someone engages with it.

CPM Advertising

How does cost-per-mille work?

Every time you load a web page, ad servers will check if an advertisement is available for that page.

The advertiser with the highest bid wins, and their advertisement is served into this space. A pricing model whereby the advertiser is charged $0.01 more than the second-highest bid for the ad impression.

What is cost-per-view advertising?

Cost-per-view (CPV) is a performance-based advertising pricing model, this time based on every ad that is successfully displayed and watched, meaning you pay for each view instead of a flat rate such as CPM’s cost per thousand.

Firstly, it’s essential to distinguish between cost-per-view (CPV) and cost-per-completed-view (CPCV), as much of the talk around the two now overlaps.

CPV started as being charged for a simple view, perhaps 3 seconds or more, but the CPCV model takes this even further, charging only when a user has viewed a whole video or until an agreed-upon point, typically 15, 30 or 60 seconds in rare circumstances.

Cost per view
online video ad Example
Example of Client Video Campaign

CPM Vs. CPV: Which model is best for my ad campaigns?

There is no right or wrong and one-size-fits-all style as with all online advertising models. Each ad campaign will have different criteria from budget to goals.
It would be best if you tried to think ahead and work out what the average cost of the KPI you are looking for is going to be.

So if your KPI is 15-second views, how many video impressions will you need to deliver that view threshold of 15 seconds? If you used CPM pricing, what is the total cost divided by the number of 15s views? Is this more or less than the CPV model?

Why choose CPM?

Compared with CPV, pricing is predictable if you are paying a flat CPM. If you are buying on a dynamic CPM there is greater risk.

The main advantage is you could acheive more views than CPV pricing but it’s a risk and you will have to optimise

Why choose CPV?

The most significant benefits of CPV over CPM are the guaranteed view lengths and increased audience impact it can offer.

Still not sure?

Ultimately, there are three factors you need to consider when creating your ad campaign, and these will guide your choices:

FAQS

Is CPV going to limit the scale of my ad campaign?

What are your objectives, and does the chosen pricing method help you scale them up? If you’re looking for increased brand awareness, a CPV model alone won’t be the best approach. Usually, a combination of both methods can deliver a good balance.

CPM vs CPV, which is more efficient?

A CPM buy that delivers a cost per view of $0.03 is likely to be more effective than a CPV campaign that delivers a cost per view of $0.06, which is why testing is so important. If you want to learn more about how we plan and test different channels and buying formats, reach out to our team.

What is the average cost per view, CPV?

The average CPV will vary and depend on your target audience and the advertising channel you are using to reach them. A specific audience will normally mean a higher average cost per view.

If you buy Facebook ads, the average CPM tends to be higher than YouTube. TrueView ads, for example, where CPV can be as low as $0.01, making it very efficient.

A good rule of thumb is to estimate the average between $0.03 and $0.20+ per view as a starting point.

Advant Technology offers advertisers CPVs as low as $0.01 across programmatic advertising.

Can you use CPV pricing for display advertising?

NO. CPV does not work for display banners.

What is a good programmatic CPM?

Programmatic CPMs vary by market, audience, website, ad network, ad exchange and publisher.

$1-$15.00 CPM is a good starting point for programmatic CPMs, but you can find them as low as $0.10 per thousand impressions.

You can also find the cost per click (CPC) or cost per action (CPA). To estimate the average CPC, you need to have some idea of your conversion rates and the value of each conversion. The cheapest CPMs usually are on sites with large traffic/scale.

How do you calculate CPM?

CPM = 1000 * cost / impressions or try this handy calculator.

How do you calculate CPV?

CPV = Cost / views or try this calculator.

How do I lower my CPV?

If you are using Facebook, try improving your quality score. You can improve your Facebook ad quality score by having a clear call to action and avoiding ad fatigue by rotating your ads frequently.

What is a good ad spend budget for a CPV campaign?

That depends on the size of the target market you are trying to reach and the frequency you want to achieve.

Final thoughts

The choice between CPV and CPM depends on the type of campaign you want to run and the audience that you’re trying to reach.

If your target is a niche, CPM will likely be more effective as it is more scalable. If, however, you’re looking for mass-appeal advertising campaigns, then CPV could work a treat.

CPM and CPV are just two pricing models, and they can branch off into more specific online advertising pricing models. Further reading is available on our blog, where you can find information on other pricing models.

If you are interested in increasing brand awareness and driving sales reach out now and we can put an action plan in place.

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The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Best Programmatic Agency

The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Best Programmatic Agency

Are you a digital marketer looking for an expert programmatic advertising partner to develop a marketing strategy tailored to your needs?

Choosing an agency is usually an expensive and time-intensive process, but with the right knowledge, the process can be made easier.

There are many ways you can go about finding your next agency. Typically agencies are chosen through a tender process or previous relationships, however, you decide to find your next programmatic partner make sure you take a read of this blog post by CEO and founder Ben Myers.

As a London-based agency that works with both brands and agencies, we know a thing or two about choosing your next marketing agency.

We have solutions for agencies and brands/clients.

It’s important to find a media agency well suited to your needs. The best programmatic agency isn’t always the biggest, most advanced, most data-led algorithmic all singing, all dancing. It all depends on your requirements as an advertiser and where you are in your journey.

Programmatic background

Programmatic advertising has seen strong growth and in 2021, will be worth 155 billion dollars globally. Some brands have chosen to take programmatic advertising in-house whilst others continue to rely on the expertise of specialist programmatic advertising like Advant Technology. Others take a hybrid approach in-housing the tech and outsourcing the management and ad operations.

Programmatic background
What does a programmatic agency focus on? – Advant Technology

What is a programmatic agency?

Let’s start with the basics. Programmatic agencies focus on making data-driven decisions about digital advertising by using algorithms to conduct personalised A/B testing and leveraging machine learning to increase clients’ ROI.

These companies may also specialise in creating targeted messaging through display ads, video ads and mobile ads.

Using the definitions above, you can determine how these businesses work together to create your marketing budget through different channels.

Why work with a Programmatic Agency?

The best media agency will create a programmatic strategy that works for your business goals, providing you with concepts, creatives and technologies that will keep you at the forefront of changing market conditions.

They’ll find what works well for your brand before implementing the campaign in a DSP, and crucially before spending your budget. This careful media planning phase will help you achieve even greater reach and a better ROI.

Agencies are also adept at leveraging agency partners with publishers, ad exchanges, SSPs, DMPs, Ad servers, ad networks and ad creatives, making the programmatic landscape more accessible to you.

They should provide turnkey solutions, taking care of campaign management. They’ll help make the process seamless by acting as a liaison between your business, ad tech, data and ultimately your audience. They will also advise on the complexities of compliance standards.

Finally, they’ll help with analytics, reporting and measurement based on your goals and objectives. If you choose right, you’ll be selecting a programmatic advertising partner more than just an agency.

Let’s dive into some of the primary considerations when choosing the best programmatic agency.

Make sure the agency is reputable and trustworthy

Always do background research on any agencies you’re thinking about working with and make sure they have a good reputation for timely delivery and great results.

Check to see if they have a good client retention rate and how long their clients have been with them. Your business is spending money, so you need to make sure the agency you choose will be able to deliver on its promises.

Talk about your business goals & media objectives

Before working with an agency, define clear objectives for your programmatic campaigns. Agencies can help you with both short-term (how many clicks do you want?) and long-term (do you plan to generate leads for your sales team or increase brand awareness?) marketing goals.

Understand what the agency offers

Make sure that the agency has a good handle on how programmatic works, from data analysis to targeting users. Ask them how they plan to reach your target audience, what technologies they use and who their publishers are.

Ensure the fit is right

Your agency should have experience working with clients in your industry or vertical or be adept at understanding it. They should create a programmatic campaign that’s customised according to your business goals, not just sell you the same programmatic strategies used for existing clients/past clients they’ve created for other clients.

Make sure you understand your ROI

Understand what is included in your agency’s agreement, e.g., how will their work impact your ad performance? Is there a success fee involved if certain milestones are achieved?

What’s the payment structure and price of future campaigns?

Agree on clear terms with your agency so that both parties have an understanding of how fees will be calculated. For example, some programmatic agencies charge an ad spend retainer or minimum guarantee each month.

Ask them about transparency

Know whether your programmatic partner can provide transparent reporting so that you can measure the effectiveness of campaigns hitting your goals.

As a brand/client, if you opted for a fully transparent pricing model, you should expect to see the granularity of how your programmatic budget is being spent. This information should be available line by line item, impression by impression across all media buys.

If an agency cannot provide this level of transparency, they are likely not operating a fully transparent agency model.

Programmatic media buying technology stack

Is it important that your agency uses all the latest tech? Or is a more streamlined approach with less technology access better for your brand? If you’re not going to be using every piece of the agency’s ad tech stack, does it matter to your brand? In one way or another, you may end up paying for that.

Ask questions about what Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) they use or what DSPs they are experienced in.

Ask them about why they are using the DSP they use. Understand that each DSP is unique, offering different data integrations, algorithms, inventory access, fee structure, reporting and support.

You will also find that some DSPs are better suited to specific industry sectors, for instance, Google DV360 is not very strong in verticals which we classify as grey markets, such as casino gambling, sports betting or CBD marketing.

Programmatic innovation and programmatic strategy

The best programmatic agencies will be up to date with what’s happening in the programmatic world, and inform clients on new ad formats, new tracking standards, new analytic platforms and even new data platforms. They’ll deliver those insights in way that gives you a clear understanding on how it can benefit your business objectives.

Make sure it’s secure

The agency will ensure that your programmatic advertising is compliant with industry standards by verifying that all data is collected via legal channels.
An agency should also be familiar with ad fraud detection systems like IAS and Doubleverify, useful for preventing ad dollars from being wasted.

Services structure

This one really depends on your business and the type of work you are looking to get done for you.

A lot of agencies offer different types of fee categories. Think about what structure works for you, do you want an agency strictly focused on programmatic media buying or do creative services sit within the account too?

Ensure you have a good working relationship

Working with a programmatic agency should be a positive experience for your marketing team, so both parties must be on the same page regarding communication and expectations. Make sure you choose an agency that makes its people available to answer questions and follows through on promises on time.

Quality of work

As agencies grow larger, it can become challenging for them to maintain high levels of quality, ask some questions about how they keep clients happy?

Are they open to critiques and new ideas, or do they believe their way is the only way? If they have a steady stream of returning clients, they’re doing something right. Look at client retention rates as an indicator.

Long term contracts

Short-term partnerships can allow you to test out agencies while rarely committing to large sums of money, eventually, you want to commit to a long-term contract. This is a commitment and fit from both sides and allows you to ensure that traders and account managers stay on your account.

Culture & service

Finally, don’t underestimate the importance of culture and teamwork when choosing your agency. If there is no chemistry, it can make for an unsuccessful partnership.

You’ll know when you find an agency passionate about programmatic advertising. Finding an agency that cares and that is passionate isn’t hard. You just need to reach out.

Takeaway List of Considerations

There are no right or wrong answers to the questions and considerations in this guide. Careful consideration will help you define what you need in a programmatic partner.

These takeaway questions are designed to get your thinking juices going so you can get to the roots of what you need and what you want.

Takeaway List of Considerations
The Ultimate Guide To Choosing The Best Programmatic Agency Word Cloud

Questions to ask your programmatic agency

  • Have they worked with media budgets similar to yours?
  • How long have they been established? What is the background of the management team?
  • Do their clients rave about them? Check out their reviews.
  • Is there a good level of transparency on what they do and how they do it?
  • Do they value face-to-face interaction with you as a brand?
  • Do they have a deep understanding of your business and target audience?
  • Where do they source their talent from?
  • Can they provide references?
  • How many other brands do they work with?
  • Are the brands in the same industry vertical as the industry vertical you operate within?
  • What is the technology stack they use?
  • How much automation do they have in place? Reporting automation, for example, to give you real-time results might be important for your company stakeholders.
  • Do you need a dedicated account manager? Are you willing to pay for one? How many do you need and what is the cost vs account managers who might work across several clients?
  • What is their team structure like? This can be very important when you consider things like culture and collaboration.
  • Are they familiar with productivity tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Basecamp?
  • Are they up to date on the latest industry trends, including any emerging new technologies?
  • What is their attrition rate like?
  • Do they only work with brands, or do they also work with other agencies?
  • What does their reporting look like, and do they provide proactive insights?
  • Do they provide an open door policy to discuss anything with you?
  • What does their contract look like?
  • Do they have a leadership team that is well respected in the industry?
  • What is their payment structure?
  • How do they ensure RFPs are sent to the right vendors? How much control do you have over which agency partners win the business?
  • Do they have trading agreements?
  • Do they have sector experience?
  • Do they have experience in your geographical region/country?
  • Are they a full-service agency where programmatic is outsourced? What effect is that likely to have on ad space?
  • What targeting capabilities/methods do they use?
  • Do they offer paid search services or partner with another agency that does?
  • How do they plan on using first-party data?
  • How do they plan on using second and third party data?
  • Do they offer innovative formats such as digital home and programmatic audio advertising?
  • Do they use just one platform or multiple programmatic platforms to execute?
  • Will they give you a media plan before launching with clear budget distribution?
  • Are they willing to move media spend around based on performance aka, dynamic ad budgeting?
  • Do they offer both desktop and mobile inventory?
  • Can they run connected TV CTV campaigns?
  • How do they charge for their service?
  • Do they put blacklists on their campaigns?
  • Do they offer fraud tracking?
  • Do they offer brand safety features?
  • Do they A/B test?
  • How do they structure the campaigns?
  • What bidding optimisation will they use?
  • Do they have a robust pixel implementation strategy?
  • Have they worked with Google UTMs?
  • Are they experienced in tag management platforms such as GTM – Google Tag Manager
  • Will they help me choose the best ad format?
  • Will they help me with my messaging framework?
  • Will they help me with my landing pages?
  • Will they work with other agencies?
  • Will they work and suggest the best approach in how programmatic fits in with other organic and paid media channels?

