Programmatic Buying / Programmatic Advertising

What is Programmatic Buying?

Have you ever wondered how brands deliver targeted advertisements to users? The answer is: through Programmatic Buying/Advertising.

As opposed to its counterpart—Traditional Buying or Advertising (which uses traditional and offline methods of advertising such as billboards and print ads)—Programmatic Buying is an automated process of placing targeted advertisements in real-time on websites or apps. The main benefit of programmatic buying is that it optimizes marketing spend by targeting the right audience in real-time and reducing the overall advertising costs—significantly simplifying the advertising process for publishers and advertisers.

How does Programmatic Buying work?

Programmatic Buying uses algorithms and data in an automated fashion to buy ad inventory in real-time. This helps with determining the right audience (like specific segments of age and gender or interests like Games), ad placement (like types of ad sizes and formats), and cost in real-time, thus making targeting campaigns a lot more effective than manual or traditional forms of advertising.

Popular ad formats in programmatic buying are banners, video and native placements. Special platforms also allow audio ads and dynamic retargeting.

What is the main benefit of Programmatic Buying?

The main benefit of programmatic buying is that advertisers are able to analyze the effectiveness of their ads via data collection and analysis, and understand the end price. This is in stark contrast to traditional buying, which has unclear price formation and limited targeting options.

Mobile Programmatic: How are mobile apps and mobile websites different?

There are two different segments in mobile programmatic: mobile apps and mobile websites. Mobile apps generally provide the end user with more information compared to mobile websites. For example, most mobile apps have a name, category (i.e. Educational apps, Lifestyle apps, Gaming apps, etc), age limit, information on number of installs, rating, comments, etc. The fact that a mobile app is present in Google Play or App Store automatically signals that its content is compliant with the strict policies imposed by the respective companies, and is secure for users. This guarantees advertisers that the ads placed on the App Store or Google Play Store will not be positioned next to unwanted or inappropriate content, and it is more complicated to get such a security level with mobile websites.

It is important to constantly monitor and analyze the performance of programmatic campaigns using attribution and analytics platforms. Knowing what’s working, and what’s not in terms of ROI and using that information to optimize your advertising campaigns can help you scale your business.