What is programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising is not a new form of digital ads, but new approach to targeting, where machines decide if the user is worth seeing that specific ad.

You’ve probably heard something about machine learning. Well, that’s what we’re talking about. Oldschool display ad is just a banner that will be shown to every website visitor for a certain amount of time. There is no such thing in programatic. You pay not for a banner being there, but for it to be shown somewhere to users, who are most likely to buy your product.

Programmatic buying is finally the way to buy audience, not a place on a website.

That may seem like robots control too much, but they don’t. They still can’t find your customers without you setting proper targeting. But actually they are moving towards it. Some advertising companies announce full automatic targeting an lead generating. New look-a-like algorithms appear and probably one day there will be just a “bring me clients” button.

What is RTB then? Is it programmatic?

At most it is. Real-time bidding is a mechanism of programmatic buying. Since you’re paying for every view or click, advertising platform launches a fast auction for every that single view. You win if you have the highest bid. Here you can read more about how RTB works.

Should I use programmatic?

If you’re an advertiser you may use programmatic advertising to better reach your potential clients. This way you don’t spray your budget all over the place, but get at least relevant audience.

If you are a publisher, you can still sell oldschool display banners, but you can also install SSP code and get at least some more money for the traffic you couldn’t sell as usual. When talking about “as usual” we should also mention that more and more publishers start selling their traffic only through SSPs. Why? Because it is much easier just to install the code and let it do the thing, than to find clients and place every single banner by hands. Programmatic may sometimes bring less income, but you save time and become more cost-effective.

By AdMachine (White label DSP)

Originally published at AdMachine.