FAQs

Should I in-house or outsource Programmatic Advertising?

Advantages of in-housing marketing:

  • Better control: You’ll have more direct and better control over your own marketing and advertising efforts if you do them in-house. This enables you to be more innovative. Your employees can work on their own creative ideas and push the envelope of new technologies, whether it’s increasing audience data insights or developing new ad formats.

Disadvantages of in-housing marketing:

  • In-house talent can be costly: In addition to the financial investment required for hiring and training your employees, you’ll also need to account for the additional overhead costs like office space (and furnishings), IT infrastructure (including bandwidth), etc. High staff turnover can also dampen your efforts.
  • Lack of innovation: A lack of investment across platforms compared to the pooling of budgets from multiple advertisers. Marketing services companies often have access to a broader pool of resources to draw when building out creative strategies and technologies. This also gives them the benefit of leveraging different perspectives for inspiration on new ideas, tools and techniques.
  • Lack of cross-channel marketing expertise: Without an in-house marketing team, you lose the ability to have an in-depth discussion about multi-layered digital programs that are well integrated with other channels, like TV and social media. It is also less likely that these different programs will be integrated with each other.
  • No scale: If your company doesn’t do paid media marketing on a large enough scale, you might find it difficult to justify the need for an in-house team.
  • Limit costs: You can maintain a lean budget, and that’s especially appealing to smaller businesses. Your marketing and advertising efforts will also be more scalable, so you’ll only pay for what you need – when you need it.
  • Lack of control: You don’t have the same level of direct involvement and control over your marketing and advertising efforts when you outsource to a third-party provider.

What business/pricing model should I choose?

Non-Disclosed Margin

In this model, the agency will use its knowledge of the programmatic landscape to run a campaign. The agency will make money by performing what’s known as media arbitrage. The agency will make money by buying media at one price and selling at another. For illustrative purposes let’s say they buy at $0.85 CPM and sell it for $1.00; their gross profit would be $0.15.

Percentage of Spend

A transparent approach where the agency takes a percentage of your media budget to plan, manage, and optimise your programmatic media budget. Your budget is $10,000.00, 15% of which goes to the agency, 85% towards the DSP.

Combination Pricing

Some agencies use a combination approach, a hybrid approach mixing multiple pricing mechanisms.

Results-Based Pricing

Usually, a combination of % of media spend + a kicker based on programmatic outcomes. For example, 15% of media spend + £10 for every sale tracked.

Day Rate or Hourly Rate

Pay for the hours/days required to plan, manage and optimise campaigns.

Conclusion

Programmatic buying is one of the most effective ways to reach desired audiences. However, marketers need to consider their goals and choose an agency that can help them measurably achieve these objectives.

There are many benefits to working with an agency, but make sure they have the necessary experience and expertise to realise your company’s goals.

There are a ton of marketing agencies out there but few programmatic experts. If you need international media buying executed programmatically, Advant Technology could very well be the right fit.

FAQs

Keep in mind the following definitions to help you understand how programmatic technology and processes around it work:

What are demand-side platforms DSPs?

Technology service providers that allow advertisers to purchase digital advertising space via real-time auctions. They then create automated targeting strategies using data collected based on users’ online behaviour and interests based on these user profiles. This allows marketers to focus their ad spend on audiences that are most likely to be interested in their product or service. With programmatic buying, ads are placed throughout many different websites or apps rather than simply being targeted toward a single website through traditional means of advertising.

What is programmatic paid media?

Advertising where marketers pay a demand-side platform for digital ad spots to increase brand awareness and generate sales.

Programmatic paid media might include display ads, video ads, mobile ads or native ads, among other forms of promotion, including social and search-based advertising.

What are advertising algorithms?

Computer systems designed to automatically match advertisements with the interests of website visitors.

These systems are driven by both statistical analysis and machine learning. This allows advertisers to focus their ad budget on locations that will be most successful in creating customer engagement. Marketers can use these analytics to determine which platforms, topics or formats perform best for specific goals they have set out to achieve.

What is a paid media marketing agency?

Companies help businesses manage their digital advertising campaigns across various adtech programmatic platforms. They may also assist in creating messaging strategies that fit the campaign goals of an organisation through paid advertising, paid social or paid search.

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How to Find and Target Your Audience Online with a DSP

How to Find and Target Your Audience Online with a DSP

DSP

Are you looking for a new way to target your audience? Or perhaps you’ve recently gotten your hands on a new DSP (Demand Side Platform)? Maybe you’re a programmatic trader with many years of buying programmatic ads?

We know it can be challenging to find the right audience for your campaign. That’s why we created this completely free, super detailed guide, so you can learn everything about programmatic campaign audience targeting using a DSP.

Programmatic ad buying is complex. There are many factors to consider, which is why most advertisers use a programmatic media agency.

Whether or not you use an agency, this is still a valuable guide to understand how you can understand the back end of how audience targeting works in a DSP.

Start-up or market leader, this article applies principles that work across the board.

Our team of experts has put together all of the information that you need in one place, making it easy for you to understand what programmatic targeting is and how it works.

We share media agency planning and buying trade secrets with you to level up your online advertising campaigns. So now, there’s no reason not to start reaching out to more prospective customers using programmatic ads.

Demand Side Platforms - DSP - Programmatic Advertising 101 - Advant Technology -
Demand Side Platforms – DSP – Programmatic Advertising 101 – Advant Technology –

Note: this guide focuses on the options available in Google DV360, but the principles learnt here now apply to most major demand-side platforms:

Demand Side Platforms / Ad Tech DSPs

  • The Trade Desk
  • Mediamath
  • Tabmo by Hawk
  • Adform
  • Xander
  • Emmerse
  • Stackadapt
  • DataXu
  • Adform
  • Adelphic
  • Centro
  • Pocketmath
  • Oath
  • Adelphic by Viant
  • Amazon DSP
  • Adobe Advertising Cloud

Note: This guide to programmatic targeting applies to the main advertising formats that include display, native, instream (pre-roll & mid-roll) video, outstream video, audio advertising and connected TV, although there may be some targeting restrictions for audio and connected TV.

Audience Targeting in Programmatic Increases Efficiency

The world of programmatic advertising is extensive and is predicted to be worth more than $156 billion in 2024.
There are trillions of available ad impressions every month through most major DSPs. Hence, as an advertiser, you need to make sure you’re using the right targeting strategy to narrow in on your target.

With so many ad impressions available, you could easily spend millions of dollars a day and still not hit the most likely audience to purchase your product. The programmatic ad industry is simply too big.

If you don’t target your audience effectively, your ad campaign is unlikely to resonate with your audience.

Now, suppose you’re going to invest in display advertising, native, video, programmatic audio or CTV (connected TV) campaigns.

Well, in that case, you need to understand how to reach your exact audience efficiently to maximize your ad spend, increase brand awareness effectively and drive more sales/conversions.

As you’ll see throughout this guide to targeting options in DSPs, the better your data is, the more targeted the bidding set-up can be, and as a result, the more accurate you can be with your targeting leading to a better ROI.

Audience targeting is not an art form. It’s a data-driven way to increase the chances that your ad will convert by showing it to the right people.

You can do this by looking at their data and seeing which ad would work best for them.

Let’s look at how you can use audience targeting in your own campaign.

Questions to Ask to Define Your Target Audience - Programmatic Advertising 101 - Advant Technology
Questions to Ask to Define Your Target Audience – Programmatic Advertising 101 – Advant Technology

Define your Target Audience

Think of a targeting strategy as a set of levers that you can push and pull to effectively reach the right audience. This audience targeting guide shows you the most important levers to push and pull within a DSP to deliver a well-targeted ad.

It goes without saying that before moving those levers, you need a clear understanding of your audience and their online behaviour.

Understanding your audience needs to go beyond the general demographics of your audience. You should ideally have a deep understanding of your audience’s behaviour. The following questions will help you to build that deep understanding.

  • What is your audience interested in?
  • What content does my audience read?
  • What websites does my audience visit?
  • What apps might have they installed?
  • What products does my audience buy?
  • What brands does my audience follow?
  • What hobbies does my audience enjoy?

Remember, you can have more than one target audience, especially if you have a company that offers multiple products.

Your primary audience will typically demand most of your budget and attention and yield the highest ROI as they are the most likely to convert.

Your secondary target audience is people with similar interests to your primary audience but slightly different characteristics. Your secondary target audiences are where you will be able to expand and test to scale your campaigns beyond the primary target audience. They may not convert as well or yield the same ROI.

Controlled experiments targeting specific secondary audiences should be conducted to see how they convert.

Efficient and effective digital media planning and buying require that you have a well-defined target audience. It will help you use all the targeting levers efficiently, ultimately resulting in better campaign results and a more substantial ROI.

Targeting Tactics

Before looking at the actual targeting options available in Google DV360 (levers), let’s take a moment to explore the basic types of audiences.

When looking at your audience strategy, we think it’s important to understand the context of the audience data you are applying and ask how accurate and reliable it is and how recent it is.
To answer this, you need to look at how the audience data was gathered. This isn’t always easy. Naturally, if the data is inaccurate, there will be little point in applying it in the DSP as part of your advertising campaign.

Let’s look at the three main types of audience data options:

First-Party Data

Data you own and manage from potential customers or your audience. It can come from your website or app, CRM and purchases. As this is your own data, it makes it the most valuable. The challenge with first-party data is reach, often restricted in both scale and breadth.

First Party Data

Second-Party Data

Essentially this is someone else’s first-party data. Second-party data is basically sharing of first-party data.

For example, one of our clients works with another brand to do collaborative b2b campaigns. The other brand could share its data from their Data Management Platform (DMP) to the brands’ DSP.

Another example could be an airline sharing data with a Direct Marketing Organisation/Tourism Board. The DMO then targets that data segment with display ads for people travelling to competitive destinations.

Third-Party Data

Is generally aggregated data. It’s often inferred (implicit) data based on past behaviours.

Through the collection of interests, online browser behaviour, hobbies or preferences, third-party has a vast reach. The flip side is that third party data can often lack quality, reliability and accuracy. Third-party audiences are accessible through data management platforms such as Loatme, Krux and Liveramp.

Your audience strategy needs to take account of the complex factors at play, and you should develop an audience strategy using a mixture of relevant.

One of the reasons we like the Google DV360 platforms is the breadth of high-quality Google audiences. We regularly use Google audiences, and we find they perform very well. They are very accurate.

At Advant Technology, we help advertisers and clients develop a data strategy for targeting. We help them collect first-party data and identify third party data providers from the plethora of aggregators we have existing relationships with.

Relevant Messaging

It’d be remiss of us, an international programmatic agency, to create an article about audience targeting and not talk about relevant messaging, so make sure that your ad uses a message that will resonate! That isn’t covered in this guide but make sure you understand how the two need to work together.

OK, let’s begin with the actual detail.

DSP Targeting Options Explained

Language Targeting

DSP_Language_Targeting
DSP Language Targeting

Language targeting works based on targeting the individual bid requests defined by the publisher.

Language targeting can be useful where you might want to reach ex-pat communities, e.g. Greek people living in the UK.

It can also be helpful when you only have creative in one language but target multiple countries.

For example, you are a b2b company running a campaign in Germany. Your creatives are in English only; therefore, you only want to reach customers in Germany who speak English who will understand your creatives. Setting English language targeting to German IP addresses could be an effective strategy.

Geographic Targeting (Geo-Targeting)

Also known as location-based targeting or geo-targeting
This is one of the most basic principles when it comes to targeting. The vast majority of campaigns at Advant Technology have some sort of geo applied at least at the country level, given that most advertisers have a specific target country when running programmatic ads. We can refine this further than the county by targeting:

Region Targeting

Allows you to target the user based on state, cities, postal codes, airports and universities.

Radius Targeting

Allows you to target the user based on longitude and latitude.

Both region and tadius allow you to bulk upload lat/long codes and allow for an inclusion and exclusion list.

Insider tip:
You might be wondering why you would need to use exclusion lists. Exclusion lists can be a time-saving setting.

Let’s say you want to target all states bar the state of New York, California and Texas. Rather than selecting the 47 remaining states, you would target the US and exclude New York, California and Texas.

Exclusions can also be helpful if you see impressions slipping through from the wrong geo.

