Move Over Traditional Display Advertising, Go 'Programmatic'
Apr 23, 2018
10 min read
Table of contents
If you are a seasoned player of display advertising, you must be well aware of the fact that traditional buying and selling of display advertisements is a cumbersome process that takes a lot of time to execute effectively and with precision.
Also, tracking metrics of your ads placed through traditional advertising is often difficult and a task of its own.
Did I forget to mention that traditional advertising is usually followed by a contract between the advertisers and publishers regarding the exact number of banner ads to be placed and the tenure of it, nothing more, nothing less and if your ads are not performing well, you are left with no other choice other than to watch all your money go down the drain.
In short, there are a lot of hiccups when it comes to buying some ad space on websites. But Programmatic is here to change all that and more.
If you are hearing the word ‘Programmatic’ for the first time, don’t worry, we will walk you through everything there is to know about this new (kind of) method of buying ad spaces and how it can radically change your ROI when it comes to display advertising.
So, what exactly is ‘Programmatic’?
Programmatic advertising is nothing new but has recently started to woo top level marketers who have now realised it’s true potential.
Simply put, programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying and selling of display advertisements by making use of DSP’s, SSP’s, DMP’s and Ad exchanges.
Are all these abbreviations going over your head?
Let’s look at what they actually are and how they are an integral part of programmatic advertising -
DSP’s
Source
DSP’s or demand side platforms help advertisers buy available media spaces on websites (publishers) by connecting them to various SSP’s and ad exchanges.
SSP’s
SSP’s or supply side platforms help publishers sell available display advertising spaces on their website by connecting them to prospective buyers through DSP’s and ad exchanges.
Ad Exchanges
Ad exchange is where the actual buying and selling of advertisement space happens through RTB (real time bidding) or direct buying.
Real time bidding is when advertisers place bids on SSP’s for ad spaces of publishers they want to place their advertisements on. Publishers, on the other hand, accept the highest bids from advertisers for their mentioned ad space, all of this happens on Ad exchanges in real-time and inventories are sold and bought in real time through AI.
On Ad exchanges, publishers fill up their inventories with impressions and advertisers select a publisher with impressions that appeal most to them and their budget.
DMP’s
Source
DMP’s or data management platforms are an integral part of programmatic advertising as they provide you with the needed insights on audiences. The main role of DMP’s is to collect data from a range of offline and online sources, segment them into audiences and use those audience segments to let buyers and sellers make better informed decisions about the type of ads they should place for a particular audience type.
Usually, DSP’s and SSP’s also serve as DMP’s via third party integrations and most of them have it.
Knowledge of all these different platforms is vital to start your programmatic journey, but what exactly are these platforms and how many are they?
There are a lot of different platforms out there that are specifically demand or supply side and there are platforms which are one-stop programmatic shops which take care of all the verticals.
I would suggest you to not dive deep into all that fluff and simply trust Google DoubleClick for all your programmatic buying, selling and insights. They are the leaders at it and are the most trusted.
But why go for Programmatic advertising?
Ok, so now you know exactly what programmatic advertising is and where you need to go to try your hands at it. But, is it worth the effort?
Absolutely!
Programmatic advertising has been called the ‘future of display advertising’ and is not just limited to fancy banners on websites. Video ads, mobile ads (apps and websites) and all other forms of advertising imaginable can be purchased via programmatic and it also allows advertisers with some great retargeting options with the help of DMP’s (Google’s DoubleClick has that as well), which is great for garnering the right exposure.
Apart from being instant, there are a myriad of benefits programmatic advertising provides over traditional advertising, which are -
1.Transparent Pricing
As we talked about before, prices on ad inventory is totally based on impressions. Auction-based media pricing model increases impression-level price transparency and there is no way you can game the system.
Publishers can’t ask for what their heart desires from advertisers in programmatic advertising.
2.Granularity
In programmatic, advertisers can cherry-pick publishers based on impressions and selectively choose only those publishers who align with their target audience.
3.Insights
Advertisers can track how their ads are performing in real-time and optimize accordingly, which is great as nothing of this sort was available in the traditional model of advertising. Advertisers can also make use of detailed campaign reports that most DSP’s provide to make better informed decisions in the future.
4.Scale
You can spread the marketing wings of your campaign as much as you want with programmatic, ofcourse it all depends on the budget you’ve allocated for display advertising. With programmatic, it can be done easily with a click rather than contacting different publishers for ad space, which was the norm in traditional advertising.
5.Control
Programmatic advertising puts you, as an advertiser or publisher, in the driver’s seat as you have the option to select the publishers or advertisers you want, the number of ad spaces you want to buy or sell, the price you’re willing to pay or get for each ad space and if the performance of your bought ads isn’t performing upto your expectations, you can always pull those ads in an instant.
