programmatic ad buying - a tactical guide

Programmatic Ad BuyingA Tactical GuideNeeraj Mishra | Co-Founder, Mcounts [email protected] | +91-7799656664

Programmatic Ad Buying“Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to automate purchase of digitaladvertising in Real Time or otherwise, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs,human negotiations and manual insertion orders

Real-time bidding is a type of programmatic ad buying, but it isn’t theonly one. RTB refers to the purchase of ads through real-time auctions,but programmatic software also allows advertisers to buy guaranteedad impressions in advance from specific publisher sites. This method ofbuying is often referred to as “programmatic direct.”

Is Programmatic Ad buying,the same as real-timebidding?

Before programmatic ad buying, digital ads were bought and sold byhuman ad buyers and salespeople, which are expensive and unreliable.Programmatic advertising technology makes the ad buying systemmore efficient, and therefore cheaper.

Why does programmaticadvertising matter?

Efficiency

No, it’s not.

Tech Jargon Simplified

Ad Inventory: Amount ofad space a publisher has available to sell to anadvertiser

Programmatic Ad Buying: Real Time Bidding - How it works?

As webpage loads, if it has adspace on it that isavailable for Real Time Bidding (RTB) , informationabout webpage and user viewing is passed on toAD-Exchange An Ad-Exchange is where real-time auction

(in a milli-second) takes place. Ad-Xchangeauctions off available space to highestbidder.

Impression:A single unit of of ad spaceavailable.

Some impressions are more valuable dependingon particular website it appears, it's relevanceand likelihood that a user will click through onthe ad.

Price of impression is determined by what buyersare willing to pay in real time

On Advertiser's side: DSP's or Demand Side Platformis a fully automated piece of software that bids animpression from an Ad-Exchange. It also helps todecide which ad-impression to purchase.

Removes the need for Human Sales people,negotiation skills and a huge amount of time as adecision to bid on an impression is madeimmediately and the highest bidder wins

Strategic Phases of Lean Display Advertising

Build your Test Campaign

Analyze theData

Scale YourPerforming areas

Optimize YourCampaigns

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Strategic Phases of Lean Display AdvertisingPhase 1: Build your Test Campaign

Create various campaigns aimed at a variety of potential audiences to see how each responds. This is wherebaseline data is gathered for further analysis. There are several keys to the testing phase, the primary onesbeing:

Tracking: Track conversions or desiredactions (preferably with an associatedvalue).

In an ideal scenario, you’ll want to tracknot only conversions and revenue, butthe impact of campaigns on brandsearches, view-through conversions,bounce rate, landing page engagement,and even lifetime value.

Segmentation: Properly defining thescope of each campaign.

You can’t assume that audiences indifferent regions, age groups, or incomelevels will respond to the same ad, onthe same website, in the same way. Thisis why segmentation is important:control the variables to make for betterdata.

Wide variety of ads : Wide Varierty ofAds in your campaigns is the key toenabling good performancecomparisons.

If you create many nicely segmentedcampaigns, but they all use the samestandard banner ads, you miss theopportunity to split-test the impact ofmultiple ads with each of thoseaudiences.

Strategic Phases of Lean Display AdvertisingPhase 2: Analyze the Data

The second phase is where you measure, analyze, and learn from the data that was collected inthe first phase. In order to extract insights from your campaigns, digging into the data ondifferent levels is crucial.

Some key areas to analyze in this phase are the engagement and impact of below

Specific websites and placements ingeneral

Visitors from specific regions, on certaindevices, at certain times, etc.

Specific audiences in general

Your ads on a placement level, sitelevel, and in aggregate

Strategic Phases of Lean Display AdvertisingPhase 3: Optimize Your Campaigns

Once a proper set of data has been collected and analyzed, it’s time to cut the weak elementsfrom your campaigns and allocate more resources to the elements that are working. Optimization should really be viewed as a continual process of learning from the data andimproving campaigns over time

Disable or cut down certain elements — such asads, placements, or sites — if they are found tobe under-performing.

This allows the elements that perform well toreceive a larger share of resources, therebyimproving overall campaign effectiveness.

Another way of allocating more resources toelements and campaigns that work is byincreasing budgets, bid prices, and frequencycaps (incrementally) in order to drive morevolume.

Strategic Phases of Lean Display AdvertisingPhase 4 : Scale Your Performing areas

It is only after you have acquired real-world data (foreknowledge) in the above three phases that thetime becomes right to invest the effort and dollars into scaling your campaigns.

Buying display ads via RTB is an ideal way to gain knowledge and test out the performance of specificpublishers and audiences, without blindly committing thousands of dollars on high-CPM direct buys.Once you’ve discovered valuable placements, you can then also approach the publisher directly toreserve your own inventory on a guaranteed basis or increase your bids for specificdomain/publisher.

Caveat: While exploring direct buys, you may notice that CPM rates exceed a level that is feasible forreaching your performance goals — so always keep your key metrics in mind

Display Categories

Laptops/Desktopsrunning browsers likeChrome, Firefox etc.

Mobile Video

Desktop DisplayTactics

Desktop Display Tactics

Audience Targeting

Retargeting

Contextual Targeting

Site Buys


Re - TargetingRetargeting is a perfectexample of “audience buying,”which is to say: the marriage ofvast amounts of inventory withbehavioral targeting data.

The data for retargeting is collected by placing a smallchunk of code on your website or landing page, similar tohow you would add code for an analytics platform. Sincethis data comes from traffic that you control, it’s oftenreferred to as “first party” data.

