#Sempl16 paul gill

Editor's Notes

• #2: Hello good morning everybody Today I am going to be discussing Real-time bidding and how it allows you to achieve unmatched results compared to any of your previous display or online media buying activity Now, The complex specifics of exactly how to optimise fully to improve your ROI cannot be discussed in just the 30 minutes I have to talk to you today However What I can do, is arm you with the questions to ask and the strategies that are available to understand both what is the roi of programmatic as well as get the most out of any current campaigns and agency partnerships
• #3: To introduce myself I am the Head of RTB at Bid.Media We are a specialist programmatic agency for advertisers part of the Search Laboratory group We manage brands global programmatic activity, primarily utilising Google Doubleclick for which we are the UK’s first Premium partner agency in real time bidding We manage advertising campaigns across Europe and Worldwide primarily using mother tongue speakers for each territory we target,
• #4: So, If you are about to commence your first RTB campaign you are on the brink a fantastic step forward in terms of cost efficiency, audience insights and targeted, responsive advertising But these great benefits are only accessible to those who make the correct decisions This is because defining your ROI starts way before any bid optimisation takes place. So with that in mind today I will be covering four key areas: Firstly What is RTB? Secondly how your reasons for entering the programmatic market should influence your decision making in partners and strategy Then What key decisions should take place before you go live to ensure that your RTB project can deliver the required ROI Finally we will look how some of the best practices in campaign strategy and optimisation work to unlock that ROI
• #5: To understand what is RTB and why it is so important …lets take a look at the history of display advertising
• #6: There's a number of you that may have been frustrated by display advertising Looking back at the history of display ….this is not surprising. Above we can see the first banner ad appeared in 1994 for AT and T on hotwire.com - It had a 40% CTR! With the introduction of ad networks a couple of years later a huge opportunity arose for advertisers large and small, billions of dollars were about to be spent Place your brand on a relevant websites and get your message in-front of millions people as often as you want The problem was, a lot of advertisers took that message too literally…speed and low cost replaced talent and quality ……..POPUPS In the space of a few short years the reputation of display banners was ‘destroyed’ for both the user and the advertiser, SPAMMY became the choice word when you thought of display! So with the market having a scattergun approach without real targeting advertisers lost faith That is until the market changed dramatically in 2004 with the launch of the first ad exchange. A technology platforms that facilitate the buying and selling of online media advertising inventory from multiple ad networks. The approach is technology-driven as opposed to the historical approach of negotiating price on media inventory define programmatic advertising was born Fast forward to 2012 and RTB was the channel to drive programmatic to the mainstream.# As it entered the mainstream and the benefits were experienced for both advertisers and publisher spend…
• #7: So the market changed and spending patterns are changing dramatically, lets talk about what exactly is real-time bidding?
• #8: Well any of you who’ve done any research into RTB you may have come across a picture like this. It looks complicated…. but it needs to be. This is the most complex technology solution across any online advertising It requires a skill set that understands all traditional display media buying options but applies them to what we’ll discuss is state of the art targeting and statistical optimisation There are , dsps, ssps, dmps and a whole host of other confusing 3 letter acronyms and you start to see the scale of this industry. So…. its complex…but my job today is to make the benefits and potential strategies a little clearer if you approaching your rtb strategies in 2014.
• #9: But before we delve into specific strategies lets look at the tools available to us and understand the basics of RTB In its simplest form it’s still banner advertising with the varied options of both standard banners and rich media banners. These engagement ads are more than just a click ………..they actively seek out the users interaction and are a great step forward for any long term RTB account. They can actually provide uplifts of 40% for CTR for ecommerce sites compared to standard banners, you may have seen examples of these floating ads across the screen, embedded videos or page takeovers.
• #10: What's different….Well fundamentally in rtb we’re trying to place the right ad in front of the right person at the right time. We are just a set of websites because they are deemed relevant. targeting the user visiting a website, not just a website because its deemed relavant Our campaigns decisions to assess users relevancy is executed in milliseconds, in real time, each individual user is valued for their worth to your brand…. This should give you an idea of the power of this technology, millions of statistically qualified decisions taking place every day, each impression accessed in real time and bid on in an auction model if relevant
• #11: So for these display campaigns now have the ability to target a user. This should be done through collaborating with multiple third party cookie data providers. If this is a new concept then to explain. These companies who you might liken to an ‘Experian’ for the most part have one job…. and that is to track the user in the days, weeks and months leading up to them visiting a website. They then segment all of that information across hundreds, if not thousands of data point into demographics, such as those listed above. So if we were targeting someone in the market for a Mercedes Benz, this user above would be of interest to us.
