Programmatic Advertising Tips
Take Audience Segmentation Into Consideration
Programmatic advertising can push your ads right in front of your target audience at the right time.
Moreover, these ads give you a wider choice of channels, ad formats, and devices. That said, it allows a greater choice of audience segmentation. And it is not limited to demographic targeting or channel-specific targeting.
So, with programmatic advertising, you must drill down to include:
- Psychographic segmentation – Focussing on the interests and preferences of your target audience.
- Technographic Segmentation – How an audience interacts with technology and their choice of interaction channels.
- Demographic Segmentation – The set of variables like age, gender, qualifications, etc.
- Purchase Potential – The buying habits and potential of a particular audience group.
- Life Events – Set audience targeting based on life events (anniversaries, birthdays, promotions, etc.)
Creating several audience segments for programmatic advertising allows you to employ A/B testing. This opens a wider room for experimentation and optimization.
For example:
If you own a tourism agency, you might want to explore different types of audience segmentations:
- The people who have searched for travel packages recently
- The people who have married recently or have an upcoming life event (anniversaries, birthdays, etc.)
- The people who have visited your site or one of your competitor's sites recently
- The people who have listed traveling and tourism-related interests on their social handles
You can plan high-conversion programmatic advertising across several channels based on these segments.
You can use Google Analytics to perform audience segmentation:
Buy Ad Spaces Relevant to Your Campaign Goals
While programmatic advertising allows you to leverage automation, you must be wary of your ad placements. You might fail to draw the right value without a pre-defined goal and aligned ad spaces.
So, before you leap toward programmatic advertising, you must list your campaign goals.
You might want to grow your brand awareness, gain email subscribers, draw website traffic, gain direct conversions/inquiries, etc.
Moreover, your goal might be to inform your audience about a new offering or drive footfall to your store.
Each of these goals might harmonize with a specific type of programmatic tactic and audience targeting.
For instance, if your campaign aims to drive direct sales, you must plan to retarget ad spaces.
Meanwhile, if your campaign aims to grow brand familiarity, you must buy ad units on platforms with high viewability.
Your programmatic partner can help you assess the most rewarding ad spaces based on your campaign's objective. Your partner also helps you avoid platforms that support fraud impressions.
Thus, a well-defined campaign objective helps you attract relevant value from your ads.
You can analyze the performance of your ad units using Google Ads:
Check Your Ad Placements for Brand Reputation
Can you risk publishing your brand's ad alongside extremist or degrading content?
The programmatic marketplaces have access to an extensive number of publishing platforms. And while you leverage programmatic advertising, there are chances that your ads may land on some unwanted platforms.
And so, it is essential to assess your ad publishing platforms. You can create a list of platforms and industry verticals you wish to exclude from your ad publishing network.
Moreover, you can define the list of platforms or verticals where you might want to showcase your ads.
An experienced programmatic partner might help you find programmatic platforms with verified publishing sites.
Today, most brands preserve their reputation by preferring private marketplaces over open marketplaces.
Though the programmatic PMP are more expensive, they help you access premium inventory.
Here's an example of a bad ad placement:
Do Your Due Diligence to Sort the Best Marketing Channels
Multi-channel targeting remains one of the most rewarding benefits of programmatic advertising.
You can programmatically showcase your ads across desktop, mobile sites, video platforms, audio, mobile apps, native, TV, etc.
However, with a wider choice of channels, you need to put extensive thought into the channels you choose.
Your choice of channels decides your campaign performance and your campaign budget.
For instance
The CPM will be low if you showcase display ads on the desktop or mobile platform. However, with these channels, you might fail to generate a significant number of clicks.
Meanwhile, if you plan to leverage video platforms, your video ads will cost high CPM. However, these ads have a high brand recall value and engagement potential.
Similarly, when you wish to draw high conversion through retargeting, you might want to employ cross-platform ads. Here, you can choose to show your ads across several channels/devices during different phases of the customer journey.
Thus, pinning the right channels help you meet your specific campaign objective. And this translates into superior value from your programmatic advertising campaigns.
You can use StackAdapt to run cross-platform ads:
Optimize Targeting with Data Layer Segmentation
Programmatic advertising has unveiled a huge potential to reach the most precisely targeted audience easily.
Using Big Data and multi-channel audience segmentation has added to the benefit of programmatic advertising.
Now advertisers can segment their target audience in terms of several data layers. And each of these data layers narrows down the audience to refine the targeting.
For instance,
Let's say you wish to target a specific audience searching for wedding dresses.
Here you can narrow down your audience through data layer segmentation. The possible data layers include:
- 1st - The first segment would include all the audience that has added updates about their wedding (life event). This data combines with the demographic data and the apps on the user's smartphones.
- 2nd – The next layer of segmentation targets the audience that has done searches related to wedding dresses. They might have also engaged with content related to wedding dress ideas online and on social media. You can combine this with the data related to their location history.
- 3rd – The third layer of segmentation narrows down to the audience that has visited the sites selling wedding dresses.
- 4th – The fourth layer further narrows down to the audience that has recently interacted with your ads or visited your sites. This becomes your retargeting list.
