Contributed by Amanda Benoist, Marketing Content Strategist at Goodway Group 
Have you taken the time to really understand and tap into the path your customers take to find you, research your products, compare you to other options, and to choose (or not choose) you? Today’s consumers will consult more than 12 sources before making a big purchase and nearly 75 percent of customers will read online reviews before buying. Sure, with your direct buy or ad network you get a reliable circulation or audience view, but do you really know who is seeing your ads? How do you know you aren’t paying for the wrong consumer on the right site or the right consumer in the wrong context? That’s the challenge with buying impressions rather than buying a consumer. Let’s take a look at the benefits of more sophisticated targeting in today’s “Back to the Basics” insight: More than a one-size-fits-all solution, programmatic serves up data to give you a real-time pulse on where, when, and who to target. Traditional segment-based buying filters audiences based on five to ten attributes like age, gender, income, etc. In contrast, programmatic buying enables you to evaluate based on millions of data features in real time. Targeting becomes incredibly sophisticated and precise, which means you can see with a high degree of detail exactly who your audience is and scale campaigns up to a very large volume. For example, if you’re selling cars, you can buy an in-market auto shopper audience to target those most likely to make a purchase. If you sell organic baby food, you can buy the intersection of a moms-with-young-children audience and a preference-for-organic-food audience. Being able to target so precisely increases the efficiency of your media buys. Thanks to programmatic buying, advertising messages get to the right person, at the right time, in the right place. If you truly care about helping customers explore, dream, and find what they are looking for, programmatic can get you there. For more “back to basics” training, see these posts about why programmatic is more efficient than traditional ad buys, how programmatic takes advantage of big data more effectively, and why the future of programmatic looks promising. A seasoned marketing pro with years of experience on both agency and client teams, Amanda brings valuable insight and solutions to today’s challenges in strategic communications, digital branding, and social media management. As marketing content strategist for Goodway Group, Amanda transforms complex digital media topics into easy-to-understand resources to keep all advertisers and marketers at the forefront of understanding the evolving programmatic landscape. Her favorite part of the job? She gets to share our compelling story with new audiences each and every day.