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Programmatic Marketing FAQs
B2B programmatic marketing campaigns can help you effectively reach your target audience through various channels. By integrating programmatic marketing with other tactics like content syndication and managed email, you can enhance the quality and results of your B2B campaigns. Whether you are considering adding programmatic to your marketing strategy or already using it, you may find this programmatic marketing campaigns 101 guide helpful. It provides answers to commonly asked questions about programmatic marketing.
B2B Programmatic Marketing Campaigns 101
B2B Programmatic Marketing Campaigns
What is programmatic advertising?
Programmatic advertising is an automated way of buying and selling advertising inventory, enabling brands or agencies to purchase ad impressions on publisher sites or apps within milliseconds. These ads are intelligently directed toward properties that have the greatest potential to deliver the best results at a price point that optimizes your spend in real time. It allows you to target people through the digital channels they spend their time on like mobile, CTV, and online video.
What is Anteriad programmatic?
Anteriad programmatic is a managed, programmatic ad targeting and delivery solution. The solution is unique in that it’s powered and optimized by our rich audience data, buyer intent data and defined buying groups to drive increasingly better digital engagement.
Anteriad maintains its own programmatic trading desk within the programmatic team to assist customers in achieving their marketing goals and objectives through selecting tactics, recommending custom target audiences, the precise acquisition of digital media and optimizing those programs to drive increasingly better results.
How is programmatic different from other channels?
Programmatic stands out because you can zero in on specific target audiences and reach them through several channels like web, social, and connected TV (CTV). Scale is a major benefit of programmatic as you typically get much higher reach than you would with buying ad space directly from a publisher. With programmatic you’re easily able to check your ad performance to see what’s working and optimize for better performance.
Why should I use programmatic?
Programmatic can be used as a standalone tactic to increase brand awareness or alongside other tactics as part of an integrated campaign to improve lead quality and amplify your campaign results. Programmatic layers seamlessly into multichannel strategies to reach your target audience across a variety of channels to keep your brand top of mind so they move down the funnel faster when they’re ready to buy. It’s also a very cost-effective way to reach your audience compared to more traditional tactics like direct mail.
How do you justify programmatic to your CMO?
Selling programmatic advertising to your Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) involves a strategic approach that emphasizes the alignment of programmatic advertising capabilities with the company's broader marketing objectives. Here's how you can do it:
Share how programmatic supports your brand’s business objectives. Explain how programmatic allows you targeted reach in the channels where your audience is spending time today, like across the web and on CTV.
Programmatic enables you to reach your target audience very efficiently and measure that effect with precision. You can layout an effective retargeting plan to your CMO. Once you’ve driven your audience to your website, you can also use programmatic to retarget them with messaging that can address different stages of the buying journey as they come back to your site and take action.
Programmatic is budget friendly. Explaining how programmatic is a proven cost-effective tactic for driving website traffic while also building brand can also help you convince your CMO to sign off on programmatic.
Can you also use programmatic for cross-sell, upsell, and ABM?
Yes, programmatic fits well into these strategies. You can target upsell, cross-sell and ABM lists. We recommend a minimum of 500 companies (or 10,000 contacts) but can review on a per-list basis to determine how many contacts are available.
Why does having the best data matter for programmatic?
Because with better data you get results like a 52% higher CTR. We ran a test with Causal IQ to prove how our Neutronian-certified data stacks up against non-certified data from other providers. Our data drove a 52% higher click-through rate and a 52.5% lower cost per acquisition
How do you reach your target audience efficiently?
Reaching your B2B target audience comes down to having the right data. You need to work with a trusted data partner who can provide in-depth audience data to reach your target audience effectively. Anteriad offers prebuilt and custom audiences based on demographics, firmographics, intent data and more to help reach your targets.
What are typical targeting capabilities?
Audiences can be targeted in many ways like based on behavioral data, interests, contextual data, technographic data, firmographic data, demographic data, geographic data, custom segments, retargeting and lookalike audiences. You may use your own first-party data as well as data from second- and third-party sources.
What is a lookalike audience?
