Programmatic AD Buying - A Tactical Guide

Programmatic Ad Buying
A Tactical Guide
Neeraj Mishra | Co-Founder, Mcounts
neeraj@mcounts.com | +91-7799656664

Programmatic Ad Buying
“Programmatic” ad buying typically refers to the use of software to automate purchase of digital
advertising in Real Time or otherwise, as opposed to the traditional process that involves RFPs,
human negotiations and manual insertion orders
Real-time bidding is a type of programmatic ad buying, but it isn’t the
only one. RTB refers to the purchase of ads through real-time auctions,
but programmatic software also allows advertisers to buy guaranteed
ad impressions in advance from specific publisher sites. This method of
buying is often referred to as “programmatic direct.”
Is Programmatic Ad buying,
the same as real-time
bidding?
Before programmatic ad buying, digital ads were bought and sold by
human ad buyers and salespeople, which are expensive and unreliable.
Programmatic advertising technology makes the ad buying system
more efficient, and therefore cheaper.
Why does programmatic
advertising matter?
Efficiency
No, it’s not.

Tech Jargon Simplified
Ad Inventory: Amount of
ad space a publisher has
available to sell to an
advertiser
Programmatic Ad Buying: Real Time Bidding
- How it works?
As webpage loads, if it has adspace on it that is
available for Real Time Bidding (RTB) , information
about webpage and user viewing is passed on to
AD-Exchange An Ad-Exchange is where real-time auction
(in a milli-second) takes place. Ad-Xchange
auctions off available space to highest
bidder.
Impression:
A single unit of of ad space
available.
Some impressions are more valuable depending
on particular website it appears, it's relevance
and likelihood that a user will click through on
the ad.
Price of impression is determined by what buyers
are willing to pay in real time
On Advertiser's side: DSP's or Demand Side Platform
is a fully automated piece of software that bids an
impression from an Ad-Exchange. It also helps to
decide which ad-impression to purchase.
Removes the need for Human Sales people,
negotiation skills and a huge amount of time as a
decision to bid on an impression is made
immediately and the highest bidder wins

Strategic Phases of Lean Display Advertising
Build your
Test Campaign
Analyze the
Data
Scale Your
Performing areas
Optimize Your
Campaigns
1
3
2
4

Phase 1: Build your Test Campaign
Create various campaigns aimed at a variety of potential audiences to see how each responds. This is where
baseline data is gathered for further analysis. There are several keys to the testing phase, the primary ones
being:
Tracking: Track conversions or desired
actions (preferably with an associated
value).
In an ideal scenario, you’ll want to track
not only conversions and revenue, but
the impact of campaigns on brand
searches, view-through conversions,
bounce rate, landing page engagement,
and even lifetime value.
Segmentation: Properly defining the
scope of each campaign.
You can’t assume that audiences in
different regions, age groups, or income
levels will respond to the same ad, on
the same website, in the same way. This
is why segmentation is important:
control the variables to make for better
data.
Wide variety of ads : Wide Varierty of
Ads in your campaigns is the key to
enabling good performance
comparisons.
If you create many nicely segmented
campaigns, but they all use the same
standard banner ads, you miss the
opportunity to split-test the impact of
multiple ads with each of those
audiences.

Phase 2: Analyze the Data
The second phase is where you measure, analyze, and learn from the data that was collected in
the first phase. In order to extract insights from your campaigns, digging into the data on
different levels is crucial.
Some key areas to analyze in this phase are the engagement and impact of below
Specific websites and placements in
general
Visitors from specific regions, on certain
devices, at certain times, etc.
Specific audiences in general
Your ads on a placement level, site
level, and in aggregate

Phase 3: Optimize Your Campaigns
Once a proper set of data has been collected and analyzed, it’s time to cut the weak elements
from your campaigns and allocate more resources to the elements that are working.
Optimization should really be viewed as a continual process of learning from the data and
improving campaigns over time
Disable or cut down certain elements — such as
ads, placements, or sites — if they are found to
be under-performing.
This allows the elements that perform well to
receive a larger share of resources, thereby
improving overall campaign effectiveness.
Another way of allocating more resources to
elements and campaigns that work is by
increasing budgets, bid prices, and frequency
caps (incrementally) in order to drive more
volume.

Phase 4 : Scale Your Performing areas
It is only after you have acquired real-world data (foreknowledge) in the above three phases that the
time becomes right to invest the effort and dollars into scaling your campaigns.
Buying display ads via RTB is an ideal way to gain knowledge and test out the performance of specific
publishers and audiences, without blindly committing thousands of dollars on high-CPM direct buys.
Once you’ve discovered valuable placements, you can then also approach the publisher directly to
reserve your own inventory on a guaranteed basis or increase your bids for specific
domain/publisher.
Caveat: While exploring direct buys, you may notice that CPM rates exceed a level that is feasible for
reaching your performance goals — so always keep your key metrics in mind

Display Categories
Laptops/Desktops
running browsers like
Chrome, Firefox etc.
Mobile Video

Desktop Display Tactics
Audience Targeting
Retargeting
Contextual Targeting
Site Buys

Re - Targeting
Retargeting is a perfect
example of “audience buying,”
which is to say: the marriage of
vast amounts of inventory with
behavioral targeting data.
The data for retargeting is collected by placing a small
chunk of code on your website or landing page, similar to
how you would add code for an analytics platform. Since
this data comes from traffic that you control, it’s often
referred to as “first party” data.
With RTB one can evaluate and bid on each individual
impression and effectively buy audiences by matching
behavioral cookie data with it, but also allows you to do so
at a large scale, thanks to the massive reach of the RTB
supply side.
Another flavor of retargeting is “search retargeting,”
which allows you to target audiences based on keywords
they have searched for in the past. In other words, you can
target users by intent (the same factor that made search
advertising explode) but with display advertising

Audience Targeting
Similar to retargeting in that it
relies on cookie data to target
specific audiences (as opposed
to specific publishers)
instead of using one's own first-party data, we use
behavioral data from a third-party data company like
BlueKai, Exelate, Bizo, Lotame and so on.
Data from data companies is usually broken down into
very distinct segments like:
gender, age group, household income, education level,
relationship status, banking institution, or hundreds of
other specific demographic and psychographic categories.
Since it comes from a third party, there is normally a price
associated with using this data (typically anywhere from
$0.25 to $2.00 CPM) in addition to the cost of inventory.

