Programmatic technology is becoming one of the major revenue-generating streams in the digital advertising ecosystem. Gone were the days when programmatic was still jargon in the advertising world. It has gained immense prominence owing to its targeting capabilities and robust technology.

More and more advertisers and digital agencies are hopping on the bandwagon to make use of this technology. Advertisers are embracing its capability to secure maximum returns on their ad spend and digital agencies are relishing its targeting capabilities and building a constant revenue stream for their businesses by including programmatic in their media buying decks.

However programmatic is being accepted rather quickly, there’s a lot of information, tips, and tricks that most agencies or advertisers are either not aware of or do not pay much heed to. So in this article, we will be covering 6 such tips and tricks that will help digital agencies and advertisers make the most of their programmatic campaigns.

Suggested Read: How To Set Your Agency To Success With Programmatic Advertising

1. Choosing The DSP

A demand-side platform or DSP as it is commonly called is a platform that helps advertisers create and manage their programmatic campaigns. To run ideal campaigns has a lot to do with the platform they’re being created and managed on. While choosing a DSP, there are several factors to evaluate like technology, integrations, brand-safety mechanism, targeting options, reporting, costing, transparency, your relation with the platform team, etc.

It’s important to evaluate the targeting options any particular DSP is providing, brand-safety filters they have, the tools that are present for the bidding process, tracking progress, and fetching reports. Apart from that which inventories are available for you to target your ads at and most importantly, do you have human help in case you find yourself stuck in anything while working with the DSP. If you hire a digital agency everything mentioned here will be taken care of. However, if you opt for a self-serve DSP, make sure you’re well aware of the aspects listed here.

2. Targeting Audience

One of the highlighted features of programmatic technology is its unique targeting options. Given that, it’s important for advertisers to give considerable salience to launching perfectly targeted campaigns. Although it’s recommended to keep your audience wide, note that keeping your audience widely targeted is the key. You may have a wide audience, but they should be targeted well for the campaign to secure desired results.

You may choose from a variety of targeting options like Pincode level targeting, postal targeting, device/device ID targeting, geo-location targeting, etc. You can also target specific sites related to the product or service you’re targeting or categories that fall under that area. For eg, targeting sites related to finance and category of audience interested in a similar field for let’s say an advertisement related to insurance. Consider adding new users to your targeting list as this may help when launching remarketing campaigns for those who interacted or showed interest in your product or service.

3. Creating Engaging Ads

Programmatic advertising relies heavily on eye-catching visuals that can attract users’ attention by appealing to them. Use creative imagery, appropriate ad sizes, and attractive call-to-action. Don’t hold back from trying A/B testing to determine which of the creatives are working better with your audience than others and try to examine and follow similar content in the future. It is also important to note that creative approaches need to be different for different types of ads.

There are different ads like display, native, retargeting, video, etc and each format should have a varied approach specific to it. For example, display advertising by nature is visually attractive with bold call-to-action, and more. On the other hand, native ads are minimalistic in nature, unobtrusive, and usually informative. Here DCO (dynamic creative optimization) can be a great tool for marketers to adjust the creative content on the basis of real-time information.

Employing Proper Data

Data is one of the most important aspects of programmatic advertising. However from the tons of data, it’s important to derive insights, else you may be running your campaign on uninsightful data and it will be good as not running any campaign because your ad will not be seen by the ideal set of audience. The more your data is precise, the more the effectiveness of your campaign. With the help of the data, you can determine how to target, whom to target, predict the results or conversions that you will achieve, and so on.

Now there are broadly three types of data – first-party data, second-party data, and third party data. First-party data is the one that you as an advertiser collect and employ, second-party data is the one that is unpatented and collected from a partner, and third-party data is the one that is compiled by a DMP and can be transformed into custom segments. Combining all this data can help you target your audience well and hence enable better performance of the campaign.

Placing The Ad

The placement of ads is a crucial step and needs proper analysis. This involves determining which sites or apps are ideal for placing your ads. Note that decisions here should be made on the basis of the performance of the ad while appearing on a specific site and not the site itself. Data should be given priority while analyzing the sites or apps that are ideal for your product or service. While running programmatic campaigns, the goal is always to reach the user where they are present.

As long as the sites you’re placing your ads on are on your allowlist and do not have questionable content, it should always be judged from the perspective of how the performance is. While analyzing the performance, consider metrics like CPA, CPC, and CTR. If you’re receiving a lower percentage of CTR with a higher CPC or CPA, it’s recommended to remove the site or an app to allow the budget to move towards a relatively inexpensive side.

Optimizing The Campaign

Optimizing the programmatic campaign means enhancing the performance of the campaign based on real-time results. Even if it’s the first time that you’re running a programmatic campaign, you must have access to the previous campaigns’ data which you can leverage to better the performance of the campaign. It’s important to have your goals clear before launching the campaign so you can analyze the performance based on the KPIs effectively.

After the campaign is launched and has started gathering the data, you should look for areas like where your campaign is working relatively better – desktop or mobile. If you’re securing better results on mobile, why would you want to direct your ad spend towards mobile? The moment you start gathering data, be quick to respond to the performance and direct the campaign to where you’re clearly seeing better results.

Suggested Read: What Is Mobile Advertising & Why Is It Important?

Final Words
In this article, we summed some of the important tips and tricks you need to better a programmatic campaign. Although there may be multiple other factors that you may want to consider and those you’ll uncover once you start running your own campaign. However, the DSP you choose to work with influences the performance of the campaign considerably. We at IngeniousPlex offer a multitude of targeting options, a brand-safe environment, premium inventories, and lots more. To know more details, you may write to us at mktg@staging.ingeniousplex.com.