Programmatic Advertising: What’s the Big Fuss?

You may have heard many people talk about the importance of programmatic advertising, but not many people know what the term actually means.

Let’s break it down, and consider why it’s important for any successful business.

Definition

Programmatic in terms of digital advertising is the process of automating the ad buying process.

Computer algorithms use learned data to make decisions on where to buy advertising, and how much to spend.

Why Should I Care?

You may not actually care about the use of this new technology, especially if you’re not digital marketing nerds like us here at Two Trees.

We think it’s important to have this discussion, mainly because it has a huge impact on our industry and the level of services that we offer, but also because we see our competitors’ misusing the term as an excuse to increase their pricing and offer fake new services.

Programmatic technology actually allows us to reduce costs over time by removing the need for a real human to make decisions.

This dramatically increases efficiency. We can make better use of that time, developing more sophisticated long-term strategy rather than focusing on the mundane day-to-day repetitive tasks.

A lot of the work we do is repetitive and time consuming, which can lead to errors due to fatigue.

Computers don’t get tired and are much more reliable for these types of tasks.

When we use the term programmatic, we’re simply referring to our task handling portion that is now automated by software, instead of being executed manually by a human.

Are Robots Really Taking Over?

Well, yes and no. These “robots” are able to free up our time to do the tasks that software can’t fully handle quite yet.

This provides us with more time to spend face-to-face with our customers and learn about what kind of success they want to achieve.

When we fully understand our clients, we can learn about their motivations and goals, and what they want to achieve by using our services.

I haven’t yet met a robot that fully understood me, but who knows… maybe this will change!

By 2019, 83.6% of US digital display ad dollars will transact programmatically.

How Do I Keep Up?

There have been many changes in the world of online marketing; it’s frankly very hard to keep up with it all, especially if you have a busy life or have more than one business.

So, we’d highly recommend partnering up with someone whose profession it is to keep ahead of the game.

Aside from bringing in professionals to get the most out of any programmatic software, you’ll need to collect data through tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Facebook Pixel and any other tools that help track your customer journey.

These are the modern-day equivalent of asking your customer for their email address or phone number which, of course, you do still need to do!

Keeping up is also about keeping an open mind.

A lot of negative press is out there about Facebook’s data collection practices, but don’t expect the technical process to change anytime soon.

Billions of dollars are invested in the sharing of your information to benefit businesses who advertise digitally.

Regulations may be tightened, but by 2019, it’s projected that over 80% of display ad spend will be programmatic.

Is This Really The Future?

It certainly looks that way.

Even traditional media platforms are looking at ways their current ad space can be purchased automatically.

Traditional print, TV and radio ads are struggling to maintain their relevance.

Streamlining the purchasing process and integrating automation software that cleans up the buying process sounds like a very attractive opportunity to those in traditional marketing houses.

It’s important to understand what programmatic advertising is, what it intends to do, and how it can be used to improve the results our clients get.

Modern digital marketing agencies, such as Two Trees PPC, have adopted modern technologies like programmatic wholeheartedly.

Any tool that benefits the client should always be taken seriously, especially when it results in better quality leads.