What is programmatic advertising for dummies and how does it work?
Before answering the question, what is programmatic advertising, it should be noted that it is not a separate type of advertising, but rather a method of its promotion.
Programmatic advertising is a method of advertising on a platform that allows you to accurately determine the audience to be shown.
Now let’s explain it simply. When every user enters a website or any other digital platform, he sees advertising banners, videos. Usually, advertisers pay a fixed amount for their placement and have no control over the broadcast to the target audience. Programmatic advertising makes it possible to show this same banner only to the target audience, which greatly increases coverage and makes the campaign effective.
This trend in advertising has taken a big step toward automating advertising on the Internet. Now ad buyers don’t have to search for numerous partners to place their ads. It’s enough to use programmatic advertising!
How does programmatic advertising work?
Two parties are involved in the placement of any advertising campaign: the buyer and the seller. It is not about the material for publication, but the place where it is broadcast.
The algorithm for programmatic advertising looks like this:
- User visits the site.
- The ad is placed.
- Advertisers best suited to the viewer’s request are selected.
- Advertising place is played out between all suitable advertisers.
- An advertisement is published.
- The viewer goes to the advertiser’s site.
As you can see, this procedure is very similar to an auction.
Banners or short commercials are most often used for placement. In this matter, it is very important to interest the client and quickly convert it into a customer.
Programmatic systems essentially select the right viewer for the advertiser by its geolocation, gender, age or interests.
Pros and cons of programmatic advertising
Of course, there is no better method of advertising. Programmatic advertising is no exception: it has several pros and a few cons.
The first advantage is the direct interaction with the publishing platform. Now the advertiser does not need to search for an agency or involve many sites. This saves a lot of time and budget.
The second advantage is that you pay for effective shows. When you place a banner on a site without engaging programmatic advertising, the buyer purchases placement and can’t filter viewers. Here the ad is shown to the target audience, and therefore the campaign works better.
The third is that the ad is shown on different sites through one service. It will find your potential buyer wherever he is.
Targeting is also one of the pros. For the selection of the target audience, the customer can use many parameters (location, age, gender, active time of use). Before this stage, it is necessary to conduct research and determine the target audience. Subsequently, the analytics of shows from the service is available. In fact, you delegate the advertising to the robot, and you can direct the forces in another direction.
The negative sides of programmatic advertising are not so numerous. The main one is the site for placement. The advertiser should be interested not only in quantity but also in quality, because there may be unscrupulous platforms.
What can it affect? First of all, the reputation of the brand. Also, the ads may simply be skipped. It’s easy to avoid this problem, because sellers can block such sites. The main thing is to notify them and pass the data.
In general, programmatic advertising is a great way to buy traffic. To implement such a tool, you need to do research to get to know your consumer better. The rest of the work will be done for you by the system.