How to Best Leverage Programmatic Technology

Maximizing Campaigns & Optimizing Your Budget

We’d all like our marketing campaigns to be maximally successful, increasing profitability by using every dollar effectively. While using programmatic technology to place ads can help you get more for your money, it needs to be done wisely — to ensure your campaigns are working their hardest and reaching their full potential. To catch that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, keep the following key processes in mind:

Define KPIs

Before determining your new marketing budget and embarking on a campaign, define measurable objectives and put key performance indicators (KPIs) in place. This puts your marketing efforts in context, allowing you to discuss goals with a programmatic advertising partner and determine what’s within reason, given your budget.

Target Your Ads

In order to capture valuable advertising opportunities, avoid making your ads too broad or too specific. Not every message works for every individual, and it’s important to get the “big picture” view of your target customers and understand who is most likely to click or to make a purchase.

Reaching an audience effectively requires learning about your chosen demographic, and creating buyer personas. Before launching your programmatic advertising campaign, you should take into consideration:

• Your audience’s preferred sites or apps
• Pricing
• Campaign length
• Frequency capping (how many times a consumer sees an ad)

Wait for It to Be Profitable

Stage 1 of a campaign involves investing a small amount, and then seriously evaluating the campaign’s performance using relevant analytics. Test and optimize; play around with your content, the frequency of the ads, and the time that the ads run. Once you have a better understanding of your audience, ad performance, and ad spend, you can tweak the campaign and make adjustments that optimize future earnings.

Stay Within Your Budget

Be advised: It’s smart to cap your spending and input a maximum sum that you’re able to spend during a defined time period — and set overspend mechanisms that pause your ad or campaign when you hit that amount. When a new time frame begins (daily, weekly, or monthly), the campaign will continue running again, until your budget is once again used up.

This type of budget control allows you to continue running campaigns long-term yet within your defined constraints. Of course, over time, you may opt to consider playing around with your budgetary limits — when you discover that a specific advertising strategy is working well.

Choose Your Platform Wisely

Make sure your Demand Side Platform (DSP), the system that allows you to manage multiple ad exchange and data exchange accounts through a single interface, can leverage first and third-party data across your entire investment and has access to the largest sources of cross-device inventory, including:

• Web
• Mobile Web
• Mobile app publishers
• Linear and connected TV

In addition, make sure the DSP has transparent pricing with absolutely no hidden fees.

Get the Most Out of It!

By continuing to review, test, evaluate, and optimize, you can learn which sources generate the majority of your sales and fine-tune your ongoing strategy and allocations. The greater the degree of control you have on what and where you spend, the more you’ll be able to focus successfully on where you want to invest your budget.