With RTB one can evaluate and bid on each individualimpression and effectively buy audiences by matchingbehavioral cookie data with it, but also allows you to do soat a large scale, thanks to the massive reach of the RTBsupply side.

Another flavor of retargeting is “search retargeting,”which allows you to target audiences based on keywordsthey have searched for in the past. In other words, you cantarget users by intent (the same factor that made searchadvertising explode) but with display advertising


Audience TargetingSimilar to retargeting in that itrelies on cookie data to targetspecific audiences (as opposedto specific publishers)

instead of using one's own first-party data, we usebehavioral data from a third-party data company likeBlueKai, Exelate, Bizo, Lotame and so on.

Data from data companies is usually broken down intovery distinct segments like:gender, age group, household income, education level,relationship status, banking institution, or hundreds ofother specific demographic and psychographic categories.

Since it comes from a third party, there is normally a priceassociated with using this data (typically anywhere from$0.25 to $2.00 CPM) in addition to the cost of inventory.


Contextual Targeting

Choose to show your ads only onpages that pertain to a specifictopic or category. For example,you can show an advertisementfor rucksacks to people readinga page about backpacks!

Contextual data technology algorithmically analyzespages, and categorizes them by topic.

Like retargeting, it’s easy to get too narrow with yourtargeting criteria if you combine contextual targeting withtoo many other options like retargeting, demographictargeting, or too small of a geographic region.

Contextual targeting works best with text-rich publisherslike blogs, news sites, and forums (which also happen to bethe type of sites that have tons of pages on a wide varietyof topics).

Cost for contextual campaigns are marginally more than astandard Web campaign, with contextual fees rangingfrom $0.05-$0.10 CPM, in addition to the cost of inventory.


Site BuysOldest tactic for targeting display adcampaigns is to simply choose thepublishers you wish your ads toappear on

Mobile Display Tactics


Mobile RTB is a very exciting frontier at the moment. There are unique advantageswith mobile that allow for extremely precise location targeting, and in the nearfuture, extremely precise behavioral targeting that won’t depend on thepreviously-dominant cookie

Mobile App Mobile Web Hyperlocal


Most of the time people spend on their mobile devices is within apps. This is whymobile app inventory is among the most attractive inventory for advertisers:

it’s where most of the market attention is focused. Many app publishers also havevaluable first-party behavioral and demographic data that advertisers can use forenhanced targeting.

As a result, mobile app inventory is the highest priced segment of the mobileinventory spectrum.

Mobile App


Mobile optimized Web inventory is Not the regularly-rendered websites shrunkento the point of illegibility on a mobile screen with equally illegibleadvertisements, but properly-formatted pages designed for mobile devices.

This means your creatives will be shown in their proper mobile sizes, resulting in ahigher rate of viewability and engagement. Mobile Web inventory is similar tomobile app inventory in terms of creative sizes (320×50 primarily), but simply in aWeb environment rather than an app environment.

Mobile Web


Uses GPS coordinates and a specific radius to target a very precise area. This is made possibleby app publishers that have location-sharing capabilities for each impression.

For local businesses and events, hyper-local targeting allows for extremely novel adcampaigns. One example could be a local Real Estate campaign that targets a specificneighborhood based on its demographic profile. For entertainment districts, event promotionis another industry that could leverage the power of hyper-local ad targeting.

Imagine your target audience reading through their social news feed and seeing your ad for alimited-time promotion at an interesting establishment down the street, advertisers will beable deliver a relevant message to the right person at precisely the right place and time.

Hyper Local

Video Display Tactics


In Banner In Stream

Video ad campaigns over RTB are a relatively new frontier that allow advertisers to apply the sameprecise, impression-level targeting, but with video creatives and in native video environments.

In fact, video advertising is one of the fastest-growing segments of online advertising in terms ofdollars spent.

However, the two largest barriers to getting started with video are the slightly higher cost of inventoryand the resources necessary to produce the video ads.


In Banner

Video ads can also be served within standard IAB ad units, like the medium rectangle(300×250), which happens to be the most common.

There are also several attributes associated with video ad units, such as automaticaudio, audio on rollover, audio on click, and muted by default. The ad qualityrestrictions of each publisher ultimately dictate which of these audio options can beemployed.

The benefit of in-banner video ads is that they generally come at a fraction of the costof in-stream video ads. In fact, the cost of in-banner video is basically the cost oftraditional display inventory, and can be combined with most other display tactics.


In Stream

In-stream video ads allow you to serve up video ads (of 15 or 30 seconds) to either thebeginning (pre-roll), middle (mid-roll), or end (post-roll) of online videos (pre-roll being themost popular, by far).

This is the closest that a digital marketer can get to reproducing the same advertisingexperience as television, which makes it an appealing tactic for brand advertisers.

As a result, CPM rates for video inventory are currently the highest of all RTB inventory, withaverage rates hovering around $10 CPM.

General Targeting Criteria

Time of day Day of week Frequency Geo Location Operating System Device Browser

There are also general attributes associated with every impression that passes through RTBsystems, which are often layered with each of the tactics mentioned above. Some of theseoverarching targeting criteria include the below and are universal in nature.

They apply to each and every impression available to advertisers, and are generally safe tocombine with any of the larger tactics.

Targeting tactics are your tools in the programmatic world, and it’s always importantto understand the tools. When you know what tactics you have at your disposal, you

have a much better chance of choosing the right ones to meet your objectives.

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programmatic ad buying - a tactical guide

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