With so much of power and publishers at your disposal, it’s quite easy to come across a fraud inventory and misplaced ads.
According to WARC, the international authority on media and advertising effectiveness, the fraud rate (assumed) on programmatic spend was as much as 30%.
There are basically two major types of frauds which have currently plagued the programmatic advertising industry with an estimated loss of around $6.5bn, according to the ANA (Association of National Advertisers), which are -
1.Ad misplacement
Misplaced ads are a great threat to a brand’s image as your ads can be displayed right next to some objectionable content which you’d really not like your brand to be associated with.
In the past year, as much as 43% of marketers claimed that they were already facing some reputational problems with programmatic advertising as most of their ads were placed right next to undesired or objectionable content and 37% of them pulled their ads as soon as they found out about it.
And it can have some serious repercussions with your target audience as well, as one in five consumers (19.5%) state that they would likely take some direct action against a brand if it’s advertising appeared alongside objectionable content either by completely boycotting the brand (10.5%) or being local about it (9%), according to ANA.
2.Ad fraud (clicks impressions)
ANA’s data show that almost 3 out of every 4 clicks on programmatically purchased 300*600 ‘half page’ ads are fraudulent. On an average, 1 in every 3 clicks on programmatic ads across all platforms and sizes are fraudulent. And this data doesn’t even count fake impressions!
ANA also states that the estimated loss of $6.5bn could have been reduced to just $700 million if the entire industry had adhered to their safety guidelines.
By following these guidelines, marketers can make use of the full potential of programmatic advertising and save themselves from getting stuck with hollow metrics that portray a fake image of your digital campaigns.
As this industry matures further and big players like Google entering into the market, we think that it will be a lot safer for marketers to initiate their programmatic endeavours without any risk of deceit and fraud.
If you’d like some more information on programmatic advertising, feel free to contact us .
Marketing And Artificial Intelligence: How The Combination Is Taking The Industry By Storm?
Marketing has always been desired when your business cares to promote trade, acquire more market share, or be recognized with its brand’s name. It is a basic act of attracting people to show interest in your product line so you can convert them into customers and achieve short-term or long-term organizational goals accordingly. Every business’s prime objective is to earn a profit, and fruitful or effective marketing plays a significant role in driving sales and generating revenues. Therefore, it is imperative to focus on a constructive marketing approach, be it traditional or conventional; the idea should be to promote the business and invite trade opportunities. Nowadays, marketing has helped businesses make strong connections with the customers and maintain a relationship that completely spins around what they aspire from your business. The approach is known for its ability to persuade people because, with rising consumerism levels, companies must strengthen their customer base and gradually expand it. Artificial Intelligence In Marketing Factors like technological advancements, the need for effective communication, and rising competition have simulated many businesses to look after their marketing and advertising strategies so they can survive in the cut-throat race and continue to keep their brand image. Technology, in specific Artificial Intelligence, has lately become a part of strategic marketing. Since technology guarantees speed and error-free computations, hard-core marketers make use of Artificial Intelligence to collect and observe piles of customer-centric data, which includes classifying the needs of a group of people, analyzing the buying trends, and collating factual information about the impact of various marketing methods used in the overall industry. This enables them to distinguish between a particular set of observations and comprehend the pros and cons of each marketing method applied to them. Once this is done, businesses get a better insight into individual wants and what marketing approach it is affected by the most. AI marketing is the talk of the town and has brought a positive impact on the existing traditional marketing approaches, making ways simpler and better. The prime reason to include AI techniques to cater to business marketing needs is that with the rising consumerism, it is hard to manage data trends, customer behavior graphs, and important stats which is essential for a business. AI tools effectively manage to collate such details and provide decisive arguments, where required, to save time and speed up the overall process. If you observe any traditional marketing approach, it involves different ways of targeting and retargeting the customers at various points of time to ensure brand loyalty. On the other hand, with the much-needed introduction of AI methodologies, your business can come up with automated yet monitored ways to reach out to the customer and complete the marketing procedure as proposed by your business. Benefits Of Artificial Intelligence In Marketing Technology and marketing, if used in a synchronized way bring fruitful results for a business, and for that to happen, enterprises have to work on how they invest their time and efforts in understanding the impact of AI on business development tools, including marketing. The following are some of the plus points that a business enjoys while incorporating Artificial Intelligence into marketing strategies: Monitors Overview Of The Process Since it is considered that customer reaction is an impact of the business activities, the disposable behavior of a customer is based on what your business offers to them, in terms of product/service, after-sales services, attracting via alluring advertising programs, the price of the product, etc. These factors are precisely taken into consideration in order to predict customer behavior and anticipate future sales. This analysis and segmentation of customer behavior and related trends allow a business to get an overall perspective of the suitable marketing approach which seems promising and ensures back results. Machined And Skillful Work Technology itself sends a reminder to be better than what it is now, in simpler terms, using AI for marketing practices allows your process to strategically understand the situation and learn from the experience to provide necessary improvisations to the existing approach. It is a continuous process that includes AI to repeatedly search for data trends and bring relatable content for the customers. As a business, it allows you to focus on other operations and initiate a self-driven marketing approach. Avoids Excessive Revenue Reduction Customer retention is a skill that every business strives to be good at and losing loyal customers to your competitor surely wouldn’t be a good thing for your business. Understanding and fulfilling the customer-needs ensure brand loyalty thus helps in preventing the need for disinterest. AI plays an important role in comprehending this data so your business can completely know what your loyal customers require. Collating this