• #12: We want to target a user and we know we have thousands of audience targeting options. Each users impression is essentially for sale. How do we define which users view to buy. We’ve talked about lifestyle choices and online behaviour but what are the other considerations: Have they purchased previously? What's there social engagement? What's there intent? Are they in the market for your product or your competitors already There also 1st party data: We can combine our audience targeting with publisher websites 1st party data This is extremely powerful.
• #13: We’ve covered the setup, lets look at the tools we can use. Now thinking back to our history of display advertising the options or tools that would have been available to us up until a few years ago would not have been sufficient to put this strategy into action Before the days of rtb we would have used one of a number of ad networks such as GDN or We would have gone with a traditional remarketing company such a criteo, struq or mythings to try and improve our repeat purchase rate. Finally we may have purchased in bulk from a large premium website. We may have spent thousands on a direct deal with a diet website or women's magazine to get as many impressions as possible. So lets compare that to our approach today and remember at these point that non of these channels would have worked together.
• #14: Now compare this to RTB tools in 2014 Firstly keyword/site targeting: Keyword contextual targeting this is placing ads on sites which contain relevant content, this is not new, What is new is having 70% greater inventory to target, making statistical optimisation more productive given the huge volumes of data we receive We can also combine our audience targeting with our keyword targeting so appearing on sites with our relevant keyword but only when our key successful audiences are online. This is powerful targeting We can also choose a variety of Preferred and private deals with the worlds leading publisher sites to appear on the highest quality sites in front our target audience Then with remarketing you can utilise all of the standard and dynamic remarketing lists you would usually employ but apply them over70% greater inventory compared to traditional display advertising More importantly your remarketing tags can be used to profile everyone who is hitting various parts of your site from any source whether that’s ppc, organic or RTB to build a picture of the most consistently converting audience. As we’ll discover this is vital for branding insights and optimisation Finally the discussed audiences targeting which can be advertised to across social media exchanges
• #15: So we understand RTB, Lets understand how our reasons for going programmatic affect our chances of achieving an unmatched ROI
• #16: Well to understand why your brand should go programmatic lets look at the fundamentals of the approach. How does buying impressions from publishers on a single auctioned basis provided greater efficiencies than the traditional direct buy model. The diagram above may highlight why: On the left we have the traditional online display advertising model where inventory was purchased in bulk and on the right we will look at real time bidding. If the blue boxes represent impressions then when buying in bulk through a traditional buy we may not have the opportunity to concentrate our investment on the impressions or individuals that provide the greatest ROI. Now compare to RTB on the right whereby we are buying impressions on an individual basis. It may be based upon a site or perhaps an audience. If for example we were targeting 25-35 year old men then the crossed out imprecisions may represent over 35 year old men and we wouldn’t pay to show these users an ad. A Huge reduction in relative wasted costs So we are choosing to place the right ad in front of the right person at the right time and subsequently giving conversion, click through and engagement rates the best possible opportunity to improve. Think about spreading your portfolio of campaign impressions across multiple, quality sites but appearing to the relevant 10%. The power of millions of statistically qualified decisions taking place every day with each impression accessed in real time and bid on in an auction model sets a platform from where if the right decisions are made we can look to achieve unmatched ROI.
• #17: The first step to understanding how to unlock that desired ROI for your campaign is to establish why you want to go programmatic in the first place, That’s aside from the efficiency of the model. I imagine the room today is split, there will be those who want to understand the principles of RTB and if it is relevancy to their brand. There may also be those who are currently undertaking programmatic activity but want more of an understanding as to the results they currently achieve, whether that be across video, mobile, branding or direct response campaigns. Events like today are a great opportunity for the brands in attendance as well as the market suppliers. There is still undoubtedly an education gap compared to other channels in terms of the in-house skillset or knowledge of the options available. So it is important to understand what parts of this complex marketplace are the most relevant to you and from those suppliers which can deliver the most relevant service to your requirements. In establishing exactly why you want to go programmatic, there could be a number of reasons. Maybe You just want straight to market advertising in front of potential customers Perhaps you have specific branding strategy in mind or are planning to drive sales directly Maybe you’ve had performance issues with traditional display advertising It may be you’ve seen diminishing returns on other channels, maybe ppc There a number of reasons for a programmatic strategy for your brand, the way this strategy is defined and the market in which you serve these ads can differ dramatically In the birth of this market the decision may have been to either choose a DSP or an agency partner, today the decision has to be which partner (of which there are a number of good specialist options, can tailor your programmatic activity to your reason for entering the market
• #18: Now We could spend two or three hours easily discussing the inner workings of account optimisation and complex bidding strategies and although these are extremely important in the daily account management of your programmatic activity there are first very important decisions to be made
• #19: We know the cost efficiencies, we have established why we want to enter the market, now lets understand what our preferences are in terms of an approach to a strategy and management of programmatic activity. To do this as brands what's required from you is simple but extremely important: Challenge Everything The best partners will have the answers you need to provide the service and results you want In terms of What is RTB, How does it differ from programmatic? What is a DSP? Those are the questions that any partner should be able to answer confidently but are not necessarily the answers that will allow you to achieve the maximum ROI from your activity. What are your targeting capabilities, how will you target, provide me some specifics, are you combining targeting to improve CPAs for example Appearing on a site or contextual targeting but only when a key audience is online Start to Think about : What have been your frustrations, Where have you not seen transparency in previous media agency relationships , ad serving or trading desks Where exactly is your media investment going and what are the reasons behind this How are multilingual and international campaigns approached, Is it a one size fits all or bespoke strategy? Is your focus mobile or video advertising ----- does it require a separate strategy from desktop? Asking these questions will not only allow you to select a partner that is right for your requirements, but will allow your partners to get a greater understanding of what needs to be done specifically to deliver a bespoke strategy and performance for you.
