Whether you’ve previously run programmatic advertising or not, now is the time to think about it in terms of an integrated campaign. While it’s a powerful standalone tactic, coupling it with another like content syndication or managed email can boost the success of your marketing strategy.
Programmatic advertising is an automated way of buying and selling digital advertising. Whereas the traditional method includes requests for proposals, tenders, quotes and human negotiation, programmatic advertising enables brands or agencies to purchase ad impressions on publisher sites or apps within milliseconds.
Think of programmatic as a stock market of digital media where purchases are intelligently directed toward those properties that have the greatest potential to deliver the best results at a price point that optimizes spend in real time.
Programmatic advertising is an effective way to get in front of your next customer across the channels where they spend their time. Programmatic ads come in so many types and formats. Some examples include:
The types, formats and placements of your ads largely depend on the goal of your campaign and the audience you’re trying to reach.
Programmatic display advertising is such a powerful tool for B2B marketers because its performance can be monitored in real-time. With just a glance at a dashboard, marketers can know how many ads have been served and how many clicks have been generated.
The success of your programmatic advertising campaign can be easily measured and depends on the goals of your campaign. Metrics are vital in tracking individual tactics, but without the context of how each piece fits into the revenue strategy, metrics can be misleading. This is particularly true in B2B, where programmatic display is integral to virtually every phase of an account’s complex purchase journey.
The most basic of programmatic advertising metrics are total impressions served and the click-through rate (CTR) on those impressions. These are the building blocks of programmatic ad metrics.
You can think of these as the big four metrics – they are always relevant, although their importance to a specific campaign’s success depends on the customers’ purchase journey stage and what impact you’re trying to have on their decision process.
Some other metrics to monitor throughout our program are:
Metrics have vastly different significance, depending on whether you’re running a branding campaign or a transactional campaign.
Take, for example, CTR. If you’re trying to elevate brand awareness for an upcoming product launch, a short animation may well have all the impact you’re looking for, and CTR isn’t a make-or-break metric. If you’re running full video creative, CTR is even less significant. In fact, a very high CTR might indicate that your audience is a little too narrow for your goal.
However, if you’re looking to convert growing interest in your product launch into a spec sheet download, CTR becomes a far more critical indicator. It indicates how well you refined your audience by job role and additional targeting intelligence, including purchase intent. It’s no wonder B2B marketers get excited about tracking programmatic results.