Everywhere you go in 2015, you’ll hear about the power of targeting in programmatic media buying. You will constantly hear about how going programmatic is the best, and most modern way to find high-value inventory, but what drives this targeting, and why is it so special? In this article, we take a delve into programmatic marketing and find out why targeting via RTB or programmatic direct is so amazing.
Unique data
The first thing to understand about any successful programmatic media platform is that it can provide users with unique data that is often not reachable through other means of marketing. Online publishers are constantly delivering content to internet users each and every day, and programmatic media platforms are learning to gather as much data as possible from these users.
Firstly, advertisers can provide their own data from the people who click their ads. Quite a lot of information can be guessed about a person’s interests just by gathering the ads they click on. It doesn’t stop there though, and many platforms have a lot of other first-party data about their inventory to play around with too. These platforms can also get access to information from third party information services, such as Experian or Nielsen.
Insights and More Data
It’s not all just about the data that’s available. A good platform needs to be able to do something special with the data it can provide to its users. With insights, platforms and publishers can learn more about how ads perform by viewing data and learnings from previous ad campaigns.
Taking all of the information available and throwing it into a marketer’s face isn’t going to be very helpful. There is a lot of data to deal with, after all, so creating analytics platforms and useful insights that can explain how this data can be used by marketers helps considerably. For example, tools such as DMPs (data management platforms) can be used to allow marketers to reach out to a certain targeted audience by combining all of the data provided from various sources as explained above.
These kind of tools can be used to accurately work out what works, and what doesn’t saving marketers the pain of dealing with hiccups in their own marketing campaign.
Algorithms and Targeting
Following on from the above point, by using complex algorithms, all of the complex data can be dealt with in a way that allows computers to manage it easier. The end-user experience for advertisers is a lot less stressful. With algorithms on programmatic platforms, marketers can instantly see what is working for them and what isn’t, and these algorithms can even be used to automatically switch out the poor performing ad campaigns with ones that have proven to work well in the past.
Real Time Bidding is completely powered by these kinds of algorithms, and as programmatic media buying evolves, so will the algorithms and data used to present advertisers with the best possible service available.
There’s no doubt that the power of targeting in programmatic media buying is of high value, and advertisers that haven’t delved into programmatic media buying should really look into how effective it can be.