Lookalike audiences are a group of people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services based on the similarity of their characteristics to your existing best customers.
What is an affinity audience?
Affinity audiences are users grouped by general interests, behaviors, and lifestyle information. This is useful for raising awareness and driving consideration among groups that have a strong interest in your products.
What is an intent-based audience?
An intent-based audience is a group of buyers who are actively researching products or services and considering buying something like what you offer as they browse pages across the web. Intent data uses online activity to identify in-market audiences so you can reach the right customers at the right time.
What is retargeting?
Retargeting is a strategy that targets those who have previously visited your site to remarket or reengage them with relevant ads. An example you’ve probably experienced is shopping for a product on the web and then being exposed to ads for the same online store when you visit other websites.
It can be a powerful tool to increase brand loyalty and allows you to zero in on users who have shown intent.
What is a tracking pixel?
A tracking pixel is a snippet of code, which is placed on the webpages for tracking or remarketing purposes. Different types of pixels include universal pixels to track interactions, retargeting pixels to collect information for remarketing campaigns, and conversion pixels to help optimize campaigns for conversions.
What are the main programmatic advertising channels?
- Display Ads
- Video
- Social Ads
- Audio Ads
- Native Ads
- CTV- Connected TV
- OTT - Over the Top TV
What is native advertising?
Native ads are online ads that match the look and feel of publisher content. They appear as part of the typical browsing experience and engage the viewer with relevant ads that flow into the surrounding content seamlessly. A few types of native ads include search ads, recommendation widgets on website pages and paid blog posts.
Since native ads are implemented in a way that allows the ad to appear seamless within the content, it reduces the negative impact on the user. This means:
- Less ad blindness
- A better storytelling canvas
- More engagement
What is the difference between instream and outstream video?
In-stream video creatives are played in video players on web pages. They are played before, in the middle of, or after other video content. Outstream video is played as a user scrolls through a different kind of content like text on a blog.
What are interstitial ads?
An interstitial creative is an ad that either floats on top of a publisher's page on desktop or fills the screen on a mobile device. It is also known as a floating or prestitial ad. Interstitial ads are interactive, full-screen ads that cover the interface of their host app or site. Since these ads appear between content, they're placed at natural transition points or breaks, such as in between activities or game levels. Their full coverage is what differentiates them from other ad types, like pop-up, native, and banner ads.
What is the difference between OTT and CTV?
- Connected TV specifically refers to televisions that have access to an internet connection and can load or stream digital content. This includes Smart TVs, but it can also include standard TVs that are connected to the internet via smart devices including gaming consoles like Xbox and PlayStation and dongles like Roku or Chromecast.
- OTT refers to any TV-like content delivered over the internet that can be accessed from any internet-capable app or device.
What is GDPR?
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy in the European Union and the European Economic Area. It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas. GDPR applies to any organization operating within the EU, as well as any organization outside of the EU which offers goods or services to customers or businesses in the EU. That ultimately means that almost every major corporation in the world needs a GDPR compliance strategy.
Under the terms of GDPR, not only do organizations have to ensure that personal data is gathered legally and under strict conditions, but those who collect and manage it are obliged to protect it from misuse and exploitation, as well as to respect the rights of data owners.
GDPR protects:
- Basic identity information such as name, address, and ID numbers
- Web data such as location, IP address, cookie data and RFID tags
- Health and genetic data
- Biometric data
- Racial or ethnic data
- Political opinions
- Sexual orientation
What is CCPA?
The California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018 (CCPA) gives consumers more control over the personal information that businesses collect on them. CCPA protects the rights of consumers, including:
- Access to information around the data businesses collect from them and how it will be used
- The right to delete personal data collected from them
- The ability to opt out of sale and sharing of their personal information
- Protection from discrimination for using CCPA rights
What is ad fraud?
Ad fraud (also referred to as Invalid Traffic) is concerned with theory and practice of fraudulently representing online advertisement impressions, clicks, conversion or data events to generate revenue. While ad fraud is more generally associated with banner ads, video ads and in-app ads, click fraud has been associated with search marketing, mobile advertising, and conversion fraud with affiliate marketing. Ideally, you want to look for less than 2% ad fraud. At Anteriad, we're able to keep programs 99% fraud-free.