• #20: Now Lets take a look at some of the best practices that go into your first programmatic campaigns and how they improve both ROI and a wider understanding of optimisation
• #21: So starting with the setup. Those of you who have previously outsourced some of your traditional display advertising management may have been met with claim This is an approach that many brands have heard before but an approach that cannot work today if you want the ROI we’ve talked about. You have too much money invested, potentially too many frustrations with traditional display advertising and too much of an opportunity to achieve some definable success today. A full strategy and setup must first be put in place so you can utilise your campaign insights and data effectively So lets look at the considerations that take place in setting up RTB campaigns Well first you have to have a breakdown of who is effected advertising push internally, who is your target audience, how much do you know about them and what you will define as success is it sales growth, branding metrics, a CPA target. Do you subscribe to a Post click or post view conversion model and what are the reasons for this Do you want to have some preferred or private publisher deals as part of your portfolio and how will this affect your overall metric of success. For the creative strategy Again we can’t just put some one set pf ads and leave them for 6 months. They have to be tailored for audience and tailored for the goal, if you want to see those 10, 20% increase in an audience targeted click through rates then make sure your creative reflects those that are being advertised to. For creative, like all biddable media strategies test, test and test again. Have a strategy in place to test ads targeted at different gender, age groups demographics Test rich media ads against standardised flash or html banners ----- is the improvement in click through rate compensating for any ad serving costs Finally the multilingual strategy a
• #22: a number of the brands here today will operate and advertise internationally and within programmatic it is this multilingual strategy which currently isn’t talked about enough. It is hugely important to the success of PPC but perhaps even more so when planning your first rtb campaigns. ******** It is more vital to work with mother tongue speakers on your display activity ******** When it comes to Creation of keyword targeting you need keywords that are specific in meaning and context to the country and language your trying to target ********Research and knowledge of territories online purchasing behaviour and reception to advertising needs to be taken into consideration ****** In terms of competition, we could assume that your competitors could be doing with PPC in most markets you both share, this will absolutely not be the case programmatically ********With the production of creative in terms of the messaging and designs how they are catered to the country or language in which you are advertising. *****Finally research needs to take place across the sites and content in your target region outside of just premium publisher content. Niche blogs and very specific websites are often the best performing so the ability to research and identify those is beneficial A country specific strategy also applies to audience pools and site performance, audiences will not perform like for like in any territories Expect big variations in click through rate, engagement and conversation rates by not catering a bespoke strategy to each market. And as an example on the bottom of this slide you will be able to see an example of Amazon’s ad creative strategy in China – a clear difference from anything you’ve seen from them across Europe
• #23: One good example of how markets respond differently to brands is Superdry.  In the UK, Superdry is perceived as a casual and sportswear brand for men and women, they are on the higher side of high street pricing for their demographic But in France, they are known to appeal to men through their sportswear range, a number of khigh profile bloggers were surprised, Superdry wasn’t just sportswear In Germany Superdry sites in a much, much cheaper market place and can be bought in Woolworths and other supermarkets for much smaller price compared to the rest of Europe. It could be more targeted to middle aged people that shop at discount stores. So if your established internationally you must be preparing your campaign strategy based on how each market reacts to your advertising with no assumptions made on new audience performance, if you are pushing or launching in a new market, be ready to adapt with your campaign and creative management.
