Programmatic advertising leverages the power of automated bidding for inventory in real time, which helps advertisers in delivering faster and smarter campaigns. India has seen exponential growth in programmatic advertising with 80% of the advertisers seeing efficient gains due to its effectiveness and the control it gives. The adoption of programmatic advertising in India is projected to grow by 52% till 2021. Programmatic advertising is the future of advertising in India and it is about time that advertisers start leveraging programmatic advertising to make the most of their advertising budgets. In this blog we’re going to talk about
- How programmatic helps advertisers make the most of their marketing budgets
- What advertisers can do to help programmatic drive maximum ROI
How Programmatic helps in making the most of your advertising budgets
- Automated & Smart Bidding
- Data-driven creatives for personalization
- Brand Safety
- Advanced Targeting Options on DV360
- Advanced Tracking with DV360 and Campaign Manager
- Transparency in PG deals
Automated & Smart Bidding
Programmatic Advertising through DV360 offers bid strategies that leverage machine learning to improve campaign performance by serving impressions or increasing bids for users based on the likelihood of achieving the KPI set by the advertiser. DV360 gives advertisers control over setting a goal for their campaign example CPA goal - 500 and tell the system what to optimize for example - maximize clicks/conversions and also choose what to bid on example - spend the entire budget while minimizing CPA or set a target CPA.
Advertisers have various goals to choose from for Branding which include CPM, Viewability, and CTR while optimizing their campaigns for maximizing their impressions or minimizing their CPM and Performance campaigns include goals like CPA, CPE, and CPI while optimizing their campaigns for either maximizing clicks or conversions with bidding strategies focusing on a specific CPC/CPA or spending the budget while achieving the CPA/CPC the system can achieve.
Use the right bidding strategies for your campaign to show ads only to relevant users helps to make the most of our budgets and maximizing results
Pro Tips
- Start with CPC as a goal for a performance campaign, optimizing for maximum clicks and bid on spending the entire budget while minimizing the CPC/maximizing clicks, to let the system gather learnings for better optimization. Once you have enough conversion data in your campaigns, move to smart bidding strategies like setting a CPA goal or maximizing conversions. Starting with bidding can have an impact on the delivery of the campaign or will not have enough data to bid smartly to generate desired results. The same strategy method can be used for branding campaigns as well.
- Leverage OBB (Outcome Based Bidding) to only pay for clicks and not to impressions served to save campaign budgets.
Data-driven creatives for Personalization
Programmatic advertising campaigns on DV360 lets advertisers leverage the power of personalization with data-driven campaigns and creatives paired with rich media formats for increased performance and engagement.
Advertisers can choose from various formats, upload images and copies suitable for different personas of their target audience and set the target audience for a campaign. The system automatically serves the most relevant combination of images and copies for each user based on machine learning. It involves using data to sub-segment audiences showing the right creative to the right audience at the right time instead of going the traditional route of showing one ad to an entire audience segment. This enables personalization and automation at scale, which means we don’t have to work on 10 different creatives with different copies and create different campaigns for each audience segment. Instead, we can easily do that with data-driven creatives on DV360 paired with interactiveness which helps maximize relevant engagement with the target audience and increases ROI.
An example of personalization with data-driven creatives
Brand Safety
DV360 offers various brand safety control options to advertisers to prevent their ads from being displayed on sites with content that is not good for the brand’s image like Adult, Drugs etc. and tools like Ad Fraud prevention which can be used to exclude either High Risk or Medium Risk or High and Medium Risk Websites. Excluding high risk has worked the best in terms of minimizing ad fraud, however, excluding high and medium might impact the delivery of the campaign or increase the CPC. TRAQ Score is like a credit score for a website, the higher the TRAQ score, the safer the website. The scores range from 250-1000. Using scores between 500-1000 has worked the best for our campaigns, which helped prevent ads being displayed on spammy websites in just a few clicks without a huge impact on the cost for each click.
This helps advertisers make the most of their advertising budgets by reducing irrelevant clicks which in turn reduces wasted advertising budgets and gets more clicks from relevant users.
