The Beginner's Guide to Programmatic Advertising

Digitalization has taken over the world in all aspects. Be it shopping or banking or ordering food online, or anything. And the most affected of all is the digital marketing area. Marketing and advertising are now everywhere, from paid media to youtube videos to bloggers' websites, and all over social media. From bath soap to buying homes, you can give Ads for anything. People in the USA come to know about cryptocurrency and its benefits only through online Ads.

The latest of all the popular trends in the digital marketing industry is Programmatic Advertising, often called Programmatic Buying or Programmatic Marketing. Well, as they said what's there in the name, the big idea is a new advertising concept has been in place for all the online marketers.

So, if your head is also full of questions regarding Programmatic Advertising, we have got you covered. You have landed on the right page where you get all the necessary information about this game-changing marketing idea alongside programmatic ad examples. So, pin this page and keep reading.

What is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of online advertising through some sort of software that generates and displays automated ads on different websites online. It may sound similar to the pay-per-click advertising concept where the Ads are not displayed just randomly but relevant to the genre and target audiences.

Programmatic Advertising - How It Works?

As we have said that programmatic advertising is all about Ads and their automated buying or selling online. But that might not just be enough for you to get a dig at it. Let us understand its exact working mechanism.

There are primarily two transactions involved in this game of Programmatic Advertising - media buying and media selling. The one who buys media is called advertisers and the one who sells media is called publishers. To get started with it, online Ad space is the basic need. To go deeper into the entire scenario of programmatic advertising, we first need to know about DSP (Demand Side Platform) and SSP (Supply Side Platform).

Let us understand it one by one.

DSP (Demand Side Platform)

This platform is exploited by advertisers to show Ads under the programmatic advertising process. On this platform, advertisers buy impressions from publishers. By doing this, they gain the advantage of publisher' connections, Ad exchanges, and networks to display ads.

DSP provides advertisers to study the surfing history of the audiences, track their location, check out interesting genres, and many more factors that influence the decision of the audience. On the other hand, publishers sell their space through Ad exchanges.

DSP plays an important role in identifying suitable Ad space for the advertisers for potential placement of Ads. What makes a 'suitable Ad space' for the advertiser depends on information and target audience data provided by advertisers to DSP.

SSP (Supply Side Platform)

Now that DSP has already been discussed, SSP is a bit easier to understand. SSP is used by the publishers for selling available Ad areas on their websites & Apps. This way they can make money by displaying ads added by the advertisers in the DSP. Since the entire process has been automated, things are better sorted out.

Now that you know the basic idea of DSP and SSP, here are the step-by-step quick working mechanisms of Programmatic Advertising.

Suppose a person named 'Tom' opens any website.

Advertisers buy Ad space from the owner of the website. This is what we call SSP.

Now, these advertisers will sell this Ad space to Sellers for displaying their Ads. Sellers are selected through a bidding system. The one who pays the highest bid will win it.

The selected seller will then display his Ad which will appear to 'Tom' while he surfs the said website in the question.

If 'Tom' will click on the Ad, he will be redirected to the landing page or advertiser's website. In this way, all the parties - seller, buyer, advertiser, and marketer will earn.

It has to be noted that the entire process of finding Ad space, bidding it, and action of winning bid, everything is conducted through an automated process.

Targeting Options in Programmatic Advertising

In this section, we are listing down all the possible target capabilities that a marketer can encash. Here we go!

Geofencing

As the name suggests, here audiences are targeted through the location. Marketers display ads based on factors like country, state, city, area code, Pin code, IP address, etc. This helps in sharing Ads with its intended audience. Some products and services are location-specific. Say for example - fairness cream. There is no sense in showing Ads of fairness cream in American countries because people are born fair there.

Contextual

Here the Ads are displayed based on editorial relevance, category of the website, or the keyword which a customer searches for. Ads are shown as per the best relevance with the content. Marketers bid on hot and trendy topics or keywords that will be used to show Ads.

Audience

Personal details of the customer can also be a target for showing Ads accordingly. Marketers keep a check on age, gender, income, and also education qualification. Displaying Ads based on this target information helps in engaging real-audience then than just increasing the number of views. For example, it helps to identify the audience that will want to take the online casino quiz.

Behavioral

What people are searching over the internet, which pages they visit regularly, their interest areas, etc., are falls under Behavioral targeting. It's quite meaningful to show ads based on online behavior, search pattern, or browsing history, otherwise, there is no point in showing a comb ad to a bald person.

Cross-device

For showing Ads, the audience can also be targeted based on the devices they switch to access the internet. To make it more clear to our readers, let us take the example of 'Tom' again.

Suppose 'Tom' has access to a website from his laptop and watches an ad there. Now that he is on the go, he used the mobile phone browser to visit the website again. Under cross-device targeting, 'Tom' will see the same or similar ads again on his mobile phone. The same can be vice versa as well.

Retargeting

This is a very effective targeting strategy and boosts the results more than 4 times. Retargeting simply means showing Ads on different websites and apps once a user searches for any product, celebrity, video, or anything and everything.

Well, Ads are always annoying but they are the medium to reach out to the public at large. Talking about programmatic advertising, it is totally about your business vision and goals.

Benefits of Programmatic Advertising

In the current scenario where the internet is easily accessible through your mobile phone and is affordable too, there is no lack of channels for marketing and advertising. This is why digital marketing is flourishing more with each passing day. Programmatic advertising is the most preferred technique for showing Ads. It creates excellent opportunities through taking advantage of targeting capabilities. Here we are putting together some more benefits of programmatic advertising.

Specific Quality Audience

Relevancy is very important. The Ads which are going to show the audience must be relevant to them otherwise all the efforts will be in vain. You can't reach out to each and everyone, which is also not essential. What important is to reach people for whom Ads are relevant and matter. This will lead to meaningful and quality impressions.

In-depth Targeting

Showing your Ads to everyone is useless. So, there has to be a system to identify the right audience to show them the right Ads at right time. Right? Programmatic Ads buying and selling make sure in-depth targeting capabilities (Already discussed above) so that out of millions, your Ad is displayed in front of the target audience only.

Automated

The entire process of buying, selling, and showing Ads in programmatic Marketing is automated. This means a higher ROI will be expected. All you need to do is figure out the campaign and Ad space. The rest will be the job of DSP and SSP.

Highly Efficient

As per the Bug Daddy's of the marketing field, it is being said that Programmatic marketing has proved highly efficient. In-depth targeting, selective audience, increased ROI, and better control over who will see your Ads makes it happen.

Real-time Observation

Things are now getting data-driven. According to guest author Alex Lysak, Without data analytics, companies are blind and deaf. It is therefore great to have all the minor and major statistics of your advertising campaign on your screen. Programmatic advertising provides for all the measurements like how many impressions come on your Ad, how many ads are converted into leads, to whom the ads are being shown, etc. All these data and statistics, including gambling addiction statistics, help you in making better plans for the future.

Wrap Up

Marketing is a very important and best medium to promote any business, service, products, events, etc. And if it is done right, the ultimate goals will be achieved. Programmatic Advertising is the new talk of the town and we hope that all your questions about it will be answered.