Let’s say, for example, you set the campaign to target only Spain, but on a geo impression report, impressions are coming from Sweden. This could be because the Content Distribution Network where your banner is hosted is in Sweden.

Putting an exclusion on Sweden could make sense, but generally speaking, the impressions from the country not on the inclusion list are so few, and their cost is so negligible that it’s not really necessary.

This is generally considered a reporting anomaly and should be ignored.

Available Languages You Can Target

  • Arabic
  • Bengali
  • Bulgarian
  • Catalan
  • Chinese (simplified)
  • Chinese (traditional)
  • Croatian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • Dutch
  • English
  • Estonian
  • Filipino
  • Finnish
  • French
  • German
  • Greek
  • Gujarati
  • Hebrew
  • Hindi
  • Hungarian
  • Icelandic
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Kannada
  • Korean
  • Latvian
  • Lithuanian
  • Malay
  • Malayalam
  • Marathi
  • Norwegian
  • Persian
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Punjabi
  • Romanian
  • Russian
  • Serbian
  • Slovak
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish
  • Tamil
  • Telugu
  • Thai
  • Turkish
  • Ukrainian
  • Urdu
  • Vietnamese

Note that Google uses its own proprietary technology to decipher the language based on the user signals and content-based signals if the publisher didn’t declare the language of the content in the bid request.

Demographic Data Targeting

Along with geo-targeted ads, demographic targeting is considered one of the most important and most basic targeting settings.

  • Age

  • Male

  • Female

  • Or you can set it to unknown

  • Age

  • 18-65+

  • Or you can set it to unknown

  • Parental Status

  • Parent

  • Not a parent

  • Or you can set it to unknown

  • Household income

  • Top 10% – lower 50%

  • Or you can set it to unknown

Insider tip:
The unknown options help expand your audience, which is often good practice if there is no downside. So, if, for example, your audience is both / female and male, then you should tick the unknown box, this allows you to expand your reach with no downside; the same applies to all of the demographic options.

Insider tip:
Assume a scenario: Your target audience profile is 80% female; you may want to consider creating two line items, each with its own budget allocation. Consider the female market to be your core audience and allocate 80% of the budget and 20% to the male audience, or you could consider 100% of the budget if you have budget limitations.

There is no correct answer, but splitting your line item strategies makes sense if the splits are that extreme.

You can also use other levers to target specific content or publisher titles that lean toward females, such as gossip or a title like people.com, which skews heavily to females. There are many ways to skin a cat.

Keyword Targeting / Contextual Targeting or “KCT”

Allows you to input several keywords related to your product or service or potentially your audience. Your ads can then appear against that content in a contextually relevant environment.

Keyword Contextual Targeting KCT works in different ways depending on the DSP. The DSP may use its own technology or that of a third party. In the case of Google DV360, it uses Google Search Technology, unquestionably the most intelligent search technology in the world.

It works if the keyword is relevant to the content on a specific URL of a publisher (or video metadata). Some DSPs work when the keyword appears on the page instead of being relevant to the page.

Insider tip:
It takes a few days for Google and other contextual search ad technologies to reference content across the web and decipher what keywords are on the page or what the content is about. Therefore keyword contextual targeting does not work well with new content or a URL/ publisher page constantly updated.

Insider tip:
Don’t just think of contextual keyword targeting as having to be contextual.
When we ran a global paid media campaign for Diadora, they wanted to target what they defined as “sneaker addicts”, essentially a youth sub-culture.

They provided us with an audience persona that consisted of interests such as hobbies, musicians, brands they follow etc. Using this info, we created a set of keywords that were not related to the product in a traditional sense (sneakers, trainers, footwear), but rather a set of keywords based on their interests (Hypebeast, Avicci, house music etc.).

Category Targeting

The following is a list of broad categories you can target using the Google DV360 platform; under each parent category is a subsection or multiple sub-sections.

  • Arts & Entertainment
  • Autos & Vehicles
  • Beauty & Fitness
  • Books & Literature
  • Business & Industrial
  • Computers & Electronics
  • Finance
  • Food & Drink
  • Games
  • Health
  • Hobbies & Leisure
  • Home & Garden
  • Internet & Telecom
  • Jobs & Education
  • Law & Government
  • News
  • Online Communities
  • People & Society
  • Pets & Animals
  • Real Estate
  • Reference
  • Science
  • Shopping
  • Sports
  • Travel
  • World Localities

Category targeting is broader than contextual targeting. The above list is similar to the IAB category list, available on other ad tech platforms such as Outbrain.

In our experience, category targeting produces some iffy results with ads appearing on domains that have very little to do with the category; therefore, it is advisable to layer the category with other levers unless you have a vast audience.

Category_Targeting_DSP
Category Targeting DV360 DSP

Environment Targeting

Environment targeting refers to whether or not you want to target web browser inventory or inventory served in mobile apps.

Whichever inventory environment you select, make sure your tracking supports this.

If you just want to target mobile web users, not inventory in apps, you’ll need a combination of targeting levers. You’ll need to ensure you have selected both mobile devices and web environments.

Bear in mind that if you do target just mobile web, this could slow down your ability to scale spending as most inventory on a mobile device is actually app inventory from ad exchanges like Mopub.

Insider tip:
There is a myth that browser inventory is better quality than mobile app inventory. This is simply not true and has no foundation.

Environment Targeting Environment
Environment Targeting in DV360 DSP

Position-Based Targeting

Position-based targeting refers to where the ad is likely to be displayed on the devices’ screen.

This is important because logically, an ad in a more prominent position on the page, for example, above the fold and in-article (as opposed to right rail), is likely to have greater consumer attention.
Attention & time are essential! The longer the user looks or has the ad creative in view, the more likely they are to remember or take action, thus improving the ROI of your campaign.

Display & Native Position on Screen

Options include above the screen fold or below the screen fold.

Display & Native Inventory Position in Content

Options include:

  • In-article position, in-feed position, interstitial position, good old in-banner position or unknown position.
  • Display position options
  • Video position on screen
  • Options include above the screen fold or below the screen fold or unknown position.

Video Instream Position

Options include pre-roll position, mid-roll position and post-roll position.

Video Outstream Position

Options include:

  • In-article position
  • In-feed position
  • Interstitial position
  • In-banner position and unknown positions, in which the position is not declared or detected.

Positions explained

  • In-feed ads appear between paragraphs of content or potentially between images as you scroll down the page of a publisher.
  • In-banner ads often appear at the top, sides or potentially bottom of the page.
  • In-article ads should appear in between a paragraph, i.e. split the paragraph in two with the video creating the break

Bear in mind that if you do target just mobile web, this could slow down your ability to scale spending as most inventory on a mobile device is actually app inventory from ad exchanges like Mopub.

Insider tip:
There is a myth that browser inventory is better quality than mobile app inventory. This is simply not true and has no foundation.

Position Based Targeting DSP
Position Based Targeting Demand Side Platform

Viewability Targeting

Options for viewability targeting are pretty straightforward in the Google DV360 DSP. It uses proprietary viewability technology called Active View, the same framework as the MRC viewability standard.

Options include:

  • 90% or greater (most viewable)
  • 80% or greater
  • 70% or greater
  • 60% or greater
  • 50% or greater
  • 40% or greater
  • 30% or greater
  • 20% or greater
  • 10% or greater
  • All impressions

For brand campaigns, we always recommend applying the greatest viewability.

You’ll want to run regular reporting to closely monitor the actual viewability, as Active view is only a predicted.

If you are not getting the reach required due to other campaign settings, you could consider loosening the viewability restrictions day by day until you find the right balance.

If the campaign is a quick burst and you have high spend and reach requirements from day one, it would probably make more sense to start with a low 10% viewability or no viewability requirement. As you gather data, you can slowly increase impressions daily; otherwise, you will risk not hitting reach/spend goals.

Active View (Google viewability Technology)

If you are using a different DSP to Google DV360, you will have other viewability options that could include: a 3rd party integration, typically MOAT or IAS, Integral Ad Science. Note, DV360 does have MOAT and IAS integrated as well.

Audience Lists

We’ve already covered audience lists that come in different flavours, including first, second, and third party, so we won’t cover them again.

You should note that you should use a combination of inclusion and exclusion lists that allow you to narrow in on users as they move down the funnel or have made a purchase to optimize the spend properly.

An example of this might exclude users who have already purchased from you.

Custom Audience segmentation

One area we haven’t touched on yet is custom audiences. You have two options custom affinity and custom intent.

Custom Affinity

You can create custom affinity audiences using interests, URLs and Apps.
Custom affinity audiences work well for branding. For performance-driven campaigns, you should look at custom intent audiences.

Custom Intent

You can create a custom intent audience using keywords and URLs.

Audience List Targeting DSP
How To Select Audience List Targeting in DV360 DSP

Day & Time Part Targeting

If you believe certain times of the week are likely to work better for your campaign, you should apply day and time targeting.

Insider tip:
If you are a b2b marketer, consider only displaying messages during or close to working hours. Your audience may be more interested in interacting with your message during working hours.

Day & Time Targeting DSP
Leverage Day & Time Targeting in a DSP

Browser Targeting

Browser targeting allows you to target different browsers.
Example use cases of using browser targeting
If you promote software for Windows devices, you may create different targeting strategies for Microsoft Internet explorer vs Chrome.

Browser Targeting in a DSP
Browser Targeting in a DSP

Device Targeting

Device targeting allows you to target desktop computers (notebooks and laptops), smartphones, tablets, and connected TV devices.

You can select a specific device and the operating system using advanced settings. A quick search for iPhone brings up several versions of the iPhone you can target.

Device Mobile Desktop Taregting
Targeting Mobile, Tablet or Desktop Devices

Connection Speed Targeting

Connection speed targeting allows you to target users based on their internet connection speed. We tend not to use connection speed targeting. If you are a telco company selling ISP services, this could be a handy option, but it is rather niche.

Connection Speed DSP Targeting
Targeting by Connection Speed

Carrier & ISP

Carrier & ISP targeting allows you to target users based on their carrier or ISP.

Also, quite a niche targeting option that is rarely utilized unless you are a carrier and ISP looking to sell ISP. There are hundreds of options available due to the massive number available globally.

Carrier_ISP_Targeting

Conclusion

If you are a marketer, DSPs provide an opportunity for you to leverage new technologies and tools to create more effective campaigns.

By considering the different targeting options available within a programmatic (DSP) such as Google DV360, advertisers can optimize their digital marketing strategies by reaching the right audience at the right time with the right message.

Regardless of how you use the approaches described above, a targeted advertising campaign will almost always outperform an un-targeted one.

If you would like a tailored strategy by an expert programmatic media agency, then contact Advant Technology for more information on how we might be able to help you with your next programmatic buying campaign.

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Blog Guide Programmatic

Programmatic Advertising Introduction For Traditional Marketers

Programmatic Advertising Introduction For Traditional Marketers

Are you a traditional marketer who doesn’t really understand programmatic advertising?

Programmatic Advertising Introduction For Traditional Marketers
Programmatic Advertising Introduction For Traditional Marketers

Embrace Programmatic Advertising: A Guide for Marketers

Are you tired of endless acronyms like SSP, DSP and DMPs? Unfortunately, the programmatic advertising ecosystem is full of three-letter acronyms. Perhaps they are designed to scare away old school media folk.

Fear not; this guide will bring you up to speed on what programmatic ad buying is.

This article covers programmatic advertising strategies, how media buying works, and how to step-by-step apply the knowledge into your advertising strategy.

Programmatic display native ads b2b isn’t all that new anymore, but it is becoming one of the most valuable strategies for brands and advertisers.

It’s no secret that the digital advertising sector is expanding and developing rapidly. By 2021 programmatic advertising spend will reach 88% of all US digital display ad spend, which accounts for $81 billion according to Emarketer.
While this sector continues to grow, many people might feel behind how this type of advertising works. It pays to be educated on the basics of programmatic ads to avoid falling behind in your marketing.

To get on board with programmatic media buying, you must understand how it differs from traditional digital marketing methods and why it’s so effective.

Here are some insights that may help:

  • Programmatic ad campaigns use data to target customers.
  • Automating buying across hundreds of sites saves brands time and money by eliminating tedious tasks like manually buying on placements or submitting ads to multiple sites at once. In other words, automation helps brands get their ads in front of the right people at the right time.
  • Programmatic ad campaigns also use automation to serve dynamic/personalized content, track engagement rates and capture valuable audience insights.
  • Programmatic ad campaigns are conducted with preset rules to engage viewers, measure campaign performance and optimize budgets in an automated way. This strategy uses historical data to predict how users will engage with ads so marketers can set bidding strategies for desired outcomes.
  • This process also helps brands better reach their target audiences at the beginning of the path to purchase funnel. With programmatic ads, marketers can make changes to their campaigns in real-time. For example, if a brand wants to change an ad’s creative, they can do it instantaneously instead of manually submitting it for approval by humans on multiple sites. They can also automate bidding strategies based on machine learning, track engagement rates and optimize spending accordingly.
  • Bringing all of this to one platform can save marketers a lot of time and resources, which they can then use to focus on areas that will drive innovation for their business.
  • Programmatic advertising is unique because it lets brands advertise across sites without having to do any manual legwork directly with each website; that’s the traditional way, that’s the old way.
  • Advertising technology helps automate processes like targeting audiences, connecting with them, and measuring engagement rates so you can avoid wasting time and money on ads that won’t lead to a sale.

