Over the last year, we have written multiple articles about programmatic. From basic optimizations to the impact it can have on your overall strategy. But what happens when you have plateaued in your efforts and need to expand your strategy to be a fine tuned machine and continue to deliver goals and increase performance. Here are 5 tips that will help increase the quality of your overall strategy and improve the efficiency of your campaigns.
PMPs
Private Marketplaces or PMPs are private auctions where publishers invite a select number of advertisers to enter a first look auction at a higher floor price than the traditional open exchange or auctions.
Why are they so important? No inventory is guaranteed, and PMPs provide the opportunity to create a guaranteed placement on a premium publisher, that may be key to your overarching strategy without having worry about an increased competition. PMP also help offset the cost of conducting a traditional direct buy with these publishers. You get access to the same premium inventory, without the “premium price”.
The best way to determine what publishers are the best to initiate conversations with, regarding PMPs is to look at the placement reports of your remarketing campaigns. This gives insight to where your audience is regularly. Leverage this data to create top of funnel prospecting campaigns on these sites, to reach your audience with a different message, as well as reaching a like-minded audience to your existing base.
Dynamic Creative
Dynamic Creatives are not a new thing in theory. We have seen them available through Adwords Remarketing Product Feeds and Facebook Dynamic Product Carousel ads. But these ads are very basic. They are rarely on brand and messaging options are limited.
Programmatic generated dynamic creative are an automated and trigger driven approach to ad creation. These ads can be created within brand guidelines, but contain elements such as messaging, button text or images that can be dynamically inserted based on certed based on a number of data points. These data points can include:
- Weather
- Content being viewed
- Location
- Audience Behavior
- Retargeting list composition
- Demographics
Segmentation
The consumer journey has changed. No longer is brand loyalty guaranteed. Longer cycle, full funnel campaigns are now more important than ever. Programmatic provides advertisers to opportunity to create highly segmented prospecting, and retargeting campaigns, utilizing tactics like dynamic creatives that we mentioned above to create a unique 1:1 message to their potential clients at every stage in the buying cycle. For example, if we were targeting fitness enthusiasts with the latest running shoe, a campaign could look like the following:
As you can see, there are multiple layers to how we can incorporate programmatic. Not every strategy will drive conversions directly, but layered into each other, you will see the overall quality of traffic improve and costs eventually come down.
CRM Data Integration
This to me is the most exciting aspect of programmatic advertising. It can be a great way to reactivate existing customers into generating revenue, or retaining existing customers if they are being categorized as being in the market for your product or service, by offering special discounts or unique offers.
CRM data can also be utilized to create quality lookalike audiences based on your existing customer base. This provides advertisers a channel outside of the predetermined audience and contextual targeting to reach a new audience that closely resembles your existing customers, and may garner a much better response.
Brand Safety
This has become a much more important subject over the last 12 months or so, following many high profile incidents where ads were showing up alongside undesirable content. Many programmatic vendors have prebuilt blacklists, as well as already established relationships with brand safety tech providers and verification services. These stop gaps, along with the regular optimization techniques provide a deeper added value to your brand safety efforts.
Because of the vast availability of inventory through programmatic, tightly focused brand safety efforts, should not affect the scalability or reach of your campaigns. Make sure that you are constantly vetting and testing different brand safety options when
Conclusion
You may or may not be ready to expand beyond standard programmatic tactics, but if you do, take the above steps into consideration. They are great ways to expand your current efforts, while maintaining control and delivering great results.
Let us know steps you have taken to improve your programmatic campaigns on Twitter @ppchero.
Cover image credit: Sand Crest SEO
