There are a wide range of marketing strategies that can be leveraged into digital marketing campaigns, including sophisticated ways to target wide or small audiences, as long as it makes sense for the particular business. A specific kind of marketing strategy with exceptional targeting capabilities that can be implemented is programmatic advertising. Programmatic advertising is the automated buying and selling of online advertising that utilizes artificial intelligence instead of human negotiations. Programmatic advertising is purchased and placed by using software as opposed to manual methods of negotiating and requesting individual placements. 

Targeting

One of the major benefits of programmatic advertising is its precise targeting capabilities. Going down the sales funnel, advertisements can be targeted based on geography, context, behavior, geofencing, keyword search targeting, and retargeting. Targeting is important in programmatic advertising so that advertisers only pay for ads that will be delivered to the right people at the right time based on the sales funnel and customer journey. With the technological advantages of targeting tools, it allows for programmatic advertisements to be precise, rather than using a “spray and pray” method of not knowing if advertisements will reach a business’ target audience or not. 

Benefits

Programmatic advertising is very beneficial as it offers numerous advantages including:

• Efficiency – Automation can save significant amounts of time by eliminating redundant tasks such as placing bids and requesting ad space. 
• Transparency – Advertisers are provided with an abundance of information regarding when and where their ads are placed such as time of day, device type, creative size, audience, browser, and much more.
• Increased Reach – Automation searches a large list of sites to determine the perfect placements for ads that advertisers would never be able to manually look up.
• Improved ROI – Programmatic advertising has the capability to improve ad performance through targeting, reporting and optimization, which saves time and money, improving the ROI. 

Types of Programmatic Ads

There are a few different kinds of programmatic advertisements. Display ads are visual-based digital ads that may contain images, videos, text and audio in addition to coming in various formats. Search ads are another form of programmatic advertisements. Search ads appear after users search terms on search engines, unlike display ads which show up as the users browse various websites. Both search ads and display ads are a form of programmatic advertisements, along with voice ads, video ads, CTV ads, digital audio ads, etc. 

How to Bid on Programmatic Advertisements

So, how does programmatic advertising exactly work? With it happening in less than a second, it can be a little tricky to comprehend. To help understand better, we’ll explain the few steps it takes for programmatic advertisements to serve relevant ad impressions to their target audiences. These steps includes:

1. When a customer lands on a publisher’s website, the publisher will then put an ad impression up for auction through bidding and one or more SSPs. An SSP, or sell-side platform is a technology platform that enables web publishers to manage their advertising inventory, fill it with ads and receive revenue. On the other hand, a DSP or demand-side platform is a type of software that allows an advertiser to buy advertising with the help of automation.
2. Next, the DSP will enter a bid on behalf of an advertiser for the impression based on the campaign’s strategies, budget, creative sizes and a few other factors. 
3. The publisher automatically assigns impressions to the winning bidder, which would be the DSP offering the highest bid.
4. The ad will then instantly be served on the publisher’s website. 

Overall, programmatic advertisements are already extremely popular for numerous reasons, and will continually increase in popularity. If you would like to learn more about running programmatic advertisements for your business, our digital team at Follow The Eyes would be more than happy to have a conversation. Call us today!