Your Introduction To Programmatic Marketing

Have you ever come across ads on the internet that perfectly align with your interests? If so, it’s not a coincidence, and Google is not listening to your conversations (at least in the way you think it is). This happens through a marketing technique that almost all businesses use today, and it’s called programmatic advertising.

Any business or brand that recruits online marketing agencies knows that it’s not enough for your ad to be unique and engaging. If it’s not in the right place and targeted at the right kind of people, it will never reach its full potential. Today, the advent of Aritificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), and cloud-based services have allowed businesses to use advanced software platforms to efficiently market their products/services to people. They no longer have to rely on outdated traditional and often inefficient methods of digital advertising that involved calling an advertiser and negotiating terms for different values of an ad inventory, and using a manual insertion order process, making it a time-consuming and expensive process. Programmatic marketing evolved as an advertising sysem that relies less on humans and more on programs to complete this entire process of displaying ads across the internet.

What is Programmatic Marketing?

Programmatic marketing is an advanced paid marketing strategy that uses automated bidding and placement platforms to facilitate buying and selling of digital ad spaces in real time. Because it allows you to advertise to specific people in specific contexts, resulting in hypertargeted ad placements, it has now become a fundamental part of many omnichannel strategies. In fact, more and more brands are now employing Kuwait internet marketing services to build and execute these strategies.

Here are the main components of an integrated programmatic marketing platform:

1. Sell-Side Platform/Supply-Side Platform (SSP) - This platform allows publishers to sell their ad impressions to potential buyers/advertisers in real time.
2. Demand-Side Platform (DSP) - Here, agencies and advertisers can buy ad inventory across multiple platforms at once.
3. Data Management Platform (DMP) - This platform manages and analyzes user data like location, demographics, user behavior, and online activity, in order to target the right audience.
4. Ad Exchange - It connects all the systems mentioned above. SSPs feed their ad inventory into the ad exchange, which then flow to the DSPs. Inventory prices are agreed upon through the bidding process and fluctuate based on the competitiveness of the inventory.
5. Private Marketplace (PMP) - While an ad exchange is open to all advertisers, a private marketplace gives publishers better control over who can buy their inventory. Here, publishers can select a handful of preferred clients or agencies, rather than letting anyone bid on their ad space.

Is Google Ads a DSP?

Yes, but it’s only limited to Google’s inventory. The Google Display Network currently has access to more than 2 million websites, videos, and apps. However, if you as an advertiser want to access as much inventory as possible and increase your chances of securing profitable placements, you can use a third-party DSP to access inventory that is not covered by Google’s network.

Who Should Use Programmatic Marketing?

Essentially, every business needs to implement a well-executed programmatic marketing campaign with the help of a Kuwait online marketing agency, and differentiate themselves from their competitors. Previously, the concept of branding and programmatic marketing was thought to be the domain of direct-to-consumer or B2C businesses. While the ability to target a mass audience is especially valuable for B2C ad campaigns, the B2B sector can also target a smaller, more specialized audience of key decision makers through the programmatic marketing approach.

How Does Programmatic Marketing Work?

As mentioned above, programmatic marketing platforms connect publishers (those who have websites with ad space/ad inventory to sell) and advertisers (who want to purchase that ad space to promote their product/service).

Here is a brief sequence of how the entire process takes place:

• Advertisers use a DSP to automate the process of buying ad inventory from multiple publishers.
• The DSP ensures that the ads are aimed at the right audience through the use of a DMP, which manages audience data.
• When a visitor enters a page set up for programmatic advertising, an ad request is sent to the SSP.
• The SSP then runs an ad impression auction among its buyers with the DSP connected in.
• If the visitor falls into a company’s target audience as evaluated by the DMP, the company will be automatically entered into the auction.
• Since companies set their maximum bids ahead of time, the company with the highest bid wins the spot, and its ad will appear on the page. This process is known as real-time bidding.

A more simplified version of this process is:

Visitor clicks on a page → The page’s owner puts up an autction to bid for an ad spot → The marketplace holds the auction among advertisers who are competing for the spot → The advertiser with the highest bid wins the spot → Their ad is displayed on the page → Visitor clicks on the ad and makes a purchase.

This may sound like a really long process, but since it’s all automated, in reality it takes a tenth of a second to complete the bidding. Whenever a user refreshes the page, or another user lands on the website, the entire process repeats. The ad may only make an impression on the individual user, but it’s still valuable as the ad content is highly relevant to the user and they are more likely to click on it. As it is, ad relevance is the essence and main focus of social media marketing companies in Kuwait and other countries.

Programmatic ad buying of digital media is a safe and efficient way for businesses and advertisers to market their products/services. It allows marketing teams to focus on strategy-building instead of expelling energy on mundane tasks like creating manual ad orders. In our next blog, we will talk more about the benefits and challenges of programmatic marketing, and how anyone, whether new or old in the game, can succeed with it, so stay tuned. Design Master is an experienced Kuwait digital marketing company that can help you come up with and implement personalized digital marketing strategies based on your business structure and goals. If you’re ready to elevate your online presence, contact us and get started today!