information gives the control to draw outline marketing programs and drive sales campaigns quickly. Reduced Manual Marketing and Increased Bot Support Hiring marketing experts sure can suffice the process requirements at many levels, however, with the introduction of Artificial Intelligence, you can initiate proactive advertising drives and run campaigns that are run by bots and automated chat programs. This change from manual marketing techniques to tech marketing allows your business to run perpetual campaigns that don’t require much human intervention. By allowing AI to take over customer support via chat help, you can ensure your business to revert to customer queries in less time, which is a great approach to customer satisfaction. Add A Personalized Touch To Your Approach It is observed that advertising mails and promotional offers that are sent out for the target audience often seem redundant and lack a human touch. Well, AI helps a business to build automated responses that have a personalized message, basis the customer behavior and concern. It could be emails, upcoming future campaigns, social media information, anything that attracts customer attention in a better and improved way. Personalized messages can be well programmed by accumulating customer’s anticipated behavior and buying trends so that they feel worthwhile trading with you. If your business requires assistance in maintaining marketing and AI together and fails to fulfill the task due to a lack of competence or path guidance, you can consider industry experts such as SaffronEdge, where you can amplify your business development pace and include technology in an organized and precise way. We are SaffronEdge industry insights to build personalized marketing plans that tackle the trading situations and ease up advertising and promotional practices done to escalate revenue graphs. ...
read more
Why Facebook Ads Are Perfect For Raising Awareness Of Your Dental Practice
Facebook is a social media platform that needs no introduction. With over 2 billion monthly active users , it’s a no-brainer that you absolutely need to market your dental practice on the platform to gain new patients. Imagine being able to reach new patients on the platform they trust and are already spending their time on… yeah, that’s Facebook. Since trying to get new patients is the number one problem modern day dentists face, Facebook Ads can be a powerful tool and an untapped resource for dental practitioners in search for new patients, if used correctly. Now, the traditional methods of media advertising for dentists induced a lot of cost with minimal results. But Facebook has turned the digital marketing sphere for dentists upside down. How? With Facebook Ads, dentists can choose their specific target audience and it’s size according to their own budget. Also, as your ad is shown only to a relevant audience, you get improved results. A win-win, for both dental practitioners all over the world and Facebook itself. But what is a Facebook Ad? Facebook offers two forms of advertising: Ad Campaigns and boosted posts. Facebook Ad campaign is where the gold is! You can run your ad campaign as long as your budget allows and the people clicking on your ad will go straight to your website. But the best part about a Facebook ad campaign is the varied audience targeting options it has, which I don’t think any other social media provides at such a depth as Facebook. Facebook lets you target your audience on the basis of demographics, interests, your connections, user behavior and you can also create your own custom audience using mobile numbers, email addresses or Facebook IDs A boosted post, on the other hand, is something entirely different as it focuses only on your current following and their family and friends. Facebook lets you ‘boost’ your status update to make sure it is viewed by your followers and their friends and family so its best to use this form of advertisement to push an offer to your existing followers. And it’s cheap, you can boost a post for a day for as low as $1. When advertising through a Facebook Ad, it’s important to make sure that your ad contains a nice copy, stunning visuals and an irresistible offer to get results. But the real power of Facebook Ads for dentists is your ability to showcase your ad in front of a highly relevant audience selected by you. Optimizing your Facebook Ads You can target whoever your heart wants with Facebook Ads with its intelligent, data-backed targeting options. Here are some of the targeting options you can use to unleash its full potential for your dental practice Target your current patient list Targeting your Facebook ads to the people who already like and trust you is a great way to begin with your marketing efforts on the platform. The engagement you’ll receive on this form of targeting will be the highest as you’re targeting patients who already trust you with your services. Target your email subscribers Use the custom targeting option on your Facebook Ads and add all the email addresses you have in your database to target these people on Facebook as well. You’ll get high engagement rates on this type of targeting as well because people who already have taken the action to submit their email addresses to you will have no problem in taking action again. So, start targeting your email subscribers on Facebook as well along with your regular email campaigns to raise awareness of your dental practice. Target your site visitors Using Facebook Ads to target your site visitors is another great way to gain some traction as they’ve already connected with you before through your website and Facebook Ads is a great way to connect with them again. Use the custom audience targeting option to target people who’ve already visited your website in the past. Target people who have relevant interests on Facebook A simple way to increase your audience and raise awareness for your dental practice is to target people who aren’t already your patients, are not on your email list and are not your Facebook fans by using a combination of demographics, interests, or behaviors. There are unlimited combinations of interests that you can make for your target audience, depending on your dental practice specialty or goal for your Facebook ad. The possibilities are endless. To get an idea of how setting audiences on Facebook Ads work, here’s a quick summary of the targeted audience of a Facebook Ad campaign we did for our dental client in New Jersey - Once you click ‘Edit’ under ‘Audience Details’ of your campaign, you can customize almost every aspect of your targeted audience including their gender, age, location, connections or you can explore some detail targeting options, here’s how it looks like - Facebook also very conveniently displays a summary of your selected audience preferences in the top right corner to give you a quick idea of where your audience targeting efforts is heading towards. When you run a Facebook Ad Campaign, you have full control of choosing your own audience which you think will bring the best results to your Facebook Ad Campaign. Facebook and its advertising platform have opened a whole new world for dentists where they control who they market themselves to, completely unheard of in the dental industry before. So, using Facebook Ads to unlock the true potential of Facebook by targeting the right people for your posts based on their demographics, interests and user behavior is highly recommended for dental practitioners. ...