Types of invalid traffic:
- General Invalid Traffic (GIVT): The least harmful form of invalid traffic. This traffic comes from crawlers and bots from benign sources. Examples include data centers, search engine crawlers, or proxy traffic coming through a virtual private network (VPN). This traffic doesn’t attempt to mimic human behavior. Therefore, GIVT isn’t considered fraud.
- Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT): SIVT is outright fraudulent traffic that tries to appear legitimate. This traffic avoids the simple patterns of GIVT and can be a serious threat to traffic quality.
What is viewability?
Ad viewability is the concept of how visible ads on a website or mobile app are to users. For an ad to be considered “viewed,” at least 50% of the banner or creative must display on screen for more than one second, as defined by the Internet Advertising Bureau's (IAB) standards.
How do you manage brand safety in programmatic?
Brand safety refers to protecting your brand's online reputation. Our programmatic team prioritizes brand safety during campaign setup to ensure your brand is not exposed to sensitive categories, content, or webpages that could harm the brand’s reputation online. Anteriad ensures brand safety as a standard in all programmatic managed services campaigns.
What are the key metrics you should use to evaluate a B2B programmatic campaign, and how do you know what 'good' is?
Key metrics you will use to evaluate your campaign are click-through rate (CTR), cost per thousand (CPM), cost per acquisition (CPA), conversions and impressions. While CPM and impressions will fluctuate depending on how much you invest into programmatic, you can look to hit the industry benchmark of .04% to .08% CTR. Our team uses the .08% benchmark because we are consistently able to beat it for our customers.
What are common metrics to look for in a B2B programmatic campaign?
- Impressions: An impression is counted when an ad is shown on a user's device. It gives you an idea of the potential reach of your ads, but it doesn't necessarily mean that the user has seen or interacted with the ad.
- Click-through rate (CTR): CTR is the ratio of users who click on an ad to the number of impressions. A higher CTR indicates a more engaging ad.
- Cost per click (CPC): CPC is based on impressions and CTR. It’s the cost you pay for each click on your ad. This metric is relevant for campaigns focused on driving traffic to a specific website or landing page.
- Cost per thousand (CPM): The cost per thousand impressions.
- Frequency: Display ad frequency is calculated by taking the total number of impressions and dividing by the number of unique users who viewed your ad. For CTV, you divide total impressions by the number of unique households.
- Video starts: The total number of times the first segment of the video creative was downloaded and started.
- Video skips: The total number of times a user skipped the video. Use this metric for reporting when buying skippable inventory.
- Video Completion Rate: The ratio of video completions to impressions, expressed as a percentage.
- View-Through Conversions: This conversion represents when a user views your ad and does not interact with it – but they went on to convert (such as visit your website, start a demo, or add to cart) later.
- Cost-per completed view: CPCV or cost per completed view is used to measure video ads and is calculated by dividing the total spend by the number of completed views.
- Cost per acquisition (CPA): This metric measures the cost of acquiring a customer. It’s calculated by dividing the total campaign cost by the number of conversions or acquisitions.
- Conversion rates: The percentage of users who completed a certain action out of the total number of users who clicked on the ad. Conversions could be sales, sign-ups, or other goals you set at the beginning of your campaign.
- Ad fraud rate: The percentage of fraudulent or non-human traffic within a campaign. Ad fraud can artificially inflate metrics and waste advertising budgets. If your ad fraud rate is too high, you may want to consider shifting your strategy to other channels to prevent spam traffic. You should aim to keep ad fraud under 2%.
- Return on ad spend (ROAS): This is calculated by dividing the revenue generated from the ad campaign by the cost of the campaign.
Want to learn more about Anteriad programmatic marketing campaigns?
There is a lot to think about when building your programmatic strategy. Refer to these FAQs as you’re making campaign decisions. Ready to get started? Talk to an expert about how adding Anteriad programmatic marketing to your integrated campaigns can enhance your current strategy and boost your results.