But before we get into the weeds, let’s start at the beginning: what exactly is programmatic advertising?

Programmatic Advertising Definition - Advant Technology
Programmatic Advertising Definition – Advant Technology

What Is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is a digital ad buying method that uses algorithms instead of humans. This strategy uses data, which means you can target users more precisely and measure results more effectively.

The idea behind programmatic advertising is that machines are better at identifying the right audience than people are. We humans may not always choose what’s best for us – but our devices know what we like to read, watch, play, or where we’re likely to visit next better than we do.

Real-time bidding for programmatic advertising - Advant Technology
Real-time bidding for programmatic advertising – Advant Technology

How does Real-Time Bidding (RTB) work?

RTB is a type of programmatic advertising that lets advertisers bid on ad placements according to factors like relevancy, geographical location, and audience demographics through real-time auctions. Auctions take place in less than 0.2 seconds.

Here’s how it works: an advertiser sets criteria for their campaign, including a budget, audience type, time frame, and other preferences. An algorithm then automatically searches for opportunities to display relevant ads to audiences matching these criteria.

These opportunities are auctioned off to the advertiser with the highest bid, who wins based on their preferred criteria. The advert is then published where your audience can view it. A record of this transaction is stored in a data warehouse for reporting/analytics purposes.

This process eliminates tedious tasks like manually buying ads across sites and creates more opportunities for advertisers.

Types of Programmatic Ad formats

Programmatic Display Ads – Banners, static and animate in many shapes and sizes:

This kind of programmatic advertising serves ads on desktop, mobile, and tablet sites based on behavioural targeting, contextual targeting, or geotargeting. Advertisers place bids for ads to be displayed on certain types of content within certain geographical boundaries.

Programmatic Video Ads – Pre-roll, mid-roll, post-roll, in-stream, out-stream
These ads appear in pre-or mid-rolls of videos, gaming content, and other types of digital media such as between articles, but mostly it’s video ads before video content. Learn more about Pre-roll Advertising Agency.

Programmatic Native Ads – Text only or text + image
Native ads are often seen as a better fit for brand messages because they look similar to the surrounding editorial content instead of appearing in banners or pop-ups that can be disruptive.

What is a Data Management Platform?

The data management platform (DMP) is a trusted online service that allows marketers to create profiles of users based on their behaviours and interactions with a specific brand or website. Data from a DMP can be used in combination with other parts of the marketing stack, such as your CRM system, ad servers, location-based systems and email service providers to deliver personalized and relevant messages across screens and devices.

Data management platforms (DMPs) are an integral part of the modern marketing arsenal, serving as hubs for data coming from all sources. Over time, marketers have come to rely more and more on their DMPs for new types of insights into their users, and the DMPs themselves have evolved to accommodate the growing expectations.

What is an Ad Exchange?

Ad exchanges are digital marketplaces. They connect publishers and advertisers, allowing them to buy and sell ad space in real-time. Advertisers use an ad exchange to manage the buying and selling of their online advertising through a vast network of web publishers.

Publishers can participate in multiple ad exchanges depending on which types of advertisers they want to attract, which ad formats they are using, and what types of traffic they’re looking for. Think of an ad exchange as the stock market with inventory instead of securities. The most well-known exchanges in the US are Google’s AdX, Chitika, OpenX, Yahoo’s Right Media Exchange (RMX), Sovrn and Appnexus.

What is a Demand Side Platform?

A demand-side platform (DSP) is a technology platform that enables advertisers to manage, optimize and serve digital media buying across all advertising formats.
Demand-side platforms are different to supply-side platforms which, sell inventory through an ad exchange to the DSP through real-time bidding (RTB).

What’s the difference between an ad network and a DSP?

DSPs typically have access to more demand sources; this allows them to be more effective in buying inventory at the best price for an advertiser.

Ad networks are typically only able to place the inventory they sell within their ad server across their network, where DSPs can place ads across many different types of ad servers and demand sources. This allows them to be more effective for advertisers because you’re buying inventory at the best price across all different types of sources through one platform instead of having to go through various advertising networks.

Ad networks typically sell lower-priced inventory, sometimes known as the remnant, where DSPs can buy premium publishers at the best price across all types of ad servers and demand sources. This allows them to be more effective for advertisers because you’re buying higher quality inventory at the best price through one platform rather than going through many networks.

How much does Programmatic Advertising Cost?

The cost is much as you are willing to invest.

In traditional advertising, it would have been hard to spend $0.01, but technically this is possible in programmatic, that’s because you don’t have to commit large spends to buy online ad space. The programmatic ecosystem lets you spend as little or as much as you want. Algorithms help you decide where your dollars are best spent to deliver an effective ad campaign.

There may also be some minimums with the programmatic technology provider.

Most DSPs minimum fees are around $10,000USD monthly or £7000 GBP. In display advertising at an average CPM of $1.50 would generate 6,666,666 impressions.

Human negotiation in the traditional media buying process was a big part of daily life, digital advertising does away with much of that human negotiation.

Programmatic Agency Fees

Typically media agencies will take an 8-15% media optimisation fee.
Media agencies may also charge set up costs and other costs around media planning and developing a programmatic advertising media strategy.

Programmatic media is a complex space, so an excellent programmatic media agency is worth its salt to maximize your ROI. They will help you to specify the right advertising technology infrastructure and ensure ads are served to the right target audience.

Programmatic Advertising for Traditional Marketers Summed Up

Programmatic advertising provides more precision than traditional media buying and gives marketers better insight into their target audiences.

What’s more, implementing a programmatic advertising strategy can help marketers stay ahead of the competition and reach their audience with targeted messages at optimum times, ultimately leading to higher conversions and ROIs.

Programmatic Advertising vs Traditional Advertising - Programmatic Advertising 101 - Advant Technology
Programmatic Advertising vs Traditional Advertising – Programmatic Advertising 101 – Advant Technology

Programmatic advertising

  • Faster workflow due to real-time bidding & programmatic tools
  • Hyper-targeted audience for a better return on investment
  • Automated buying methodology
  • 100% trackable
  • Reduces human effort
  • Transparent
  • Buy ad space through technology

Traditional advertising

  • Low fraud risk
  • Scalable audiences via TV & Outdoor
  • Limited targeting
  • Heavy labour cost due to inefficient workflow
  • A slow and long planning process
  • Buy ad space through humans and manual signature contracts
  • Publisher by publisher planning and purchasing

If you want to learn how programmatic advertising can benefit you, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our team.

We’ll be happy to answer any questions you have about the process and how it could fix many of the problems plaguing your marketing strategy today. Don’t wait! Reach out now so we can start solving these issues together.

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B2B Media Buying & Planning Programmatic

New Programmatic Agency? What You Need To Know

New Programmatic Agency? What You Need To Know

Hello digital marketer!

So you’ve decided to move a new programmatic agency. Congrats! We tell you what you need to know to make onboarding smoother for everyone.

If you are looking for a new agency to handle your programmatic advertising, this article is for you. We have created an in-depth guide on how to prepare yourself and your team with all the information they need to start working with a new agency.

This will help make the transition as smooth as possible.

By reading this article, you will understand what steps need to be taken to make sure that both parties are ready for programmatic advertising together.

An exciting time for your business; we hope that you are ready for the opportunities that lie ahead of you.

Processes

The first step in this process is client/agency onboarding, which means preparing yourself and your team with all the information they need to start working with a new agency.

Expert Opinion

This article has been created by the team at Advant Technology and being a programmatic agency themselves, they have first-hand experience onboarding many new clients every year.

Advant Technology works with many agencies; creative agencies, SEO agencies, PR agencies etc, not only brand/advertisers/clients directly.

This article’s information comes from expert opinion through many years of experience working with other agencies and brands/clients/advertisers.

Today, the team shares what they think you need to know when you begin working with the new agency of choice.

Advant_Technology_Programmatic

Factors affecting the scope of the onboarding

Naturally, every agency will have its own idea of onboarding clients, which will depend on the project’s scope. The things that are likely to affect the onboarding process are:

• Total budget – a bigger advertising budget will typically mean a more holistic onboarding process
• Timeframe – an always-on and long term contract/agreement will result in a more comprehensive onboarding
• Scope – the more extensive the scope is, the more critical it will be to have a comprehensive strategy
• The total number of ad formats required
• The goals and objectives of the programmatic campaign
• The number of ad creatives
• The size of the team required to support and facilitate the media plan
• Ad inventory – whether it will be open RTB exchange inventory, PMP or programmatic guarantee deals or a hybrid of all three deal types
• The number of DSPs (demand-side platform)
• Market research
Audience targeting research
• Data plan – depending on the size of your data plan, you may need to find a DMP (data management platform) that matches it
• Location targeting research
• Device segmentation and match rate research – audience matching can be done using cookies or device IDs
• Demographic & psychographic profiles CRM list segments available for matching against audiences
• Compatibility with existing audience data
• Existing ad technology stack
• Types of creatives and ad tags available for insertion
• Analytics – types, platforms, integrations with existing infrastructure etc.

As we’ve discussed, onboarding is just the first step, but to understand onboarding better, let’s look at that from a bigger picture view so you can see what comes after client onboarding.

Programmatic Agency Onboarding Process
Advant Technology's proprietary approach, developed for our one of clients, Destination Canada in which we managed end-to-end planning and buying.

Marketing Goals and Campaign Objectives

Goals and objectives need to be defined before onboarding a client to understand the scope of what will be required to achieve those goals and objectives. There is a difference between goals and objectives. Let’s establish what you should be looking at at this stage.

Remember: Objectives should be measurable and actionable.

Goals can be unmeasurable, while objectives should have a specific structure to ensure they’re attainable and trackable.

For example, a goal could be to increase brand awareness among our target audience.
On the other hand, an objective would be to sell 100 units in 30 days at $50 each.

This type of objective is much more specific and actionable because it’s measurable and timebound.
Advant Technology likes to use SMART objectives as a framework

SMART objectives are:

Specific: what the desired result should be and measure whether this has been achieved in your campaign. It also makes it easier for everyone involved in carrying out the digital advertising campaign to know what the team should do.

– Measurable: a number attached so you can measure your progress throughout the campaign. You will not be able to assess whether or not your digital advertising strategy was successful unless there are measurable results at the end of the campaign.

– Achievable: it is vital to set an achievable objective.

– Relevant: Choose a relevant goal so there can be a direct correlation between what you are trying to achieve through digital advertising and the objectives that need to be defined at the beginning of this process.

– Timebound: an objective must be timebound because it is the only way to know that you have achieved your goal. This also makes it easier for everyone involved in carrying out the campaign (the agency and client, for example) to follow up on progress throughout this process.

Audience Insights / Research and Education

A process whereby the agency asks detailed questions about your market, your product/service, and the audience you are trying to reach. Thorough audience research is vital before the agency defines a strategy in reaching the target audience.

Know everything you can about your target audience in detail because paid media will not be successful if it does not reach its intended audience.

Programmatic Channel Strategy – Media Planning & Allocation

In this step, the agency will use audience insights from the previous step to plan media allocation and buy digital ads; this is your programmatic strategy. Media planning is a process where we determine placement, timing and budgets for purchasing ad space on various channels.

An agency may start by looking at your budget; how much you have available to spend over what period? Then analyse all relevant first-party data that can help the agency identify which advertising avenues will be most effective in reaching your target market with the message that resonates best based upon their demographics, psychographics etc.

For example, if an insight shows your potential customer base tends to purchase more during certain times of the year, such as Black Friday or specific days like Mothers Day, placing the ads within that timeframe would make sense.

Digital_Media_Plan
Example Digital Media Plan

Partner Strategy

Still part of the media planning stage, but rather than look at the channels, one should be looking at which partners are needed to execute the channel strategy.

Conversations and negotiations with DMPs, DSPs, Ad Exchanges, supply-side platforms or even RTB (real-time bidding) platforms to ensure the strategy is executed correctly. Additionally, it’s time to think of which specific publishers we can engage.

Lastly, reviewing third-party data can be applied inside the programmatic technology of choice to reach a particular audience segment.

Content Production – Brand Positioning / Creative Brief (Digital Advertising Campaign)

A brand positioning makes your company stand out from the competitors in the marketplace; it’s how you want to be perceived by potential customers and align with your marketing message(s). This step is where the agency will start creating ideas for ads that communicate these messages through photography or video, depending upon which platform best fits what needs to communicate.

For example, a pre-roll video ad may need to be different from a YouTube ad to an out-stream ad to an interstitial ad. They are all delivered differently, and thus their length/message may need to differ too.

Content production also spans across the landing pages. The ad’s landing page needs to be compelling and give value to the user. Why should they bother spending time looking at this ad?

The creative brief lets you see all these ideas come together in one document, so everyone involved is clear how it looks, feels, and sounds. Important because if there are any issues with production or timing, you want them sorted early rather than later. It may take longer depending upon each case.