Here's a screenshot of the third layer - ads targeting visitors of a website:
Plan Thoughtful A/B Testing Methods
Programmatic advertising offers you the perks of automated targeting, multi-channel publishing, and real-time bidding.
However, without proper segmentation, it may scale quickly enough to exhaust your budget without any gain.
What's manageable is the way you leverage data insights to optimize your targeting. And the old & effective tactic that comes in handy is A/B testing.
With the proliferating number of targeting & segmentation options in programmatic advertising, you can plan several A/B tests.
The type of A/B tests might include:
- Test between the private marketplace and open exchange marketplaces
- Test between the digital display and video/audio platforms
- Test between different types of audience segmentation, etc.
The A/B tests will inform you about the most rewarding campaign types. And you can further allocate a higher budget to these campaigns and optimize them.
Google AdSense allows you to run A/B tests:
Assess the Deep Campaign Metrics to Optimize the Campaigns
Rather than other advertising forms, programmatic media offers more insights into campaign performance. Moreover, you can harness deeper data insights from 3rd party analytics tools.
The detailed view into the campaign metrics unveils important learning like:
- The accuracy of your bids
- The reach (impressions) and CTR of your ads
- Cost per lead and CPM of your ads
All these insights will further answer crucial queries like:
- Did you choose the right audience segment?
- Does a particular channel work efficiently for your business?
- Did you reach the audience in the right phase of their buying journey?
- Which devices/platforms drive rewarding clicks & engagement for your business?
The bottom line remains to fine-tune your ad campaigns by leveraging performance insights.
Here's a screenshot of Google AdSense showing ad performance insights:
Try Rich Media Advertising Campaigns with Data Insights
The multi-channel advertising capabilities of programmatic platforms give you wider access to rich media ads.
Rich media ads, including images, interactive HTML5 ads, video, audio, etc., have high engagement potential.
You can promote these ads across different devices and platforms with real-time bidding.
These rich media ads deliver a higher reach and better engagement potential for several domains.
Moreover, advertisers can get insights into the reach and ROI potential of these ads through data platforms.
Data collected through programmatic ads gets accumulated in data management platforms. Advertisers can leverage this data through third-party tools. And these tools can forecast the potential impressions, clicks, and conversions for your ads.
These insights help you with making data-backed decisions.
Here's an illustration of a standard display and rich media ad:
Build High-Quality Audience with CRM Data Integration
Though programmatic tactics help you reach a huge audience database, you must also consider CRM data.
CRM data integration allows you to accumulate crucial customer data. And you can use this CRM data to create a high-quality lookalike audience.
This data helps you look beyond the current audience database. And you get a chance to reach an audience similar to what has worked for you previously.
You know the behavioral characteristics of this audience and the channels where they engage with your ads. Now, you can show engaging offers and discounts to this audience and drive high conversions.
Further, you can unveil newer avenues by aligning your CRM data with programmatic advertising. You can maximize your ad returns with cross-channel interactions and better data insights.
With CRM data integration, you can create valuable customer personas like this:
Leverage Data for Personalized Targeting
As per a study, 83% of customers were willing to share their data for a personalized shopping experience.
That said, customers love personalized ads and engage readily with them.
Moreover, programmatic advertising makes personalized ad targeting all the more accessible.
- You can segment your audience based on the customer journey.
- Segregate the audience based on their choice of platforms
- Employ demographic, technographic, psychographic, and life-event-based segmentation
- Use CRM data to create a lookalike audience and for direct targeting
- Use previous visitors' data for retargeting
You can make the ad targeting option exceptionally personalized by choosing multiple channels, devices, and ad formats.
You can create ads for multiple channels like Facebook and Instagram using Mailchimp:
Assess Customer Journey for Better Customer Experience
Programmatic advertising lets you connect with your audience at the right time in their customer journey.
Moreover, it allows you to create a lead-generation funnel. Thus encouraging your target audience to slide down the funnel smoothly.
For instance,
If your target audience is in the awareness stage, you might want to attract them to your website. And you might want to do this through display ads.
Meanwhile, if your audience has previously shown interest in a similar offering, you can pitch them an offer for direct sales.
Next, if your audience has interacted with your ad to visit your site, you can retarget them on another channel.
This approach helps you move your audience down the conversion funnel through cross-channel advertising. The personalized experience created through these ads translates into high ROIs.
Here's a screenshot of Mailchimp's campaign wizard asking which audience the ad should target:
Draw Better Returns from Real-time Mobile Programmatic Advertising
Mobile programmatic advertising has been earning superior reach and conversions to advertisers today.
Mobile advertising is on an upward trajectory, whether on social channels, mobile sites, apps, audio & video platforms, or native channels.
And mobile programmatic advertising allows you to buy the best mobile ad inventory in real-time.
However, it is important to understand that common ad formats and placements might not work similarly on mobile and desktop devices. So, you must plan for mobile-optimized ad formats and placements to grasp better reach.
Moreover, you can conduct A/B tests for device-specific campaigns.
Basis technologies let you run mobile programmatic advertisements: