Conversion is a journey, not a destination. Customers are spending more time online across multiple devices as they walk the path to conversion. In short, conversion funnels are more fragmented than ever before.
Every stop along the digital path leads to the next interaction, engagement and ideally, conversion. For this reason, display cannot be ignored, even though it may not produce direct results. Additionally, the vastness of display’s reach is so great that proper audience targeting has become more complex without the use of automation technology.
Today, we’re going to discuss what programmatic advertising is and how it can be an important part of your paid search strategy.
Programmatic advertising is the use of automated technologies to buy, place and optimize display advertising inventory.
Listed below is the general workflow once an advertiser begins working with a programmatic vendor:
The chart below is a simple way to view and understand the programmatic workflow.
Programmatic advertising offers some unique benefits. Two key benefits of programmatic are:
Display is where most paid advertising is occurring. Employing technology to help create, analyze and optimize audiences can lead to better results while still freeing time to focus on the “big picture.”
The backbone of programmatic advertising is data. To fully understand how it works, it’s critical to understand key data types advertisers use. The data types are:
As an advertiser, it’s important to understand these data types so you know how to best leverage them. For instance, first-party data might be used to create similar or lookalike audiences. On the other hand, third-party data is more generalized, requiring a messaging strategy geared specifically towards the general nature of that audience.
Programmatic is a perfect way to leverage these data types. The algorithm used to study both the behaviors and user intent behind the data helps create the most targeted audiences possible.
Programmatic solves the big problem of how to leverage massive amounts of data into highly targeted audiences that can be used to drive your paid search program forward.
So, how can we use programmatic to grow our businesses? Programmatic can be used to:
There are numerous to ways to leverage programmatic advertising. However, using these strategies can provide quick ways to learn more about how customers behave and interact with your brand and finding new customers with the same traits of those who have already converted.
Programmatic can drive your PPC program forward by virtue of its ability to add new prospects to the conversion funnel. Targeting top-of-funnel display audiences through programmatic to create initial awareness provides a unique opportunity to convert them at a later point through the paid search channel.
Tapping new audiences can lead to an increase in both branded and non-branded searches, which means your overall PPC traffic and resulting conversions grows. In other words, using programmatic can increase your total AdWords and Bing Ads traffic and conversions faster than conventional account optimizations.
Programmatic can also drive your PPC program forward because of the value of the data it provides. Programmatic is rich in data. For instance, learning the interests, likes, dislikes, geographical location and gender of customers can help determine keyword buying and ad messaging strategies.
Using programmatic data to inform your overall paid search strategy can provide a competitive advantage and improve results.
I encourage you to add programmatic as part of your paid search advertising mix. Programmatic is a great way to target new audiences that can be cultivated into loyal, paying customers.
The data acquired through programmatic can be leveraged in numerous ways that bring people across the bridge from prospect to customer. Shifting our mindset from “buying media” to “buying audiences” is a powerful way to acquire targeted customers who are more willing to convert and drive your business forward.
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