Channel Usage

It involves making sure that everything has been planned out correctly from start to finish, it also ensures that all ad placements (website, mobile apps etc.) have tracking implemented. Hence, we know which platforms/channels are performing most effectively for us – again, data drives our marketing decisions. All assets should be adapted for their various channels.

Digital Channel Planning
Digital Channel Planning

Campaign Optimisation

Running a campaign involves lots of campaign optimisation. Progress should be tracked daily, so adjustments to media spend can be made if needed or refine messaging and creative based upon how the target audience responds. Just a few things to consider when are optimising a campaign are:

– The creative used in the ad. Does it match your brand? Is it engaging and exciting enough for people to click on?

– Your target audience, who is seeing these ads, and how often will they see them so you can better understand the performance of each one? Do certain demographics perform well or poorly compared with others? Are there specific times where an ad performs better than others (daytime vs nighttime)?

And what about locations? Do certain regions produce lower engagement rates than other areas such as cities or states within different countries that might be more receptive to this type of advertising, like New York City over small towns in Iowa? All of these factors should be considered.

– The key here is not just optimising within a specific ad but across all of them in order to get maximum results from each one being served at different times throughout the day or week, depending on what works best for your business goals.

Whatever direction you decide to take after reviewing these factors, make sure every decision aligns directly back towards improving performance and growing conversions rather than simply placing ads and hoping for the best.

• Consider removing specific channels that haven’t worked well or even introducing new channels. It might also be worth thinking about swapping out programmatic display for programmatic native or reducing programmatic spend and up-weighting publisher direct activity. There are lots of things that can be done. Some of them can be left to artificial intelligence. Others are more a manual process.

Continued Reporting, Analytics & Insights

Once the campaign has been running for a while, it’s time to take a look at what worked and didn’t work. The client should receive an end result report with clear insights into what worked best with their target audience as well as a section on next steps / future recommendations, including potential ideas for new campaigns based upon learning from prior ones executed within their brand strategy framework.

Marketing plans change over time, and agencies will need to be flexible and nimble in order for them to maximise their effectiveness.

Programmatic Video Report

Programmatic Video Report Showing Viewability, Completion Rate & Domain Reporting

Let’s take a look at other questions you might be asking in anticipation of finding a new programmatic partner. FAQs:

What is the structure of a programmatic ad agency?

Advertising agencies have different structures depending on the type of service they offer, whether that’s programmatic, web design or creative.

Programmatic agencies can vary in size and structure depending on the company, but structures are typically relatively flat, with many client service-focused roles that support programmatic buying. Programmers will also be members of this team as they play an important role in getting creative elements ready for integration into programmatic campaigns. Job functions may include:

• Campaign Managers
• Account Managers
• Ad Operations
• Media Strategist
• Business Director
• Client Services
• Creative Development
• Developer
• Analyst
• Media Planner

What are the benefits of programmatic advertising technology?

Programmatic ad technology has several benefits.

First off, it’s an efficient way to increase your target market by reaching the right audience at scale.
Additionally, programmatic media buying is an excellent way to measure the effectiveness of your ad spend and track KPIs such as conversions and ROI.

The technology allows companies to monitor important metrics like clickthrough rates (CTR) which is how often someone clicks on an ad that appears in their feed or landing page views for ads that direct users to a specific landing page.

Programmatic also has a dark side, with fraud being prevalent in the industry, so make sure you use ad fraud protection.

How should my agency report back to me?

The agency should be able to provide data on the performance of your campaign. They should have access to multiple dashboards that tell you information about impressions, clicks, and conversions. Tracking these elements will help give insight into what works well for a given brand or product and give an idea of where costs are being incurred.

Programmatic agencies should also be able to closely monitor the performance of your ads across different channels, including online display advertising.

Later, this information is fed back into future ad campaigns so that you can see how effective they are in converting users into customers or clients, depending on what it is you’re trying to achieve.

How can an agency make your programmatic advertising more effective?

When an agency runs programmatic campaigns, their goal should be to improve sales, increase brand awareness, and reduce costs. For an agency to achieve this, they need to follow these steps:
-First and foremost, the agency needs to understand the clients’ marketing goals.

-Next, the agency should determine if programmatic is a good fit for your marketing objectives.
– The agency will need to leverage their expertise so ask what level of service they’ll be able to provide, including campaign setup & testing as well as creative development services.

What services does a programmatic ads agency offer?

In a nutshell, they should be able to plan, buy, set up and execute a programmatic media buy, optimise and report back, and in the process, hopefully, return a positive ROI.

How much does a programmatic campaign cost?

The cost of programmatic advertising varies from agency to agency. Some agencies have a minimum spend requirement, while others may require you to commit for an entire campaign or even year, depending on the size and scope of your ad buy.

How do agency traders work?

An agency trader optimises programmatic campaigns; their role typically involves analysing data to ensure that the agency buys media at optimal prices. The trader will also be responsible for reporting on campaign performance and adjusting campaigns accordingly to meet specific agency KPIs, meaning they’ll have regular contact with agency management teams; therefore, traders should communicate effectively, both orally and in written form.

What are programmatic exchanges?

A programmatic exchange is a platform where publishers list their inventory to be purchased by advertisers using automated software platforms or algorithms called ‘smart bids’. So, this allows them to trade advertising space across multiple ad networks without being dependent on just one provider. Advertisers bid against each other for an impression which goes into an auction-style format where the bidder wins.

How do programmatic ad platforms work?

Programmatic advertising technology works by using a system of automated bids to buy ads at the best price. The whole process happens in milliseconds and delivers relevant messages to consumers across many different channels, including social media, mobile apps, audio, TV screens and billboards that are all driven through your chosen agency’s digital strategy.

What does it mean if an agency has a trading desk?

It means an agency has a specific team of programmatic specialists whose job is to buy advertising for its clients.

What does a programmatic analyst do?

They are responsible for running reports to track campaign performance and gather data used in future campaigns.
Should I own the programmatic technology stack?

Advant_Technology_Ad_Stack
Example of An Ad Tech Stack

It’s not always necessary to own programmatic technology, but it does come with benefits. This could be in the form of reduced costs, but your budget will need to be big enough. Generally, most DSPs require a minimum of $100k per month.

Should I leave my existing programmatic agency if I have issues?

Moving agencies is time-intensive, and as we all know, time is money. Try to find a solution first before making the switch.

It’s important to make sure you’re not leaving programmatic advertising before giving it a fair shot. Analyse what isn’t working and speak to other partners. The problem might not be the agency; it could be that programmatic isn’t right for you due to many factors, both macro and micro.

What programmatic agency should I choose?

There’s no shortage of programmatic agencies in today’s landscape. Choose one that will best suit your needs and programmatic approach. Make sure there is a good cultural fit, and they understand your business.

How long should my contract last?

This will depend on the scope of your campaign. You can opt for a long term commitment or just run one-off projects. Long term contracts (one year or more) is a commitment from both sides, from the client side a commitment in spend and from the agency side a commitment they will meet the services expected.

In the first instance, it may be better to run a few campaigns before entering into a long-term agreement.

Wrapping it all up.

Programmatic_agency_word_cloud
Programmatic Agency Process

 

When you are onboarding a new programmatic agency, be sure to have an open line of communication.

Be clear about your goals and objectives so that the team can set out on the right path from day one. That way, any potential pitfalls or missed opportunities will become apparent early in the process, and both parties will feel confident moving forward together into uncharted territory.

If there is anything our team has learned through our years leading digital marketing teams; its that effective partnerships take time and effort, but they’re worth every minute!
We hope this blog post has been helpful!

If you’re looking for a programmatic agency, we’d love to hear from you.

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Blog Programmatic

Better B2B Marketing Using Intent Data in Programmatic Advertising

Better B2B Marketing Using Intent Data in Programmatic Advertising

Intent-Based Marketing - Advertising 101 - Advant Technology
Intent-Based Marketing – Advertising 101 – Advant Technology

Intent targeting represents a profound shift in online advertising, allowing you to target potential accounts/users/customers who are researching specific topics across the web rather than just presenting ads indiscriminately which leads to wasted marketing budget when engaging relevant accounts.

Intent-based advertising is the next step in B2B ABM advertising. Intent data combined with the right messaging is a powerful combo that both marketing and sales teams benefit hugely from.

Marketing teams can successfully use this tactic to generate leads and improve brand awareness from key accounts around particular topics related to your business. The beauty is that they are already researching these topics and showing ‘buying signals’.

As a programmatic agency that helps B2B clients, we know that intent targeting technology helps marketers identify their relevant audiences across multiple marketing channels and deliver a more targeted message. It is a proven method of delivering greater response rates, higher close rates, and a long-term impact on sales revenue growth.

Intent-based programmatic offers an alternative to Google Ads (intent-based searches) or at the very least support your Google Ads campaigns.

So if you’re running any kind of demand generation campaign you’ll want to read this article to learn how to use intent marketing data as part of your account-based marketing strategies and programmatic campaigns.

What is intent-based marketing in digital advertising?

Intent data is the digital information gleaned from a user’s search for information or actions and online behaviour across the web. It provides an insight into what the users’ intents of their searches and activities online are. This valuable data is what is applied when setting up your targeting.

Intent-based marketing - Digital Advertising - Advant Technology
Intent-based marketing – Digital Advertising – Advant Technology

Intent data is the new art of listening.

The average online buyer has already completed most of their buyer journey before finally speaking to a solutions provider. Therefore targeting customers based on their online behaviour/digital footprint such as content consumption will give you an edge when reaching customers.

If you can intercept buyers as they search for product information they can end up in your sales funnels rather than that of your competitors.

Understanding B2B purchase intent to improve sales prospecting

Salespeople are not a free commodity.

The last thing you want is for them to spend their time on low-quality leads. When commercial teams are aligned together, they perform at their best.

Before buying, B2B buyers are increasingly using the web to research, what you as a marketer must do is capture that intent and interest and use it in your campaigns, this leads to highly targeted leads for your sales team and it also improves conversion rate.

What is account-based advertising/marketing?

Account-based marketing (ABM) defines a strategy to exclusively engage high-value leads interested in a specific product or solution. By using personalised, strategic outreach, you can see the clear fit for intent data.

This type of marketing aims at deepening customer relationships across the decision-makers cohort and is typically applied to segments of accounts instead of one individual contact within the account.

Why are intent-based campaigns more effective?

The power of intent-based targeting lies in the ability to connect directly with your audience who are actively looking for your products and services.

Intent targeting engines use machine learning to analyse trillions of data points from tens of thousands of publishers.

The role of intent data in your ABM strategy

Intent data can help marketers to understand B2B buyer behaviour and align their engagement strategy accordingly. It provides actionable insights regarding how prospective accounts are researching and making buying decisions.

This helps marketers to have a more in-depth conversation with the right decision-maker, at the right time which improves sales effectiveness.

By understanding the research and buying process of a prospective account, marketers can map out an engagement strategy that is relevant and personalised for each individual account.

The primary use cases where intent data can be applied to Account-Based Marketing (ABM) include:

– Segmentation: using intent data in account prioritisation & filtering  to determine the weightage of an account in a scorecard

– Sales strategy: helps marketers to focus on the best opportunities within an account

– Lead scoring: using intent data to increase lead score of accounts that have been identified as more valuable by mapping it against their content consumption and intent

What can go wrong with intent data in ABM?

One important factor is to ensure that the data is of high quality, accurate and actionable. Marketers can end up spending a lot of time targeting accounts that would have been low-value customers anyway.

Another challenge is to determine if intent signals from the account are really relevant for the business or if it is just noise.

Some of the intent data might not be relevant for your company or product at all. For the ones that are relevant, it is important to determine which signals provide the best indicators on account behaviour and ultimately buying decisions.

When it comes to account-based marketing, data is crucial. Consider the quality of that data and how much it can tell you about your target consumers.

Where can I activate intent-based data on my marketing campaigns?

The intent data itself is activated in a marketing technology known as a DSP (demand side platform) which your programmatic agency can provide access to.

From here, in order to engage relevant accounts, we must reach them wherever they are spending time, that could be across consumer sites or even social platforms.

B2B Intent Data Myths

Let’s demystify intent data!

Myth: You cannot target using intent data when people are working from home

Just because people are working from home does not mean you cannot use digital display advertising to engage relevant accounts and prospective customers, your ABM program can still leverage intent data.

Bombora Intent data for example is built using a number of data sources

1. IP to business domain match using Bombora technology.

2. Using the data co-op (a tag across thousands of sites) Bombora is able to take registration data and match it to users.

3. Offline databases and registration data sources provide further business domain matches.

The end result is there has been very little data drop-off post-pandemic, so rest assured we can still reach your target accounts.

Myth: I need a big team to use intent data

False, Bombora has done the hard work for us. All we need are the prospective audiences/topics to build the intent data and we can be up and running with a campaign in a few days.

Myth: Intent data costs a lot of money

False. There are no setup fees, it’s a pay-as-you-go model whereby a CPM is charged on top of an advertising campaign. So if you only want to spend a few hundred dollars that’s technically feasible, though not necessarily advisable.

