Programmatic Advertising: Reach Your Target Audience with Greater Precision
What Is Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic advertising is an algorithmic process of buying and selling ad inventory in real-time across a network of media, information, and entertainment websites and apps. Rather than a direct buy, where an advertiser places an insertion order with a publisher, programmatic enables advertisers to place many buys across many sites and apps, all in real-time.
This buying style is made possible with demand-side platforms (DSPs). These platforms use complex mathematical formulas that evaluate advertising goals, inventory data, third-party consumer data, ideal ad formats, bidding preferences, and consumers’ online behavior patterns to create an efficient, cost-effective buying strategy.
Real-Time Bidding: What’s That?
Just like it sounds, real-time bidding automates the buying of ad space in real-time based on information gathered about the page and the user. This information is passed to an ad exchange, where ad inventory is sold to advertisers via auction.
How Real-Time Bidding Works
It’s as easy as 1, 2, 3, 4:
- Advertisers decide which audiences they want to target with their ads based on audience data, existing customers, or new prospecting audiences.
- When a website user visits a web page, information about that visitor is reported back to the ad exchange.
- If the website user matches the target audience defined by the advertiser, the advertiser will then enter an auction, competing against other ads for the same audience.
- The ad with the highest bid is then shown to that website user on the site during that user’s visit.
This whole process occurs in milliseconds, millions of times a day all across the web, mobile, and in-app.Hyper-Targeting Powered by Data
Programmatic advertising allows advertisers to reach a relevant audience with greater precision due to automated bidding based on real-time data. This kind of data-driven targeting is not possible with traditional or linear advertising that’s bought direct, or ahead of the user’s action. The more targeted and thoughtfully the campaign is built, the more engagement and better performance for the advertiser.