Your brand’s marketing department can develop a great ad. Still, the ad will only achieve its goal if it is placed on the right platforms and targeted at the right audience. There’s a solution–programmatic advertising, which has been a game-changer in the marketing industry for some time now and has proven efficient, measurable, and targeted.

You are in luck if you need to learn what programmatic advertising is and how it differs from traditional display marketing. This article will educate you on everything you need about programmatic advertising, how it works, and how it is used in places like OTT platforms and other media outlets.

What is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is a form of advertisement that uses automated technology and algorithmic tools to purchase media. In other words, programmatic advertising describes how ads are bought and sold in the advertising space by advertisers and advertising agencies.

Programmatic advertising is a sophisticated method of placing ads; it uses traffic data and online display targeting for impression driving, making better returns for advertisers. It can be an excellent tool for small business owners, no matter the business size. But this form of ad is only partially automated because you still need to prepare ad tags which require human effort manually. 

Thanks to programmatic advertising, marketers can optimize and improve their ad campaigns to achieve success. 

Benefits of Programmatic Advertising

Integrating programmatic advertising into marketing strategy has several benefits for your brand. Some of them include the following:

1. Reaching a Massive Audience

The most significant advantage programmatic advertising can offer your brand is the ability to reach a far and broad audience.  Due to a large amount of cross-platform inventory, programmatic advertising is the best strategy to purchase ad stock to reach a large audience.

2. Low-Cost and Efficient Brand Promotion

Programmatic advertising is one of today’s most cost-effective forms of marketing. You can reach your targeted audience, increase brand awareness, and boost sales of your products or service with a small budget.

3. Real-Time Data and Analysis

Another significant benefit of programmatic advertising is the ability to receive real-time data, which is possible because programmatic relies on live bidding. Real-time data means that your brand can make quick decisions and changes, making your business function proactively instead of reactively.

4. Taking Advantage of First and Third-Party Data

In a programmatic advertising strategy, data segments are available for advertisers. All the advertiser needs to do is upload first-party data through secure means and target those audiences directly, utilizing real-time bidding signals. There are also third-party segments advertisers can choose to focus on if first-party data is unavailable.

5. Cross-Device Campaign Technique

Advertisers mostly use programmatic advertising for brand awareness because of its accurate and widespread posting. This has made businesses overlook the true potential of programmatic advertising due to their craving for last-click success. The cross-device campaign helps your brand create initial awareness among the targeted audience using programmatic ads. When the cross-device campaign is used with programmatic ads, purchases are bound to occur, resulting in successful strategy implementation. programmatic advertising platform

How to Succeed Using Programmatic Advertising

Advertisers must understand what to do to succeed in using programmatic advertising. Here are tips on how to be successful at running a programmatic ad campaign:

• Know your marketplace. Study the new marketing style you are venturing into and understand the terms and how It works.
• Set the goal you want to achieve using the programmatic form of advertising.
• Even though it’s programmatic (which means it relies on machines and algorithms), it still requires a skilled marketer to plan and control its use.
• Shield your brand from false news, as programmatic advertising can display your ad on sites or platforms known for fake news. Ensure you constantly update and monitor your demand side blocklist to avert this.
• Be careful of programmatic ad fraud, not approving deals that look too good to be true because you are fixed on reaching your audience. 
• Privacy is another issue you must be on the lookout for. Ensure your ads comply with privacy regulations on mobile or connected TV trends.

Types of Programmatic Platforms

There are three major types of programmatic platforms, and they include:

• Sell-side Platform (SSP): These are also called supply-side platforms. Publishers and agencies can sell their ad impressions to brands in real time. These platforms include both ad exchangers and demand-side platforms.
• Demand-side platforms (DSP): This programmatic platform enables advertisers to buy ad inventory across many platforms at once
• Ad exchanges: This is how the sell-side platform flows its ad inventory to the demand-side media. Therefore, the demand-side platform connects to an ad exchange, where the ad price is not static but based on how competitive the ad inventory is.

How Much Does Programmatic Advertising Cost?

Programmatic advertising is one of the least expensive forms of marketing, and it can work well on relatively small budgets. Most people mistake programmatic advertising for a fortune 500 company advertising strategy. But all businesses, either large or small, can benefit from programmatic advertising.

Programmatic advertising inventory is purchased based on cost per thousand impressions (CPM). The price per impression is usually set between $0.50-$2.00. But the cost per impression can be hiked based on some factors, which are: 

• The demand-side platform you chose
• The audience you want to reach
• The rate of competitiveness in that marketplace
• The greater the target audience for your ad

So, budget is not a constraint to stop you from utilizing programmatic advertising for your business. 

Conclusion

Knowing your way around programmatic advertising will help your marketing division build a long-lasting successful marketing strategy that boosts business sales and brand awareness.

If you are new to the market, make sure whatever strategy you use integrates programmatic advertising into it. Also, ensure you understand the features and works of each media platform, so your programmatic approach can succeed.

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