Best Practices for Programmatic Buying and Selling
1.Choose technology partners carefully.
As vendors proliferate and practices evolve, the fast-changing field of programmatic advertising can quickly become overwhelming for marketers and media companies. On one hand, you don’t want to overcommit to a single partner that might not live up to expectations; on the other hand, working with too many partners can undermine efficiency and increase technical and operational complexity. Focus on finding a trusted partner with a proven track record for each element in your platform, making sure that the partner’s strengths align with your own priorities. By building stable, long-term vendor relationships, you can establish a strong base for your programmatic activities and develop best practices together.
nfuse programmatic across your media mix.
With its origins in RTB, many people have tended to think of programmatic buying and selling in terms of remnant inventory. This view is increasingly outdated, as marketers and publishers take advantage of the automation, data integration, analytics and other powerful capabilities of programmatic technology to increase the efficiency and impact of premium campaigns as well.
Pay attention to quality.
Many marketers voice reasonable concerns about the quality of the impressions delivered via programmatic. Aside from the risk of monetizing nonviewable inventory, it’s true that automation can make it all too easy to lose track of where and how your ads appear. Metrics such as viewability, past performance and brand quality, together with strong verification settings customized to a buyer’s needs, should play an important role in your programmatic strategy.
Make creative optimization part of your strategy.
The data collected and leveraged in programmatic buying can do more than just refine targeting; it can also fuel highly effective real-time optimization of media, messaging and creative. Automated A/B or multivariate testing of multiple images, layouts, messages and calls-to-action can help you zero in on the highest-performing ad versions for each segment you target and each channel you use.
Trust the program.
Much of the value of programmatic lies in the use of automated optimization, guided by vast amounts of data, to continuously improve the impact of your campaign. Programmatic algorithms are designed to learn and make corrections on their own, as well as to recognize the difference between a naturally occurring variation and a problem in need of a fix. However, marketers and publishers know their brands and audiences better than anyone
else and should closely monitor how well the algorithm is meeting their goals. Allow the system to run on its own long enough to get a fair evaluation, and then turn to human expertise to tweak the program as needed.
About the Survey Advertising Age and DoubleClick commis-sioned this online research study about programmatic. The study was conducted in January 2014 by third-party research firm Advantage Business Research. The final findings are based on 307 respondents made up of 39.2% marketers, 37.7% agencies and 23.2% media companies. The margin of error for the total of 307 respondents of the survey, at a 95% confidence level, is +/- 5.6 percentage points.
