September 14, 2017
Programmatic advertising is still a topic that confuses a lot of marketers today. People are afraid to invest in a new channel at the top of funnel that may not drive performance, most don’t know where to start, and let’s be honest, it’s confusing as hell…
I have written quite a bit over the past year about the benefits of programmatic, the fancy stuff it can do, how to choose vendors, but I have never really gotten into the bare bones of the positive impact it has had on our clients and the positive impact it can have on your overall marketing strategy.
In PPC, we are judged a lot on our performance and results we drive, which often leads us to forget about being marketers, and creating a top to bottom strategy that creates strong brand perception, customer trust, and ultimately customer loyalty. Customers are cross device, cross channel and ultimately cross brand. They have less allegiance to brand’s than in previous generations. They are loyal to brands that satisfy their needs and wants without any disruption.
Benefits to Scaling and Improving PPC Goals
Let’s take a look at some of the primary areas:
Data
As we move towards a more audience centric biddable media landscape and the introduction of machine learning takes over the world and all the day to day tasks we have become obsessed with, getting access to data, and audience insights is key. Programmatic provides the opportunity to provide extremely granular data and targeting to make sure we are getting in front of the right people.
In similar fashion to Facebook Insights and Audience Profiles in AdWords, Programmatic audience insights can give deep insight into the types of apps, sites and DMP audience profiles that your customers fall into. This data can help shape your PPC strategy in terms of demographic targeting, messaging and segmentation of audiences and campaigns.
Targeting
Utilizing these insights into our audience profiles we can create highly targeted top of funnel strategies that can improve the quality of the traffic that you receive from your display and video campaigns. These strategies can be crafted using quality contextual/category targeting or public 3rd Party DMP data from companies like BlueKai/Oracle and Excelate.
Using programmatic, we can also re-engage current customers with unique messaging and creative (which is currently not available in GDN). This can be done by targeting current CRM Data and Email lists which can be matched against user cookies and reach these customers as the browse web wide. This is an excellent addition to highly segmented remarketing campaigns at a much more significant scale.
Reach & Awareness
The biggest benefit of programmatic compared to just utilizing the GDN is the significant reach that you can achieve. Programmatic vendors provide you with the opportunity to access inventory of 80+ ad networks and exchanges. This can increase your total reach an estimated 2x. Due to the vastness of this inventory availability, marketers are not 100% reliant on Google inventory to reach their target audience in an efficient way.
During a time when brand safety has been a topic on everyone’s radar, programmatic vendors, especially when self-managed, provide a greater control of where your ads are seen, the verification of the content that your ads are shown on, and more access to integrations to reduce the impact of bot/non-human traffic and impressions.
Tying It All Together
When tying all these features and tactics together, you will begin to have increased awareness throughout the different stages in the funnel, greater brand perception and improved performance in both your branded and non-branded searches later in the funnel.
Why? Because the quality of your branding and prospecting audience is increased, customers and potential customers are served relevant messaging, increasing their trust in your brand and ultimately, customers have a greater recall of your brand when actively researching in your industry.
Here is an example of one of our client’s branded search performance following the implementation of the top to bottom programmatic approach last year.
*The estimated branded conversions refers to the volume of conversions our client attributes to our branded search vs. prospecting efforts.
This is just an example of the impact that programmatic can have on your overall marketing strategy. Ignoring the estimated branding conversions, take a look at the available branded impressions and the impact that increased targeted prospecting has on the overall brand awareness and performance.
Campaigns may not convert directly, but they play a significant role in their place in the funnel. So, do not be disheartened if the initial metrics do not look stellar, take a step back and look at the bigger picture, has any other channel been impacted, what learnings can you take from your audiences, and how can you apply them to your other channels.
Have you tried Programmatic, and seen similar results? Let us know!