Myth: Intent data breaks consumer privacy rules

False. Intent data from Bombora is collected through a co-op, this data is aggregated from digital footprints collected from users browsing content-rich website publishers researching online. That media consumption is then tracked only when a consumer opts in to have their data collected and analysed.

The B2B buyer journey & intent data

The B2B Buying journey has always been a subject fascinating for marketing professionals. Especially in this modern world where everything is shifting to online and B2B buyers are getting more mobile than ever before, the way they buy has changed significantly. Take a read of the new B2B buyer journey here.

With Bomboras surging target audience data you can choose to what extent they are showing intent, using a scoring system, though a high score does not automatically mean the buyer is at the bottom of the sales funnel.

Never before has it been more important to influence the buyer with quality content from the top through to the bottom of the funnel as sales teams no longer influence the buyer as much as they used to.

Conclusion

If all of this sounds intimidating and you want help enacting these principles in advertising campaigns, let us know. Our teams of experts are ready and waiting to partner with you to create a stellar marketing plan that drives sales by reaching customers based on intent.

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Blog Programmatic

Trends in programmatic 2021

TRENDS IN PROGRAMMATIC 2021

Last year, we took it upon us to predict some of the most exciting trends we believed would dominate the programmatic advertising space in 2020.

Little did we know that a few months into the new year, the world would be turned upside down, and by the time our Face-to-face meetings turned into Facetime meetings, most industry predictions were thrown out of the window.

Now, we’re turning our focus to the new year and look at some of the key trends we believe will define the programmatic advertising space in 2021.

A TO THE I

Artificial intelligence was one of the key topics we included in last year’s forecast, and although 2020 certainly turned out to be a big year for AI and machine learning in programmatic, we can only see this grow further this year.

With customer journeys becoming more complex and target audiences increasingly specific, it’s becoming more and more difficult to display your ad in front of the right people at the right time. AI’s ability to identify and accurately predict buyer patterns at scale and in real-time is something that human power simply can’t live up to.

In the past, AI has been something of a buzzword, but after seeing the success early adopters have achieved after implementing AI into their programmatic strategy, more and more advertisers swear by the power it holds.

DIGITAL OUT OF HOME (DOOH)

Programmatic Digital Out Of Home or DOOH refers to the automated media trading on digital out of home platforms such as billboards or signage. It’s the evolutionary offspring of one of the oldest and most traditional advertising channels; Out Of Home (OOH) advertising.

Marketeers have long struggled to bridge the customer journey gap between online/offline, and at home/outside of home. Combined with smartphone location data, Digital Out Of Home has the power to drive conversions even in the offline world.

Both DOOH and OOH digital advertising were hit hard by global lockdowns brought on by the pandemic, but the Advertising Association + Warc Expenditure report predicts that it will make a comeback in 2021 with an expected growth of 38.7%.

Take a look at our programmatic DOOH.

PROGRAMMATIC PODCAST ADVERTISING

With more than 150m monthly listeners in the US alone, podcasts are becoming more and more popular.

eMarketer estimates that spend on podcast ads will double by 2022 and reach $106.5 million, and it’s not just in the US that podcasts are gaining momentum. According to WARC, 38% advertisers globally plan to boost their podcast ad spend in 2021.

We can reach users across apps such as Acast, Spotify, Radio.com, Tunein, Deezer across both iOS, Android and across a range of devices including smartphones app & web as well as smart speakers and even in car.

Here at Advant Technology, we’re big fans of programmatic podcast advertising and have vast experience of running both local, national and international campaigns. Read more about our digital audio advertising solutions here.

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Blog Guide Programmatic

A guide to contextual targeting

A GUIDE TO CONTEXTUAL TARGETING

An ad for a stroller displayed on a site for expecting parents or a shampoo ad shown before a hair makeover video. Makes a lot of sense, right?  The method that allows for ads to be displayed alongside highly relevant content is called contextual targeting and can be done through specific keywords or categories relating to the central theme of a website or page.
Contextual Targeting - Advant Technology - Programmatic Advertising 101
Contextual Targeting – Advant Technology – Programmatic Advertising 101

HOW DOES CONTEXTUAL TARGETING WORK?

Before launching a campaign, we choose a set of specific keywords, topics and themes relating to your ads on the Display Network. Google then analyses the content of publishers’ websites and matches it against your chosen keywords, topics, language and location.  An example would be if you are a restaurant chain looking to run an awareness campaign for your newly-opened branch. If a person is nearby and reading a food blog, your ad might get displayed. Because the ad isn’t disruptive (the user is already interested in this type of content), the user is more likely to respond positively to your ad. 
Contextual Targeting - Programmatic Advertising 101 - Advant Technology
Contextual Targeting – Programmatic Advertising 101 – Advant Technology

HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR KEYWORDS

The Google Keyword Planner is a great starting point to start building your keyword list. There are best practices for how to maximise the success from your keyword list. Typically, Google recommends that each ad group should contain anywhere between five to 50 keywords, and they should be shorter and more to the point than the keywords you’d typically use for organic search. 

PLANNING YOUR CAMPAIGN

For a successful contextual ad campaign, it is also important to consider the buying journey of your target group. Do you want to target users in the consideration phase? What type of content will users who are ready to make a purchase consume? By getting a good understanding of this journey, you’ll be able to draft up a more effective list of keywords. 

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

We recently worked with  Bompas & Parr who, together with the Design Museum, organised the competition Fountain of Hygiene to raise funds for the British Red Cross in light of Covid-19. Read more about the campaign.  The aim of the campaign was to maximise the number of competition entries. To do so, we used contextual targeting to get the ad displayed alongside relevant content and in front of designers and creatives who would be likely to enter the competition.  Below you’ll find two examples of ad placements for this campaign.

DESIGN WEEK

contextual targeting example The Design Week placement shows an example of category contextual targeting where a page matches a specific pre-assigned category for which the ad matches. The Design Week has a large readership of designers and creatives and our ad would likely fit well alongside any page on the site.

EVENING STANDARD

CONTEXTUAL TARGETING AD EXAMPLE The Evening Standard  shows a result of keyword contextual targeting where the ad is displayed alongside content that matches a specific keyword. Although the site isn’t  necessarily specifically targeted towards our main target group, we were still able to display out content alongside highly relevant content.

INTERESTED IN HEARING MORE?

Our team are experts at planning contextual ad campaigns, so if you’re keen to try out this method for your next ad campaign, please get in touch and we’d be more than happy to help you plan it. 
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Case Studies Programmatic Video Advertising

Shelter: Programmatic Video Advertising

SHELTER:
PROGRAMMATIC VIDEO ADVERTISING

INDUSTRY:
Charity

MARKET:
England

SERVICES:
Programmatic video advertising

It was an honour for Advant Technology to assist the charity Shelter as part of their 2019 winter campaign. By distributing video ads across a specific list of premium news websites, we achieved viewability rates of 70%.

Challenge
As the country’s leading housing and homelessness charity, Shelter is fighting to tackle homelessness throughout the year. During the cold winter months, the need for emergency housing becomes even more urgent, and with that, the need for charitable donations.

Solution

With the aim to maximise awareness and donations for the Shelter brand over the winter period, Advant Technology used a mixture of premium video placements across tier 1 and tier 2 sites focusing on brand video metrics and donations. Shelter also provided us a blacklist of sites, which we ensured we never appeared on.

The targeting methodology was focused around delivering these ads within a contextual environment across content relating to charity, donations, homelessness and topics relevant to women (as women are more likely to make charitable donations).

We utilized Integral Ad Sciences pre-bid fraud filtering to ensure impressions were brought against high-quality traffic on large player inventory.

Pixels were placed across the Shelter site allowing us to create lookalike audiences whilst still maintaining a strict whitelist.

Due to efficient media buying, we were able to buy impressions at a lower than expected rate, allowing us to give Shelter 15% back in added value, essentially 15% more impressions at no extra cost.

Campaign Overview

  • Pre-Roll & Native video campaign
  • Targeting & Optimisation
  • Budget split into Premium Tier 1 & Tier 2 publishers
  • Positive and Negative Contextual keyword targeting across all media
  • Upweighted campaign towards later 1/3rd

Results

  • Viewability threshold of 70%
  • Completion rate of 54%

Shelter programmatic advertising

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Alpari: Programmatic Display Advertising

ALPARI: PROGRAMMATIC
DISPLAY ADVERTISING

INDUSTRY:
Finance
MARKET:
Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, global retargeting
SERVICES:
Programmatic display advertising

Alpari’s Programmatic Display Advertising Success

Alpari, one of the world’s largest Forex brokers, is a well-established and recognised brand in Russia. In 2019, to expand its international reach further, Alpari turned to London-based programmatic agency, Advant Technology Ltd to help them increase both their brand awareness and sales through programmatic display advertising.

CHALLENGE

Forex brokers are always on the lookout for more customers but they have strict cost per acquisition (CPA) targets.

They saw a big opportunity in emerging markets and turned to our international expertise programmatic media buying to help generate new customer sign-ups and regular spenders. New countries, however, means facing many unknowns such as new Forex advertising restrictions, new target audiences, as well as new languages and personas.

SOLUTION

Our aim was to drive users to custom landing pages on the Alpari website where they would be encouraged to create an account and deposit funds.

There was a concern about the landing pages loading time in different regions. This is a big deal for any advertising campaign with the mobile standard being 1 sec.

After learning that the client uses Unbounce page builder with drag and drop content creation, we suggested requesting optimisation from the Unbounce team, because the landing pages are not optimised in code by default, so that explained the long loading time.

We also suggested a few online tools for testing on mobiles for 3G & 4G as well as various regions and browsers to see the whole picture and optimise even further based on their insights.

Finally, we recommended using CDN (a content delivery network) in order to speed up loading in other countries. It caches your content closer to the country where your user accesses your site and then the next time it serves content much faster.

To maximise budget performance, it was essential that we got the targeting within the DSP spot on. Like most campaigns we start with a learning phase, we gather data, we test and learn to see which line item strategies within our chosen DSP will work best. For Alpari, our programmatic ad traders divided the platform budget equally between the campaign strategies below, we then allowed for the budget to be dynamically allocated based on the best performing line item.

INSIDER TIP:

Dynamic budget allocation allows you to set your total budget at the campaign aka parent level, the line item strategies below then share that common budget which sits underneath the parent or campaign level, the strategy with the best performing KPI will get the greatest share of the campaigns total budget.

THIRD-PARTY AUDIENCES

We used third-party audience data through independent DSP in order to target audiences with greater precision. For this campaign, we used:
Eyeota – B2B – Interest – Products and Services – Investments and Stock Exchanges
Eyeota – Finance – Interest – Personal Finance – Investments
Fifty Core > Personal Finance > Personal Investing
Fifty Core > Personal Finance > Personal Investing > Options
Business / B2B – Interest – Investments and Stock Exchanges
Eyeota – B2B – Interest – Products and Services – Investments and Stock Exchanges

CONTEXTUAL TARGETING

We also used contextual targeting to find users based on the content they are consuming. The keywords we used for this campaign were:

forex trading
+invest +stocks
+forex +trade
+alpari
forex trader
+metatrader +4
+forex
+trading +bitcoin
how to forex trading
forex trading for beginners
+forex +trader
+metatrader
+forex +training
forex brokers
free forex signals
trading cryptocurrencies
trading stocks
forex broker
invest stocks online
+demo +forex
forex trading course
alpari group
forextime
+invest +gold +online
invest apple stocks
invest cryptocurrencies
+trade +gas

WHITELIST

We started off with a whitelist of premium finance publishers, this was made up using the clients own list in addition to our list that we collated through research.

We negotiated and worked directly with these publishers to ensure we secured the best possible deal for the client. We then activated the publisher on a private marketplace deal also known as PMP (check out our blog post on PMPs here).

A selection of the best performing domains include:

investing.com
ng.investing.com
finviz.com
livemint.com
stockcharts.com
dailyfx.com
babypips.com
daytrading.com
commodity.com
forexsignals.com
brokernotes.com
dolphintrader.com
forexstrategieswork.com
forexrobottrader.com
bitcoinafrica.io
forexprofitway.com
fx-list.com
forexobroker.com
greattradingsystems.com
forexmt4ea.com
forexabode.com
theforexkings.com
forexpops.com
forexracer.com
piranhatrader.com
engineforex.com
tradeoil.com
tradersdna.com
wecomparebrokers.com
fraudbroker.com
dinero.com
benzinga.com
moneyweb.co.za
blockonomi.com

RETARGETING

A strong retargeting strategy ensures maximum media efficiency. To understand where users are on their path to purchase we export multiple event pixels that allow us to design a binary retargeting strategy. In the case of Alapri.com we tracked users across any of the following single events:

All_Pages
Basket_Page
Deposit_Page
Campaign_Landing_Page
Registration_Page

This allows us to maximise our bidding strategy to users who may have registered within 1,2,7,14 or 30 days but not yet deposited.

