In this competitive digital environment, brand messaging reaching the right audience at the right place has become imperative. To boost the brand’s success rate, programmatic advertising is the best way to ensure high accuracy and high turnover in depth. In 2023, programmatic advertisements accounted for 90% of the total ad spending. However, the big question is how brands and businesses are leveling it up to remain relevant in the market. Let’s discuss how programmatic advertising can be used the right way by implementing the right strategies.
Why Brands are Embracing Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic advertising has transformed the way brands interact with their target audiences by automating the buying and placement of ads with the help of powerful algorithms that provide precision, efficiency, and scalability. to increase the success rate which is lacking in traditional advertising.
- Precise Targeting: Using precise targeting in programmatic ad marketers use data to identify target audiences. It allows brands to send modified messages based on demographics, activities, and even real-time intent.
- Real-Time Optimization: Programmatic campaigns help in delivering real-time analytics, allowing brands to monitor performance and adjust the campaign according to their need. This enables marketers to optimize ad creatives, placements, and budgets in real-time, resulting in better results.
- Scalability Across Platforms: Programmatic advertising connects people to a wide range of platforms, including social media and display networks, as well as connected TV and audio streaming services. This enables marketers to maintain the presence across several touchpoints without having any extra burden on managing individual channels separately.
- Cost Efficiency: Traditional processes of buying and placement of ads can be time-consuming as they require negotiations and manual adjustments. With programmatic systems marketers can process millions of transactions in milliseconds, enabling brands to swiftly launch and adjust campaigns to close potential opportunities.
Challenges in Programmatic Advertising
Programmatic advertising is used in revolutionizing brand engagement with audiences, yet it brings its own set of challenges.
- Lack of Transparency: Programmatic advertising has enabled advertisers to reach large audiences, but it also poses significant gaps. Transparency of the ad campaigns is one of them. The advertisers are unaware of where their ads are showing. In some cases, this non-transparency can lead to ads appearing on low-quality, spammy websites that produce irrelevant traffic, hampering the brand reputation. The lack of transparency can impact on budget allocation because advertisers cannot judge campaign performance and ad placement.
- Viewability Issues: IAB has defined ad viewability as a standard metric to measure viewable impressions. According to it, an ad is considered viewable if the ad appears at least 50% on screen for more than one second. However, this parameter is not enough to ensure the ads are viewed by the right audience or in most cases even a human. Fraudsters deploy bot traffic to see the ads and even fraudulent publishers use tactics like ad stacking to generate impressions. The advertisers are under the impression that their ads are seen by the right audience, but in reality, they are not.
- Advertising Fraud & Bot Traffic: Ad fraud is one of the rising issues in programmatic advertising, with 37% of ad buyers concerned about abusive suppliers, bots, and invalid traffic. Over time, the fraudulent activities have become sophisticated and difficult to detect. KPIs like impressions and clicks can be easily met by fraudsters, resulting in skewed data and loss of budget
- Impact on Brand Safety: Apart from ad fraud, one of the other challenges that arise with non-transparency is placement of ads beside safe content. In many cases, the brand’s ads appear beside illicit or unsafe content which further impacts the brand’s reputation. Brands need to keep a check on their ad placements in addition to traffic validation.
Winning Strategies by Top Brands
Here are some strategies brands can implement to improve their programmatic campaign performance effectively.
- Ask for Transparency: Transparency should be the cornerstone for advertisers to ensure their optimization strategies are backed by clean data. By deploying an advanced ad fraud detection tool, advertisers can ensure they are getting genuine traffic on their ad campaigns. The right tool will help them with source-level transparency, helping them to understand where the traffic is coming from and take proactive action.
- Go beyond viewability metrics: While viewability is an important metric, it is important for advertisers to opt for a holistic approach. Advertisers should not just focus on “if the ad is visible or not” but also “who is seeing and interacting with the ad”. Using an ad fraud verification tool, advertisers can validate their ad traffic and also ensure quality traffic is engaging with the ads.
- Tackle Ad Fraud: Ad fraud remains a persisting challenge in the digital ecosystem and advertisers need the right guards to protect their ad spending. By deploying a real-time fraud detection solution, advertisers can identify evolving fraud techniques and implement preventative measures without major damage.
By regularly auditing the data of their ad campaigns, advertisers can ensure where to invest more thereby improving the ROI and ensuring that their ads reach a genuine audience. - Prioritizing Brand Safety: For advertisers, protecting the brand image is the utmost priority. This includes ensuring that the ads are placed in an appropriate and brand-friendly environment. By continuously monitoring the ad placements using advanced brand monitoring tools, the advertisers can avoid associations with inappropriate and harmful content. A proactive approach to validate the ad placements can help the advertisers establish strict guidelines for partners and platforms where their ads are appearing. By prioritizing brand safety, brands maintain consumer trust, reinforce positive perceptions, and protect long-term relationships with their audiences.
A Real Case: How a global brand tackled low engagement on programmatic campaigns
A global brand in the energy sector faced low conversion rates and limited engagement despite significant investment in audio and display campaigns on platforms like DCM and DV360. The brand realized its ad delivery process was inefficient, leading to wasted resources and poor returns. They partnered with mFilterIt and deployed its ad fraud solution and brand safety solutions.
Due to active blacklisting, the brand was able to see:
- 5% rise in conversion rates due to better audience targeting.
- 14% increase in ROI, achieved through cleaner traffic and optimized ad placements.
- They were also able to identify unsafe ad placements and blacklist them proactively.
This streamlined approach highlights how targeted programmatic advertising, backed by robust tools, can drive meaningful engagement and maximize returns.
Conclusion
Programmatic advertising has redefined how brands advertise and connect with their audiences, offering unprecedented levels of precision, scalability, and efficiency. By adopting strategies like enhanced transparency, improving viewability, addressing ad fraud, and prioritizing brand safety, advertisers can significantly elevate their campaign performance.
It has become crucial to focus on actionable insights and implement tools that streamline processes while safeguarding investments. Emphasizing transparency and accountability ensures that brands not only achieve better ROI but also maintain trust and credibility with their audiences.
mFilterIt’s Valid8 solution provides real-time traffic filtering and log-level data to enable advertisers with capabilities they need to address key challenges in programmatic advertising. By leveraging the solution, brands can ensure their campaigns achieve maximum impact, operate efficiently, and align seamlessly with their business objectives.
