As more platforms are becoming more widely used by marketers, it’s starting to become difficult to find out what strategies and campaigns to put focus into. Currently, one of the better mobile marketing strategies involves programmatic buying.
Programmatic buying can be used to bid on ad inventory – marketers can put exactly how much they’re willing to spend on ad inventory and they’ll get their money’s worth out of it. Programmatic buying can also be used to generate app installs, and we’ll go a little into all that below.
What is Programmatic Buying?
Similar to the way programmatic stock trading works, programmatic buying uses big data, analytical tools and real-time bidding to allow marketers to bid live on ad inventory. The programmatic part comes down to how automated the process is, and for the most part, it is incredibly well managed by automated software or RTB platforms.
The whole idea is that you’ll put in x budget and you’ll ask for a specific type of ad inventory – you’ll then bid on an ad inventory source, usually via an advertising exchange or similar platform. Everything is done in real-time and you’re basically bidding for every single consumer you reach out to.
Sometimes programmatic buying can have human input. For example, a marketer could bid a $2 budget to display an ad to a visitor that has downloaded a certain amount of apps in the last 2 weeks. These attributes are chosen manually by a human.
In other cases, everything can be completely autonomous, and there’s no limit to the number of analytical tools and data you can use to power a completely autonomous programmatic marketing campaign.
How to Generate App Installs Through Programmatic Buying
Programmatic buying can be used to achieve all sorts of results, but more and more platforms are starting to offer app installs as a medium that marketers can bid on. App-install ads are proving to be very lucrative, both for app owners and for ad platforms, and there are a lot of reasons why.
Firstly, app installs ads guarantee one thing – you’ll be spending x amount of money and you’ll be getting one new app user each time you spend your money. Programmatic buying can be used further so that you’ll be picking up users that actually hold value, or are more interested in the app you’re trying to market to.
No platform in the mobile marketing space has quite perfected everything, but there are a number of platforms that do allow you to generate app installs through programmatic buying. Recently, Yahoo’s Gemini platform started to support app install ads, and it’s already proven to be very successful for Yahoo.
iAd started selling programmatically late last year as well. Their platform now supports app install ads and it has been playing the programmatic buying game for almost half a year now.
Even Twitter and Facebook support app install ads on their platforms and there are many other networks that do support programmatic buying and app install ads.
Are App Install Ads Via Programmatic Buying Worth it?
It’s clear that there are plenty of ways to start a programmatic app marketing campaign, but one question that is always on the minds of those new to RTB and programmatic buying is whether it’s really worth it.
Whilst standard app install ads may help you to bring in new users and their cost per install may be considerably lower than programmatic buying, it’s important to understand the perceived value of each install. For the most part, programmatic buying will help marketers to truly reach out to users that could bring more value to their business, ultimately creating more revenue via their mobile application.
App install ads through other mediums may not be considered as valuable.
If you know how to create revenue from real, valuable app users, then app installs through programmatic buying could become incredibly beneficial to your marketing campaign.