REPORTING

Having a clear structured report allows you to see the best strategies. Here are the list of just some of the dimensions we use when exporting our reports to give us the best possible overview:

Insertion Order Name
Tactic Name
Country
Impressions
Clicks
CTR
Total Cost
eCPC
eCPM
vCPM
Total Conversions
Total Conversion Rate
Revenue
eRPM
eRPC
eRPA
Conversion Segment Name
Insertion Order Currency Name

RESULT

CPA target: £90
CPA delivered: £65.64

The results are particularly impressive given that this campaign was executed in Africa and Australia, both brand-new markets for our client. Achieving a delivered CPA of £65.64 against a target of £90 in these unfamiliar territories showcases Advant Technology’s ability to effectively navigate and penetrate new markets. Our programmatic strategy not only met but exceeded Alpari’s expectations by delivering conversions at a 27% lower cost than anticipated. This demonstrates our expertise in leveraging data-driven insights, precise targeting, and optimization techniques, even in regions where the client had no prior presence. The success of this campaign positions us well to scale efforts in these markets and continue driving exceptional performance and ROI.

Check out some other customer success stories from other financial organisations.

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Case Studies

Visa Case Study: Display Banners

Strategically placed display banners achieved nearly 11M ad impressions for VISA, helping to keep the brand front of people’s minds while travelling.

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Visit Cyprus: Programmatic Display Advertising

VISIT CYPRUS: PROGRAMMATIC
DISPLAY ADVERTISING

INDUSTRY:
Tourism
MARKET:
Russia
SERVICES:
Programmatic display

Explore Cyprus: Your Ultimate Travel Guide

Over the years we have had the pleasure of working with tourism boards in Tunisia, Canada, Greece, Poland among others. The extensive experience of working with governmental organisations to promote specific destinations have made us experts in this field. If you’re interested in hearing more about our work in tourism, please speak to our team.

VISIT CYPRUS: PROGRAMMATIC DISPLAY ADVERTISINGSummary
Our work together with Visit Cyprus was focused around driving visitors to the Visit Cyprus Tourism Information Page through display advertising.

Challenge
Cyprus is a very popular tourist destination with millions of visitors arriving on the island each year. Despite it being a popular choice for European tourists, the country has been struggling to attract visitors from Russia. There wasn’t much website traffic coming from Russia despite the site being translated into Russian. Therefore, increasing awareness among the Russian audience during the holiday planning/booking time became a first step in the campaign.

Solution
Considering the budget, creative capabilities and the best programmatic channels, we focused on display advertising. Our campaign was delivered across travel-related premium websites in affluent Russian cities such as Moscow, Yekaterinburg and St. Petersburg. The team monitored and optimised Google Analytics closely in order to segment traffic sources and feed data back into campaign delivery.

Results

  • The campaign drove 220,000 new visitors to the landing page
  • Our methods resulted in a 20% reduction in bounce rate
  • We saw an improvement of 1.8x average time spent on site

Check out some of our other case studies from working with tourism organisations around the globe.

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Medtronic: Programmatic Advertising

MEDTRONIC: PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING

INDUSTRY:
Healthcare

MARKET:
UK, BR, CL

SERVICES:
Programmatic Advertising

Medtronic, the global leader in medical technology, services, and solutions, was looking to increase awareness among a niche target audience while reducing the cost per lead. They also wanted our help to maximise the engagement of their existing content. 

CHALLENGE

Medtronic’s target audience for this particular campaign was neurosurgeons, not a huge group relative to the web. An innovative approach to targeting was needed to find the relevant audience, and further out-of-the-box thinking had to be applied to find the users with the highest engagement.

SOLUTION

We worked with the Medtronic team to drive the maximum number of video views and clicks to their whitepapers within a relevant audience who showed interest in the content and “want to learn more”. 

We used different targeting methods to achieve the best results: 

  • Targeting pages through a set of keywords (contextual targeting)
  • Find users based on 3rd party data (audience targeting)
  • Specific known top domains (domain targeting)
  • Targeting relevant categories such as business news, health etc.

RESULT

  • We achieved 16 million impressions with conversion rates reaching up to 28.36%
  • Native ad formats significantly outperformed display

Are you looking for help managing your upcoming B2B campaigns? 

We’ve got plenty of B2B experience and have worked with many brands. Check out our other case studies.

We’d love to help. Speak to us today about your requirements.

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Open Auctions

OPEN AUCTIONS

I know what you’re thinking. A digital advertising phrase that is not an acronym? What is going on? 

Calm down there cowboy. You can always trust the digital advertising community to come up with TLSs (three-letter acronyms). For Open Auctions, they’ve settled on RTB (Real-Time Bidding).

What are open auctions?

An open auction is a real-time bidding process that allows multiple publishers and advertisers to bid on ad inventory. 

What are the pros?

  • Cost-effective: these types of auctions are great if you’re looking for a large reach and have a relatively small budget to play with
  • Straightforward: easier and faster to set up compared to other media-buying methods 
  • Targeting: access to multiple powerful targeting options including third-party data
  • Optimisations: the advertisers can be creative with formats and optimisations to engage with the user
  • Reach: you can reach target audiences irrespective of the sites they are visiting 

What are the cons?

  • Non-premium: inventory us not as premium as other buying-methods
  • Ad fraud: chances of ad fraud can be greater compared to closed auctions
  • Brand safety: a chance to appear on sites you don’t want to associate with
  • Lack of transparency: no set price structures 

When to choose open auctions:

  • When you want access to a large range of inventory at lower rates and want to have the fluidity of easy access 
  • When access to third-party data and other targeting technologies would be beneficial to overlay on top of your open auction

When to avoid open auctions:

  • When you want access to more premium inventory (mastheads, roadblocks etc.) 
  • When the publisher is offering premium inventory along with premium targeting only accessible buy some form of programmatic media 

If you want to learn more about other types of programmatic media-buying, check out our blog post on PMPs (private marketplace deals).

Categories
Case Studies Display banners Native Programmatic Video Advertising

Gerard: Native, Display And Programmatic Video Ads

NATIVE, DISPLAY AND
PROGRAMMATIC VIDEO: GERARD

INDUSTRY:
Construction
MARKET:
Hungary​
SERVICES:
Native, display and video

We’ve had the pleasure of working with Hungarian roof manufacturers, Gerard, for many years. The work we do together is mostly focused on raising awareness for their products among untapped audiences through native, display and video advertising.

NATIVE, DISPLAY AND PROGRAMMATIC VIDEO: GERARD

Challenge

As a roofing manufacturer, Gerard’s target audience is broad and could apply to any homeowner but the timing of when you may make a purchase makes the audience niche, not everyone will be in the market for a new roof in the near future. We’ve been using display banners, native and video formats to raise awareness among users currently in the market for a new roof.

Solution

Our team uses contextual targeting to reach out to untapped audiences through display banners. The list of publishers is typically pre-set and targets people aged 30-64 currently constructing or renovating their homes. A typical campaign gets well over 1m impressions through whitelisted premium publishers.

Results
To us, client retention is the biggest proof of success and something we’re incredibly proud to say we’re smashing! We’ve been managing Gerard’s campaigns since we were just one year old (back in 2016), and look forward to many more years of collaboration together.

Check out our case studies from some of our other long-standing clients including Austrotherm.

You might also be interested in

Categories
Blog Programmatic

Private Marketplace Deals (PMPs)

PRIVATE MARKETPLACE DEALS (PMPs)

A guide to Private Marketplace Deals in programmatic advertising

If you’re new to the world of digital advertising, you may have noticed that the industry is full (and we mean FULL) of buzzwords and acronyms. To help navigate this notoriously complex landscape, we thought we’d break down some of the most commonly used industry jargon. 

We’re starting off with one of our favourite TLAs (three-letter acronyms, that is): PMP. 

What is the meaning of  PMP?

PMP stands for Private Marketplace and is a programmatic media-buying method.

Compared to open auctions, PMP is an invitation-only bidding process where publishers invite selected buyers to take place in real-time bidding to purchase their inventory. What is a PMP Programmatic advertising?

The minimum price of the bids is referred to as ‘floor price’ and is negotiated before the auction starts. Private marketplace deals are more targeted and premium than open auction deals, which is reflected in the price. 

 

PMP Marketing: How Private Marketplaces Enhance Ad Campaigns

By providing a more curated and targeted advertising environment, PMPs allow brands to reach specific audiences with premium content. This approach ensures advertisers avoid the clutter of open marketplaces while focusing on high-quality placements. PMP deals are ideal for campaigns aiming for precision, brand safety, and control over where ads appear.

In programmatic marketing, PMP offers a way to leverage programmatic technology with greater transparency and trust between publishers and advertisers. Marketers use PMPs to refine their audience targeting while optimizing performance metrics like viewability and click-through rates.

What are the pros of private marketplace deals?

  • Transparency: It gives both buyers and sellers transparency of the auction
  • Relationship building: Publishers and buyers negotiate and agree on terms and pricing, which allows for mutual understanding and strong relationships to be built
  • Premium inventory: Gives access to higher-quality inventory before it ends up on the open market
  • Targeting: Allows advertisers to target specific audiences 

What are the cons of private marketplace deals?

  • Only partly-automated, meaning the buying process can require more manual labour and time compared to open auctions 
  • Non-guaranteed inventory: there is no guarantee you’ll get the inventory you want
  • Pricing: Costs tend to be slightly higher than open auction deals

When to choose PMPs:

  • When you have a whitelist of publishers you want to display your ads across 
  • When you want access to higher-quality inventory before it ends up on the open market
  • When you have a specific target audience for your campaign

When to avoid private auctions:

  • When a campaign requires guaranteed ad impressions or ad placements
  • When you want a fixed price for the inventory 

Launch your next PMP advertising campaign with Advant

If you’re looking to integrate PMP marketing into your digital strategy, or want to explore how programmatic advertising can elevate your campaigns, feel free to reach out to our team for personalised advice.

Categories
Blog Programmatic

Trends in programmatic 2020

TRENDS IN PROGRAMMATIC 2020

2020 is an exciting year with continued growing investment in the programmatic advertising space. Millions of apps, sites and endless formats from which to choose from. The fragmentation of media and digital touchpoints have arguably made marketers’ jobs increasingly harder. At Advant Technology we help brands and agencies navigate the complex world of programmatic through expert knowledge of ad tech platforms.

The trends we’re exploring this year include:

Artificial Intelligence

Undoubtedly one of the hottest topics in programmatic advertising right now. We’ve seen massive uplifts of up to 40% in performance campaigns optimising towards metrics including cost per acquisition, cost per view and effective cost per click. You can explore our dedicated post here.

AI has been helping analyse the thousands of data points available to improve optimisation beyond what a human can achieve.

5G

This fascinating technology will enable a more connected world. Speeds that can surpass 100giagabits per second is 100 times faster than 4G technology. This will enable advertisers to deliver a richer advertising experience. High-speed 5g means less buffering time for rich media and heavy high-quality video files thereby improving the user experience and potentially encouraging more advertising revenue, clearly then a huge opportunity.

Digital Audio Ads

The world’s first radio station was KDKA launched in Pittsburgh in 1920. Radio’s come a long way since then playing a huge role in how we receive our news, listen to music and more, fast forward 100 years and the US will be spending more time listening to digital audio than radio according to emarketer.

Contextual Advertising

In a post-GDPR and CCPA apocalypse, world audience data activation has many challenges. Contextual advertising technology does not use cookies or customer data and is, therefore, having a resurgence. Contextual ads use keyword and semantic technology to understand the context of the page and thus allow advertisers to deliver ads that are more relevant.

Categories
Blog Programmatic

Basic targeting methodology using a Demand Side Platform (DSP)

BASIC TARGETING METHODOLOGY USING A DSP

Demand Side Platform - DSP - Programmatic Advertising 101 - Advant Technology

Mastering Basic Targeting Methodology With a Demand Side Platform

A DSP (demand side platform) allows you to target users via multiple formats that generally include display banners, video and native advertising. Ensure your ad has the best chance of reaching the right audience, regardless of format. In this short post, we’ll walk you through the main ways a DSP allows you to target. Don’t forget to research and fully understand your audience to select the right targeting parameters. Let’s dive in and take a look:

Geo-Targeting

Probably the most basic targeting methodology and at the very least you should apply some kind of country level targeting. Clearly there’s no point in advertising to people in another region or country if you only sell to people based in the United Kingdom.

Options include Country > state/region > zip code / post code or LAT LONG co-ordinates.

Geo-Targeting

Day Part Targeting

Refers to the hours of the day that your campaign is live. We often have requests from advertisers who only want to advertise between the hours of 7am and 10pm. This is normally associated with brand safety, however, there may be other reasons for using day part targeting. Let’s say you have an app that helps people relax, well maybe it makes sense to advertise just before bed or first thing in the morning, where people are more open and responsive to your messages.

Audience Targeting

Typically allows you to select audiences based on their interest or behaviour. Here’s a quick snapshot of the most effective routes.

  • Affinity Audiences (interest)
  • Customer match (using email address, phone number or other method to learn more visit Liveramp
  • Demographic such as age and gender
  • In-Market audiences e.g. inmarket to buy a used car

Re-Targeting

We’ve all seen those annoying ads that seem to follow us around after we’ve visited a retailers site. These ads are known as retargeting ads and can have a product feed showcasing the exact products you viewed as well as other products that you might be interested in. These product feeds can be implemented using an adserver such as campaign manager from Google DV360. Most businesses go wrong with retargeting by failing to frequency cap, bombarding users with too many ads. Make sure you control the number of times an ad is seen by a user respecting the balance between selling and privacy and applying a reasonable frequency cap such as 1 in 24 hours.