Contextual Targeting
Choose to show your ads only on
pages that pertain to a specific
topic or category. For example,
you can show an advertisement
for rucksacks to people reading
a page about backpacks!
Contextual data technology algorithmically analyzes
pages, and categorizes them by topic.
Like retargeting, it’s easy to get too narrow with your
targeting criteria if you combine contextual targeting with
too many other options like retargeting, demographic
targeting, or too small of a geographic region.
Contextual targeting works best with text-rich publishers
like blogs, news sites, and forums (which also happen to be
the type of sites that have tons of pages on a wide variety
of topics).
Cost for contextual campaigns are marginally more than a
standard Web campaign, with contextual fees ranging
from $0.05-$0.10 CPM, in addition to the cost of inventory.

Site Buys
Oldest tactic for targeting display ad
campaigns is to simply choose the
publishers you wish your ads to
appear on

Mobile Display Tactics
Mobile RTB is a very exciting frontier at the moment. There are unique advantages
with mobile that allow for extremely precise location targeting, and in the near
future, extremely precise behavioral targeting that won’t depend on the
previously-dominant cookie
Mobile App Mobile Web Hyperlocal

Most of the time people spend on their mobile devices is within apps. This is why
mobile app inventory is among the most attractive inventory for advertisers:
it’s where most of the market attention is focused. Many app publishers also have
valuable first-party behavioral and demographic data that advertisers can use for
enhanced targeting.
As a result, mobile app inventory is the highest priced segment of the mobile
inventory spectrum.
Mobile App

Mobile optimized Web inventory is Not the regularly-rendered websites shrunken
to the point of illegibility on a mobile screen with equally illegible
advertisements, but properly-formatted pages designed for mobile devices.
This means your creatives will be shown in their proper mobile sizes, resulting in a
higher rate of viewability and engagement. Mobile Web inventory is similar to
mobile app inventory in terms of creative sizes (320×50 primarily), but simply in a
Web environment rather than an app environment.
Mobile Web

Uses GPS coordinates and a specific radius to target a very precise area. This is made possible
by app publishers that have location-sharing capabilities for each impression.
For local businesses and events, hyper-local targeting allows for extremely novel ad
campaigns. One example could be a local Real Estate campaign that targets a specific
neighborhood based on its demographic profile. For entertainment districts, event promotion
is another industry that could leverage the power of hyper-local ad targeting.
Imagine your target audience reading through their social news feed and seeing your ad for a
limited-time promotion at an interesting establishment down the street, advertisers will be
able deliver a relevant message to the right person at precisely the right place and time.
Hyper Local

Video Display Tactics
In Banner In Stream
Video ad campaigns over RTB are a relatively new frontier that allow advertisers to apply the same
precise, impression-level targeting, but with video creatives and in native video environments.
In fact, video advertising is one of the fastest-growing segments of online advertising in terms of
dollars spent.
However, the two largest barriers to getting started with video are the slightly higher cost of inventory
and the resources necessary to produce the video ads.

In Banner
Video ads can also be served within standard IAB ad units, like the medium rectangle
(300×250), which happens to be the most common.
There are also several attributes associated with video ad units, such as automatic
audio, audio on rollover, audio on click, and muted by default. The ad quality
restrictions of each publisher ultimately dictate which of these audio options can be
employed.
The benefit of in-banner video ads is that they generally come at a fraction of the cost
of in-stream video ads. In fact, the cost of in-banner video is basically the cost of
traditional display inventory, and can be combined with most other display tactics.

In Stream
In-stream video ads allow you to serve up video ads (of 15 or 30 seconds) to either the
beginning (pre-roll), middle (mid-roll), or end (post-roll) of online videos (pre-roll being the
most popular, by far).
This is the closest that a digital marketer can get to reproducing the same advertising
experience as television, which makes it an appealing tactic for brand advertisers.
As a result, CPM rates for video inventory are currently the highest of all RTB inventory, with
average rates hovering around $10 CPM.

General Targeting Criteria
Time of day
Day of week
Frequency
Geo Location
Operating System
Device
Browser
There are also general attributes associated with every impression that passes through RTB
systems, which are often layered with each of the tactics mentioned above. Some of these
overarching targeting criteria include the below and are universal in nature.
They apply to each and every impression available to advertisers, and are generally safe to
combine with any of the larger tactics.

Targeting tactics are your tools in the programmatic world, and it’s always important
to understand the tools. When you know what tactics you have at your disposal, you
have a much better chance of choosing the right ones to meet your objectives.
Questions?
neeraj@mcounts.com | sales@mcounts.com

Agency with a creative heart
and a technological backbone
@mcountsIndiasales@mcounts.com
+91-7799656664
+91-9986114420 www.mcounts.co

Programmatic AD Buying - A Tactical Guide

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