• #24: Now lets looks at a couple of considerations that take place when optimising a rtb account
• #25: One of the major consideration that takes place in audience choice is CPM price. To target specific third party audience pools in RTB costs an additional CPM price on top of what you pay for your bid. The more specific the audience or the smaller the audience pool the more it is likely to cost Your portfolio of targeting should be fairly vast coving broader, but relevant groups, those from 1st party profiling and specific product or key audiences to target, allowing the opportunity for learning and scaling campaigns with the correct optimisation. So in the diagram above if we were to target “over 50s men in the market for life insurance” the CPM to target this audience could be very high for good reason If we were just targeting men we may be no additional CPM price to our bid It may cost another 5, 10 pence per thousand impressions to find an audience qualifying age If we are specifying an interest in life insurance content our CPMs could be rising by another £1 and by the time your qualifying the audience as in the market , ready to buy your additional CPM price could in theory be paying as much as 2,3 or £4 higher so the click through rate must increase, engagements must be on the rise to correctly manage this. Typically you will have to manage audiences across all levels of the buying or interest cycles and for each audience you may.be managing the site, device and frequency of that campaign.
• #26: So when managing audience campaigns, optimise statistically to accommodate the CPM audience bid model, however more than that its vital to use the audience data to improve all areas of your account: Take the brand Bootea, who operate in the detox and weightloss market. Bootea initially targeted those audiences and content for people in the market for detox or weight loss products, this performance did well, it was relevant to the product However what the first party profiling data told them from tracking users on site was that the most common converters we’re not those actively looking for detox products It was in fact Intense Social engagers aged 18-24 across platforms and social sites Followers of Online fashion blogs Those involved in health blogging communities This was not only going to vital for branding but also for the next steps for our campaigns We decided to run a competition with the brand to ask current customers to post selfies of themselves with the product to Instagram with the reward of being the face of the next bootea ad campaign. The winners were then used in our creative ***** ***** This resulted in a 20% increase in relative click through rates This is a company who saw a 2800% increase in conversions over the first three month’s of their programmatic activity because they connected with all aspects of audience data and this is just one example from a series of testing strategies.
• #27: And they aren’t alone in this marketplace These are two real campaign performance graphs and with a correctly planned strategy its something you can see time and again with RTB campaigns The first graph shows cost per sale or cost per engagement These are the sort of improvements we are seeing when we don’t make assumptions about strategy or audiences and have a full testing methodology in place catered to each target, country and language Our three key points shows when we first********drive huge volumes of data Our campaigns start with a wide portfolio of publisher deals, audiences, remarketing and contextual targeting campaigns from which to make statistically qualified decisions for the next steps of testing and optimisations **** As that testing is in full swing we are improving the overall performance metrics by accessing all of the data available to invest in the segments which provide the greatest CPA or performance metrics. Given the scale of the optimisation that takes place over the many variables the improvement can dramatic and reaching a target ROI can happen quickly for those with statistical analysis at the forefront of their optimisation. **** Much like the Bootea example we push further by learning and truly utilising the audience insights that are available to us. We are investing more in key publisher websites that have proven to work for us when our key converting audience is online, our decisions to invest more are based on performance and as such a world apart from the traditional deals where we were committed to a larger spend without the evidence of performance. Your campaigns at this point are carrying out advanced testing, whether that be frequency capping, active view – which website impressions have actually been viewed by the user and layering successful targeting options to improve ROI
• #28: But the refinement of performance is by no means a limitation on the scalability of your success in this market, the complexity of the account management required to get the cost per sale or cost per engagement we’ve talked about is rewarded in the opportunity to grow your engagements, Your ROI or whatever the metric of success is improving significantly but more than that your are identifying these publishers, audiences, campaigns of any type in specific territories and languages that you can then focus your investment on across the largest possible inventory available and therefor you have the opportunity to grow success and quickly. In PPC you may look for incremental increases in sales volume in a mature account but in this market you can move way beyond d the levelling off affect of conversions or branding engagement as you optimise each variable to its maximum.
• #29: So to summarise, RTB its complicated, But it needs to be. We are ultimately talking about the most sophisticated online advertising technology available, it requires a knowledge of online media buying applied over complex strategies and statistical optimisation to get that unmatched ROI However the rewards are out there, Ensure that you ask the right questions from when deciding to go programmatic, ….. through to optimisation and ensure that your brands strategy is bespoke to where and how you want to advertise Test everything – take the best practices you have learnt from biddable media strategies and take them to the next level in this marketplace with a huge number of variables which can affect account performance The title of ‘achieve the impossible may be a cheesy one’ but compared to traditional display the opportunity really is there. Consider what we’ve discussed today in your path to programmatic and you’ll be on your way to achieving the ROI’s that you’ve heard so much about Thankyou for your time.