Programmatic advertising is, for many, the shape of advertising to come, but it’s also one of the least understood areas of marketing. Our easy to follow guide will round up 10 facts you need to grasp to get your head around this lucrative area of native advertising UK companies are exploiting in growing numbers.
1. It’s efficient
By employing software to purchase advertising, instead of the more traditional method involving actual human beings, the process is a lot quicker and cheaper.
2. It happens in milliseconds
This is how programmatic advertising works: every time a webpage loads, information regarding the user’s preference and the content of the site is uploaded to an ad exchange, which auctions the ad space off to the highest bidder. All of this happens in an instant.
3. It doesn’t rule out human agency
Programmatic advertising automates the nuts and bolts of selling advertising space, leaving human beings to focus on more complex decisions about strategy and planning.
4. The pricing is transparent
By paying for a specific number of guaranteed page impressions, and often targeting people with specific interests, you know what you are buying.
5. It’s easy to see if it’s working
You get instant feedback on what is and isn’t selling, making it easy to adjust your strategy to make sure your ads are having the desired effect.
6. It goes straight to interested parties
If you can guarantee that, for example, your brand of fish food goes to a million users with an interest in fish, the value of your investment is much greater, and this is one of the advantages that programmatic advertising provides.
7. It looks just like normal advertising
To the average internet user, programmatic advertising looks just like old-fashioned, bought-and-sold-by-human-beings advertising. The only difference is it is more likely to appeal to their interests.
8. It’s more complicated on mobile devices
A lot of the targeting involved in programmatic advertising relies on browser data stored in cookies, and these don’t really work on mobile devices, so the value drawn from this market is much lower.
9. It’s growing fast
The Internet Advertising Bureau reported that programmatic advertising sales in the UK nearly doubled last year to almost £1 billion, so this sector is becoming hard to ignore.
10. But you have to be careful who you buy it from
With fake domains, hacking and bots muddying the waters, there is a lot of fraud in the programmatic domain, so it pays to do your research when buying this kind of advertising.
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