Advanced Targeting Options on DV360
DV360, one of the biggest digital innovations in recent times, offers various targeting options to advertisers to choose where they want their ads to be served to who they want to and do not want show their ads
Placing Ads - Advertisers can pick the environment like website or apps, categories and placements, choose specific apps or app categories, browser, viewability on the browser, above or below the fold, devices and even the connection speed of the browsers. The ad exchanges can be used to eliminate environments that are not relevant or generating ROI. Example - If ads placed on apps are generating too many accidental clicks and reducing the ROI, apps can be excluded in just a few clicks.
Audience Targeting Options - Along with Google Audiences and custom audiences, advertisers also have access to 1st party lists, premium 3rd party lists and created combined audiences of any Google Audience, Custom Audience, 1st party or 3rd party list. For example, if you want to target CEOs of companies with employees of more than 5000, we can target those audiences using a combined audience of 3rd party lists. This helps advertisers reach the most relevant audience however niche it is and save impressions served to users that might not be relevant.
Audience Exclusions - Exclude any 1st or 3rd party list, Google audience and also create an audience of users based on impressions already served to exclude them from your campaigns. For example A user has been served 3 impressions for one offer. You can create an audience for this and exclude it from the other offer to avoid overlap and save impressions and clicks which can be used to engage with more users.
Advanced Tracking Options using DV360 and Campaign Manager
Programmatic advertising offers advertisers advanced tracking options when Campaign Manager is used. A few of these are:
Tracking Frequency & Journey across Platforms
Campaign Manager lets advertisers track the number of impressions a user is served across platforms like Google, Facebook, OTTs, Publishers and cap it across all platforms. This helps advertisers get a single view of a user and track the entire journey across platforms and avoid overexposing ads to a single user, since they are tracked as different users on different platforms, save wasted impressions and reach more users in the same budgets.
Audience Overlap
Campaign Manager lets advertisers evaluate the overlap of audiences across platforms and helps make better media planning decisions. Example - we ran campaigns on two different platforms but the overlap of the audience on both the platforms is 85% which means the audience on both the platforms are the same and one of these can be removed from our media plan for the next campaign.
Transparency in PG Deals
Leverage programmatic advertising for placing ads on different publishers like Moneycontrol or NTDV has several benefits that can lead to optimizing the efficiency of campaign budgets:
- Tracking a user across platforms and capping frequency at a user level
- Programmatic offers 100% transparency of impressions served and clicks received, whereas in a direct deal, advertisers have to depend on reports shared by the publishers.
What advertisers can do to help Programmatic drive maximum ROI
- Set clear objectives
- Use the targeting options in the best way to reach your audience
- Test, evaluate and optimize
- Give the system time to learn and start working for you
Set clear objectives
Setting clear objectives before starting the campaign helps in better optimization. The objective of the campaign shapes the entire structure of the campaign right from the goal, what we are optimizing for, the bidding strategy, the audiences that are targeted and creatives that are used. Making too many changes to these elements of the campaign can have a negative impact on the learnings.
Use the targeting options in the best way to reach your target audience
With so many targeting options available on DV360, we can target even very niche audience segments to reach relevant audiences, paired with the relevant placement of the ads with data-driven creatives to be as relevant and interactive as possible.
Test, Evaluate & Optimize
Check which creatives work - Leverage rich media creatives and see which format and communication works better
Check with audience works - Test different custom audiences, combined audience, look at the audience analysis report to check which audience list has an overlap with your 1st party list and define your target audience
Check which frequency works - With advanced tracking options advertisers can analyze which media platforms and which frequency works the best to drive ROI and optimize campaigns accordingly.
Check which publishers have an overlap of the audience and choose the one which is more cost-effective - Analyze data from existing campaigns to make better media decisions and budget allocations based on the cost-effectiveness of each channel to reach the same audience.
Analyze Campaign Performance - Check all elements of the campaign like which environment, age, geo, day of the week, time of the day, placement, ad exchange, position, the bid strategy works the best for increasing ROI from a campaign.
Give the system time to learn and start working for you
A lot of times, advertisers initiate campaigns but pause it if there are no immediate results, however programmatic advertising, like any other advertising platform, requires machine learning to generate results and ROI. Advertisers should evaluate the performance of a campaign not just by the direct results but also by the impact it creates in terms of the consideration a campaign creates, how does the remarketing to this audience work in campaigns, etc.
Google offers their programmatic solutions only to agencies and not to brands - but there are agencies like Social Beat that offers a self serve option to brands and other agencies where they can use the existing DV360 access to run campaigns. This is known as Self Serve programmatic advertising.