Back to Basics: Programmatic Takes Advantage of Big Data More Effectively

gettyimages-programmatic-big-data The principles surrounding digital media—determining your campaign objective, identifying your target, communicating your message, and measuring your results—are no different than any ad campaign that ran one hundred years ago. Marketers still need to maximize their productivity without sacrificing quality, leverage their data to target the right customers, and measure campaign analytics to deliver real ROI results. Programmatic is just new in the terms that are now associated with this medium. So in this week’s “Back to the Basics” post, I’ll share how programmatic can help you know what’s working and what’s not. We are a generation on the move. Tapping into technology’s ability to achieve insights across multiple devices is the key to capitalizing on consumer behavior. Programmatic provides the opportunity to not just advertise across all devices, but to track the same user on every device. This kind of unified advertising reinforces your message and makes sure that your ads are not lost in the noise online. Because you can measure user impact across devices, you can capture your campaign’s impact throughout the full conversion funnel and evaluate your media investment against real world business results—in-store foot traffic, online and offline purchases, and brand lift. With programmatic, every campaign element builds insights about what drives a certain kind of consumer behavior, what message works best, or which ad format gains the most attention. Likewise, you can bring in your own data to target your existing customers. CRM data can be matched to DSP data to be able to advertise to an audience that you’ve built over time. You can also pixel your website and target visitors that have performed specific actions, like those who have browsed through product listings or researched your hours and locations. This big data can be taken offline for efficiencies as well. If the data shows consumer interest in a particular product, you can dovetail your inventory production. If you know a consumer already made the purchase, you can skip out on wasted impressions in a retargeting campaign. The possibilities are endless. With programmatic campaigns, you can gather loads of big data each day from every bid opportunity, each impression bought, and each conversion in real time. This makes it even easier than traditional advertising to set a clear and measurable goal, and to optimize the campaign toward that goal while the campaign is running. For more “back to basics” training, see these posts about why programmatic is more efficient than traditional ad buys, why programmatic enables more sophisticated targeting, and why the future of programmatic looks promising.