read more
Why Google Tag Manager Can Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rates
Needless to say, digital marketing has at least one thing vaguely defined: a good content. What can qualify as a good content? We have had surveys that took the length of the content as a parameter while others relied on the emphasis of visuals, more data to gain more user attention. However, there is still no sure-shot formula that can explain what a good, successful content is. Even through web analytics, the ideal content parameters have not emerged. It is hard both for marketers as well as industry influencers to determine what content can yield you better in terms of traffic acquisition, conversion, tendency to get viral, etc. Where are our metrics failing? Maybe the key to exploring this can be found in the way we treat our metrics. We certainly keep a check on Page Views, Bounce Rates , and other stuff, but then do they give you the complete picture, if at all? Not Tracking Content Interaction While the Page Views and Bounce Rates do tell you about the user’s behavior on the page, but the crucial information about the user’s interaction with the web page is missing. Did the user read the whole page, did he scroll below to check more, and did he share the content after he scrolled to the bottom or was it shared just after a 2 sec glance? Such information can reveal to us about the impact content generated on the audience and how to convert impressed visitors into future customers. Unless you know how the user interacted with your web page, you can’t do much about improving the user experience either. Google Tag Manager Your business can perform better when it can extract accurate data from your website. Instead of deploying each tag to measure the activity log and keep a track of such crucial website data, you can use Google Tags to make things work simpler and quicker. Google Tags are snippets of website codes, generally in JavaScript, to track the visitor behavior and understand the efficiency of your site. Adding tags and setting up campaigns will work only when it is efficiently managed. While redundant or incorrectly applied tags hamper the site performance and result in duplicate costs or missing data, it is a very time-consuming task for IT team to add or modify tags. Image: SourceHaving a tag manager such as Google Tag Manager can help you create multiple tags that can be managed single-handedly without incurring any delay in time. Define your triggers and get the most up-to-date tag configuration whenever someone visits your site. Apart from monitoring custom activities, Tags can: Minimize Coding Errors Since manual tagging can be difficult and time-taking for any team, Google Tag Manager will help you condense the tags in a manageable form. No more worrying about improperly applied or duplicate tags: your data is secure, and the costs are optimized. Decrease Load Times Your page loads slow due to several factors, one of them is having a lot of individual tags inserted in the web pages. Wouldn't it be helpful if you could replace all the tags with one or two line of code? That is what GTM does. Loading code asynchronously, GTM deploys the application that is relevant to the visitor and the page. This feature reduces the page loading time and boosts the performance of the site. As per a study by Aberdeen Group, even a second's delay in site's response can lower the conversion rate up to seven percents. When your code is streamlined, and no individual tags offer resistance in page loading, your site can bring more visitors and can have better conversion rates. Ever changing digital marketing business requires you to keep your site relevant. While analytics tools like Google Analytics are helpful in extracting the data accurately, factors like deployment delay and site's performance are often dubious under GA. Also, sometimes one may forget to add a Google Analytics event to a critical form submission, or there might be errors in changing a key configuration setting. With a strong tool like Google Tag Manager, things can become more seamless, thereby allowing the marketers access to a larger range of information resources. Working perfectly on both desktop sites as well as mobile apps, this can reduce the manual effort and increase both the preciseness of website data and the performance of the site. ...
read more
Subscribe to our newsletter
Get fresh stories, case studies, and
advice
from successful creators and industry experts.