Device Targeting

Perhaps the product you’re selling is an app? Well it probably makes sense to only serve ads on mobile devices, where the path to purchase is shorter. Device targeting allows you to control whether you target mobile, desktop or tablets.

Device targeting

Browser Targeting

Maybe you need to target Apple users only. Well perhaps a good starting point would be targeting the Safari browser whose audience is typically Apple users. Browser targeting on the most widely used DV360 platform include:

  • Chrome
  • Firefox
  • Internet Explorer
  • Microsoft Edge
  • Opera
  • Safari

Browser Targeting

We’ll look to deep dive into some of the more advanced DSP targeting tactics later but for now we hope you find the above a welcome introduction.

Photo by Yucel Moran on Unsplash Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash Photo by Daniel Korpai on Unsplash

Categories
Blog Programmatic

Benefits of Programmatic Advertising

BENEFITS OF PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING

Benefits of the Programmatic Advertising - Advant Technology

Programmatic Advertising: Transparency, Real-Time Stats

Benefits of the Programmatic Advertising – Advant Technology[/caption]

Programmatic advertising has been for many years been a medium to buy advertising online, however, in the past couple of years we’ve seen the growth of programmatic for offline advertising like Digital Out of Home and this is only set to increase.

For the purposes of this article, we’ll be focusing on online programmatic advertising which is defined by DIGIDAY as:

“the use of software to purchase digital advertising, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs, human negotiations, and manual insertion orders.”  It’s using machines to buy ads, basically.

Four Benefits of Programmatic Advertising - Advant Technology
Four Benefits of Programmatic Advertising – Advant Technology

Now we know what it is, let’s explore the benefits:

Transparency

Programmatic advertising does have it’s bad players and there are people out there who want to game the system, but on the whole programmatic advertising does allow advertisers to see exactly where their ads are being placed, on which sites/apps and the performance of each placement and whether those ads are viewable.

Real-Time Measurement

Understanding how your campaign is performing in real-time is a real joy, no more waiting around for weeks on end to see the effects of your advertising or waiting for your agency to provide laggard reports. Real-time measurement allows you to see key data 24 hours a day (if you’re that keen). Here is a full list of the metrics you can export from DV360 right now! As you can imagine a huge amount of data is generated so it’s key you focus on the metrics that matter to your campaign, shameless plug, we can help you with that!

  • Begin to Render Eligible Impressions
  • Begin to Render Impressions
  • Billable Impressions
  • Click Rate (CTR)
  • Clicks
  • CM Post-Click Revenue
  • CM Post-View Revenue
  • Engagement Rate
  • Engagements
  • First-Quartile Views (Video)
  • Midpoint Views (Video)
  • Third-Quartile Views (Video)
  • Complete Views (Video)
  • Impressions
  • Media Cost
  • Post-Click Conversions
  • Post-View Conversions
  • Revenue
  • Total Conversions
  • Total Media Cost
  • Tracked Ads
  • TrueView: Views
  • Active View: % Audible and Visible at Completion
  • Active View: % Audible and Visible at First Quartile
  • Active View: % Audible and Visible at Midpoint
  • Active View: % Audible and Visible at Start
  • Active View: % Audible and Visible at Third Quartile
  • Active View: % Audible Impressions
  • Active View: % Full-Screen
  • Active View: % Fully On-Screen 2 sec
  • Active View: % In Background
  • Active View: % Measurable Impressions
  • Active View: % of Ad Played
  • Active View: % of Completed Impressions Audible and Visible
  • Active View: % of Completed Impressions Visible
  • Active View: % of First Quartile Impressions Audible and Visible
  • Active View: % of First Quartile Impressions Visible
  • Active View: % of Midpoint Impressions Audible and Visible
  • Active View: % of Midpoint Impressions Visible
  • Active View: % of Third Quartile Impressions Audible and Visible
  • Active View: % of Third Quartile Impressions Visible
  • Active View: % Play Time Audible
  • Active View: % Play Time Audible and Visible
  • Active View: % Play Time Visible
  • Active View: % Viewable Impressions
  • Active View: % Visible 10 Seconds
  • Active View: % Visible at Completion
  • Active View: % Visible at First Quartile
  • Active View: % Visible at Midpoint
  • Active View: % Visible at Start
  • Active View: % Visible at Third Quartile
  • Active View: Audible & Fully On-Screen for Half of Duration (15 sec. cap) Impressions
  • Active View: Audible & Fully On-Screen for Half of Duration (15 sec. cap) Measurable Impressions
  • Active View: Audible & Fully On-Screen for Half of Duration (15 sec. cap) Rate
  • Active View: Audible & Fully On-Screen for Half of Duration (TrueView) Impressions
  • Active View: Audible & Fully On-Screen for Half of Duration (TrueView) Measurable Impressions
  • Active View: Audible & Fully On-Screen for Half of Duration (TrueView) Rate
  • Active View: Average Viewable Time (Seconds)
  • Active View: Custom Metric Measurable Impressions
  • Active View: Custom Metric Viewable Impressions
  • Active View: Custom Metric Viewable Rate
  • Active View: Eligible Impressions
  • Active View: Impression Distribution (Not Measurable)
  • Active View: Impression Distribution (Not Viewable)
  • Active View: Impression Distribution (Viewable)
  • Active View: Impressions Audible and Visible at Completion
  • Active View: Impressions Visible 10 Seconds
  • Active View: Measurable Impressions
  • Active View: Not Measurable Impressions
  • Active View: Not Viewable Impressions
  • Active View: Viewable Impressions
  • % Clicks Leading to Conversions
  • % Impressions Leading to Conversions
  • Audio Client Cost eCPCL
  • Audio Revenue eCPCL
  • Client Cost
  • Client Cost eCPA
  • Client Cost eCPA (PC)
  • Client Cost eCPA (PV)
  • Client Cost eCPC
  • Client Cost eCPM
  • Client Cost Viewable eCPM
  • CM Post-Click Revenue
  • CM Post-Click Revenue + Cross-Environment
  • CM Post-View Revenue
  • CM Post-View Revenue + Cross-Environment
  • Conversions per 1000 Impressions
  • Gmail Conversions
  • Gmail Post-Click Conversions
  • Gmail Post-View Conversions
  • Post-Click Conversions
  • Post-Click Conversions + Cross-Environment
  • Post-View Conversions
  • Post-View Conversions + Cross-Environment
  • Revenue
  • Revenue eCPA
  • Revenue eCPA (PC)
  • Revenue eCPA (PV)
  • Revenue eCPC
  • Revenue eCPM
  • Revenue Viewable eCPM
  • Total Conversions
  • Total Conversions + Cross-Environment
  • Video Client Cost eCPCV
  • Video Revenue eCPCV
  • AdLingo Fee
  • Adloox Fee
  • Adloox Pre-Bid Fee
  • Adsafe Fee
  • AdXpose Fee
  • Agency Trading Desk Fee
  • Aggregate Knowledge Fee
  • Billable Cost
  • comScore vCE in DoubleClick Fee
  • Data Fees
  • Data Management Platform Fee
  • DoubleVerify Fee
  • DoubleVerify Pre-Bid Fee
  • Evidon Fee
  • Integral Ad Science Pre-Bid Fee
  • Integral Ad Science Video Fee
  • MediaCost Data Fee
  • MOAT Video Fee
  • Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings Fee
  • Platform Fee
  • Platform Fee Rate
  • Premium Fee
  • ShopLocal Fee
  • Teracent Fee
  • Third-Party Ad Server Fee
  • TrustMetrics Fee
  • Vizu Fee
  • Audio Mutes (Audio)
  • Audio Unmutes (Audio)
  • Companion Clicks (Audio)
  • Companion Impressions (Audio)
  • Complete Listens (Audio)
  • First-Quartile (Audio)
  • Midpoint (Audio)
  • Pauses (Audio)
  • Starts (Audio)
  • Stops (Audio)
  • Third-Quartile (Audio)
  • Companion Clicks (Video)
  • Companion Impressions (Video)
  • Skips (Video)
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Begin to Render Impressions
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Clicks
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Impressions
  • Invalid Clicks
  • Invalid Impressions
  • Invalid Active View Eligible Impressions
  • Invalid Active View Measurable Impressions
  • Invalid Active View Viewable Impressions
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Active View Eligible Impressions
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Active View Measurable Impressions
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Active View Viewable Impressions
  • General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Tracked Ads
  • Invalid Begin to Render Impressions
  • Invalid Tracked Ads
  • TrueView: General Invalid Traffic (GIVT) Views
  • TrueView: Invalid Views
  • Audio Media Cost eCPCL
  • Media Cost
  • Media Cost eCPA
  • Media Cost eCPA (PC)
  • Media Cost eCPA (PV)
  • Media Cost eCPC
  • Media Cost eCPM
  • Media Cost Viewable eCPM
  • Total Audio Media Cost eCPCL
  • Total Media Cost
  • Total Media Cost eCPA
  • Total Media Cost eCPA (PC)
  • Total Media Cost eCPA (PV)
  • Total Media Cost eCPC
  • Total Media Cost eCPM
  • Total Media Cost Viewable eCPM
  • Total Video Media Cost eCPCV
  • Video Media Cost eCPCV
  • Profit
  • Profit eCPM
  • Profit Margin
  • Profit Viewable eCPM
  • Programmatic Guaranteed impressions passed due to frequency
  • Programmatic Guaranteed savings re-invested due to frequency
  • Refund Billable Cost
  • Refund Media Cost
  • Refund Platform Fee
  • Audio Mutes (Video)
  • Audio Unmutes (Video)
  • Average Display Time
  • Average Interaction Time
  • Completion Rate (Audio)
  • Completion Rate (Video)
  • Counters
  • Exits
  • Expansions
  • First-Quartile Views (Video)
  • Midpoint Views (Video)
  • Third-Quartile Views (Video)
  • Complete Views (Video)
  • Fullscreens (Video)
  • Interactive Impressions
  • Pauses (Video)
  • Rich Media Engagements
  • Scrolls
  • Starts (Video)
  • Timers
  • Total Display Time
  • Total Interaction Time
  • TrueView: Views
  • Verifiable Impressions
Programmatic Advertising Definition - Advant Technology
Programmatic Advertising Definition – Advant Technology

Efficiency

By reducing the human friction points of buying and selling advertising efficiencies can be gained. Less paper shuffling and more action! We can gain efficiency beyond just automation though, with so much data to hand, being available in real time, campaigns can be optimised and machine learning applied in order to increase the ROI on your campaigns. Here at Advant Technology optimisation is our mantra, so we’re constantly assessing and analysing data to improve ROI for our clients.

Targeting

We’ve explored targeting in a bit more detail in this post, in short though, rather than the old spray and pray method of advertising, programmatic allows you to be ultra-targeted pinpointing only those most likely to buy your products or services. The many targeting parameters available within a DSP help you pick and choose from the billions of impressions available across the real-time bidding ecosystem.

Categories
Blog Programmatic

Machine Learning and AI in Programmatic

MACHINE LEARNING AND AI IN PROGRAMMATIC

Using Artificial Intelligence in Programmatic Advertising - Advant Technology - Word Cloud
Using Artificial Intelligence in Programmatic Advertising – Advant Technology – Word Cloud

Artificial Intelligence in Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic is the process of using software to buy digital advertising. Here at Advant Technology, we specialise in programmatic advertising across the real-time bidding ecosystem. Real-time bidding is the process of buying ads on an individual impression basis. The process of a publisher auctioning an impression from their website/app and a buyer buying the impression is near-instant.

Artificial Intelligence for Ads
Artificial Intelligence for Ads

At Advant Technology we’ve employed independent artificial intelligence specialists who build models using data available from our DSP platforms. These models which go beyond machine learning help to increase ROI by using bid modifiers picking and choosing the impressions that are deemed most valuable. All of this can, of course, be done by a human but AI speeds up this process further increasing efficiency and giving our clients a competitive and unique advantage. Typically, the variables that AI will use to make decisions comes from aggregated across the following areas:

  1. Geolocation data (country, region, city)
  2. Time partition data (hour of the day, day of the week)
  3. Size of creatives
  4. Data regarding Operation systems (Family, version, carrier)
  5. Data regarding the browser (browser id, browser language)
  6. Data regarding gender
  7. Data regarding the device (device type [computer, tablet, smartphone..], device model)
  8. Data regarding the placement (placement id, placement group, publisher id, seller id, domain, fold position, mobile app instance)
  9. Data regarding the supply type (browser web, mobile web, app web)
  10. Data regarding the viewability and the completion rate(predicted IAB Viewability Rate, Predicted IAB Video Viewability Rate, Predicted Video completion rate)
  11. Data regarding the segments (when segment are owned by the seat and their data is accessible through the LLD)
  12. Data regarding the frequency/recency of impressions  
Real-time bidding for programmatic advertising - Advant Technology
Real-time bidding for programmatic advertising – Advant Technology

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