Measures of Success: Programmatic

Programmatic ads have long been considered a top-of-funnel solution. They often exist on the peripheral of our attention. Banner ads scroll by as we read through articles, we tune out audio ads between songs on Spotify or Pandora, and we lose focus as commercials roll on streaming apps; they exist to permeate our conscience subtly. 

Marketers have spent years thinking about programmatic in the wrong light. Yes, they are great ToFu awareness drivers, but they can be conversion machines when they’re employed correctly. Programmatic ads can work through the entirety of your funnel and drive all your consumers down from discovery to purchase. 

How to Turn Your Programmatic Ads into Conversion Machines

The key to your programmatic conversions is through your data. The data capabilities of programmatic today are far more than it was even just a few years ago. The level of granularity marketers can achieve through programmatic is impressive, with likely over 100,000 data points they can home in on. 

What marketers do with this data is crucial. Honing your target market so you know exactly who to send these ads to will make or break the success of your programmatic campaigns. Serving these customers with programmatic ads can lead to conversion as you remain top of mind in your category. Knowing your audience can lead to personalized ads at every funnel, which will lead to more conversions. 

Retargeting and Prospecting for Incremental Revenue Growth

Understanding the two main types of programmatic ads is crucial to building a successful strategy. Prospecting will target new customers while retargeting will target users who have visited your site. This is where your data becomes key. 

In prospecting programmatic campaigns, you must know the target market that you wish to capture. Understanding who your potential customers are and where they are coming from is critical. Programmatic will help inform your market, but taking in data from all your channels will truly paint the clearest picture. Target these audiences in your prospecting campaign.

In retargeting, programmatic campaigns will be able to target users who have already clicked on your ads, visited your site, abandoned their cart, or purchased. Retargeting can be the holy grail of conversions in programmatic campaigns. These customers are clearly interested and hammering home the products they’re interested in through consistent visuals of these products will more often lead to higher conversion than with average customers.

Programmatic KPIs, Before and After Cookies’ Departure 

Right now, cookies are the currency in digital advertising. However, Google Chrome has announced that they’ll begin to phase out cookies by 2022. This has left many marketers feeling scared and threatened, as many of them still rely on these cookies for data and tracking metrics. But at Adtaxi, we believe that a cookie-less world will actually lead to better campaigns and easier metrics to watch. 

Right now, it’s somewhat challenging to truly measure the impact of your digital ads. Consumers rarely click on display ads unless there’s an actual coupon or offer in them. Users can’t even click on other programmatic channels like connected TV or audio. Many marketers undervalue programmatic because of this. But it’s not about the clicks, it’s about the continued presence of your brand in the consumers’ perceptions.

However, when cookies are abandoned, the available data will be unique identifiers in each device’s browsers, likely tied to an email address. A unique identifier will enable marketers to see the true impact of their ads. If a user was served an ad and 15 minutes later went to the site and purchased something, that would qualify as a conversion from the ad. Right now, that isn’t possible unless the user clicked on that ad specifically. 

So the KPIs and metrics to track are somewhat different today than they will be in a few years. Now, TOFU metrics like impressions and traffic are measured to gain an overall sense of how effective these ads are. However, the problem is you don’t really know who did or didn’t see the ad, and more often than not, you have multiple ad types running consistently. Was it a social ad? Was it a native ad? Maybe search results? You don’t really know which ad they’re seeing, and you have to take a TOFU approach to programmatic ads to garner a rough estimate of their success. 

In a few years, these metrics will change. Direct conversion, whether traffic to the site or conversions, can be measured specifically for your programmatic ads. If they saw an ad and went to your site that day and made a purchase, the unique identifier will showcase that conversion attributed to the specific ad. The unique identifier will highlight the true success of these ad types and showcase that they are a part of the bottom of your funnel.