Programmatic is now responsible for more than 42 percent of advertising spending in India and is expected to rise to 45 percent in 2023. Companies are coming to realize that it offers a far superior approach to conventional direct media.
However, getting to grips with it is challenging. It’s highly technical and abstract, and many novice firms simply don’t know where to start.
Therefore, in this post, we take a look at some programmatic advertising best practices. We take you step-by-step through what you need to do to get the best results from your next campaign.
Step 1: Set Your Goals
The first step is to figure out what you actually want to achieve from your programmatic campaign. Boosting sales is one obvious objective, but there are many others, including:
- Increasing brand visibility
- Retaining more existing customers
- Targeting new customers
- Cutting overall advertising costs
- Reaching your target audience more efficiently
Think carefully about what your goals actually are and where your audience is likely to be in the buying cycle. Are they in the awareness stage, or are they looking to make a purchase right now?
Step 2: Determine Your Ad Format
Traditional banner ads are usually a combination of an image and text. However, research suggests that people only click through 0.08 percent of the time – an appalling statistic.
Therefore, it is wise to get creative with your ad format. Options include video ads (which have around double the click-through rate of regular banners), in-app ads (which have five times the click-through rate), and even editorial-style native ads.
If you don’t have a creative team in-house, you can get a marketing agency to draft your ads for you.
Step 3: Pick Your Demand Side Platform (DSP)
DSPs are tools that let you control your ad spend and set your budget. At the start of a new campaign, you enter various parameters, such as your daily spending cap, and then the software algorithms optimize displayed ads according to your criteria. If you bid higher than your rivals, you’ll win the impression.
Top DSPs include:
- Adform
- theTradeDesk
- Media Math
- (DV360)
Step 4: Input Your Campaign Parameters
After choosing a DSP, the next step is to insert your campaign parameters. Advertisers do this via two mechanisms: insertion orders and line items.
Insertion order is a high-level document that contains important information about your campaign. Data relates to your inventory, the start and end dates of the campaign, the number of impressions you want, and the characteristics of your target audience.
Line items are more specific details in your insertion orders. Many DSPs allow you to control these independently, allowing you to adjust spending or budgeting on the fly. You can even pause line items if you wish, disabling them from bidding on inventory.
Step 5: Collect Data To Inform Your Strategy
For programmatic ads to work at all, they need access to high-quality data. This provides firms with the information they need for their campaigns and to drive sales.
There are three sources of data you can use:
- First-party data: Data you collect directly from your customers for free such as data contained in your CRM, on customer feedback forms, website actions, in-app actions, social data, and survey data
- Second-party data: Data that is another organization’s first-party data
- Third-party data: Data that you draw from third-party sources such as databases
Be careful when accessing third-party data that you don’t breach any data protection laws. If in doubt, work with a programmatic advertising agency, such as Mplan.
Step 6: Set Targeting Options
DSP targeting options make it easy to display ads in front of the relevant people. When targeting, heed your goals and make use of your data. If targeting multiple customer personas, create unique targeting profiles for each of them.
When targeting your audience, take things like location and language into account. Work out whether you would be better served by local, national, or international campaigns. Adjust settings to better target the browsers, devices, and platforms that your audience is using.
Step 7: Launch And Fine-Tune
No programmatic advertising campaign is ever perfect at launch. All require some amount of fine-tuning. Once your campaign is up and running, use DPS tools to access reports to see how it performs. Use this data to understand the effectiveness of each digital property and view metrics such as overall spend, CPC, and CTR to determine whether you are getting a good return on your investment,
Get Help
If you’re looking for a media planning and programmatic advertising company in India, you’re in the right place. At Mplan, we offer a results-driven service that lowers the cost and helps you make the most of your programmatic ad campaign. Offering programmatic advertising solutions to engage your TG with hyper-relevant ads improving brand presence.
