Using Programmatic Advertising For Digital Path To Conversion

Carving a digital path with programmatic advertising establishes touchpoints for step-by-step measurement.

The streaming marketplace spreads across devices and services, and digital campaigns must establish measurable goals or KPIs across the board. Connecting the right message to buyers and measuring the effects are among the greater benefits of programmatic advertising.

Serve ads on smart TVs, OTT platforms, and mobile devices from the top of the purchase funnel down to conversion. Plus, providing ads that are relevant to consumers significantly enhances audience engagement.

These days, matching campaigns to specific audiences instead of broader demographics are the direction of most marketing efforts. However, only the advanced and seasoned providers offer optimizations to generate full-funnel success.

Laying Out a Programmatic Path to Conversion

Linear TV viewership continues to decline as the most popular way consumers access content evolves. And so it’s why connected TV (CTV) ad spend has reflected this shift.

One massive advantage of digital TV viewership growth for advertising is that it has become a personalized experience, which creates opportunities to discover and target particular audience segments.

The changing ways audiences stream and spend time online means adapting the traditional customer journey. Otherwise, your path to conversion becomes fragmented and disorganized.

Every stop along the digital path may not happen linearly. For this reason, understanding how to leverage data leads to a strategy geared toward specific markets and allows retargeting tactics to maintain sequential messaging.

Programmatic advertising is the perfect way to assess online behaviors and consumer intent behind the data. For example, lookalike modeling from first-party data can launch campaigns with details on already-engaged demographics.

In comparison, third-party data is broader and requires communication accuracy to pinpoint relevant audiences and ad space.

Overall, capitalizing on data through programmatic brings the ideal consumer to view. Data is a rich resource offering insights into target audiences, but delivering an easy-to-understand visualization of real-time results is the next level of digital capabilities.

Meaningful Brand Awareness

When running a brand awareness campaign, tracking everything draws connections to tactics. In particular, granular measurements determine engagement rates and highlight which placements are working the best and who is the most responsive.

Adding the real-time bidding (RTB) process of programmatic advertising frees time to focus on comprehensive strategies. In addition, what used to be a linear pathway from brand awareness to conversion is now embedded in a web of diverse contact points.

Online video, display ads, and audio advertising reach far beyond traditional advertising. As a result, audience targeting in this space has become more complex, but automation simplifies the process.

For starters, targeting should paint a detailed portrait of potential consumers. With programmatic advertising, sophisticated methods reach audiences by:

• Designing customer models from demographics, behavioral data, and online searches

• Targeting based on viewing habits on CTV and other devices in the household

• Applying zip code radiuses around specific geographic areas for localized targeting

Tracking a brand awareness campaign bridges targeting, delivery, and measurable impact for a comprehensive approach to programmatic marketing.

Focus on Ad Frequency or Reach?

Ad frequency emphasizes layered messaging to drive prospective customers to find out more information and make purchases.

On the other hand, maximizing audience reach holds a great deal of value in expanding your target market. In particular, consumers may not be familiar with your product or service, so broader channels present a better fit.

The focus depends on the marketing goals of the campaign. For instance, identifying and messaging the right audience in cadence produces the most effective results if it’s targeting a niche audience.

However, reach grows client bases and offers a blank slate for new products and services. It may be the case that neither of these metrics outweighs the other, as programmatic ads present ways to pinpoint consumers based on their purchasing interests.

Programmatic Tracks the Steps

Visualization truly puts programmatic advertising at the leading edge of digital marketing. Illustrating a successful conversion path from the user’s first engagement to the desired action links budget dollars to outcomes.

Programmatic advertising also works across verticals to deliver compelling ads to receptive viewers.

Customizing a campaign for CTV and OTT contains many steps around building a path to conversion, in addition, to the supply-side platform (SSP) and demand-side platform (DSP) considerations.

Also, this recognizes that some customers follow the arranged path, while others require consecutive interactions before conversion.

Reporting and Analysis

Ensuring attributions are measured on the back end offers a holistic view of campaign goals with insights into performance. In addition, programmatic advertising reports real-time data that advertisers can use to optimize and adjust active campaigns.

And this data backs decision-making processes when quick solutions are needed—a competitive edge over traditional media buying.

A funnel analysis underlines specific touchpoints leading to a purchase decision. The impact at the bottom of the funnel may prove valuable to top-of-funnel efforts, which optimizes the entire campaign.

Word of mouth and offline advertising count as interactions too. It’s all about targeting the right audience that leads consumers to purchase, search online, sign-up, and seek more information.

Why Programmatic Advertising Matters

Taking every opportunity to spread brand awareness is essential to expand markets and producing strong ROI. Furthermore, executing conversion paths informs advertisers of what’s working and what isn’t.

Data collection from conversion tracking reveals more insights into base consumers and the ones the campaign hopes to attract.

At the same time, it supports more potent tactics by identifying users who moved through the purchase funnel but didn’t reach the desired conversion. This designated audience with a history of interest now opens future courses of action for retargeting with programmatic display advertising and online video options.

Here are some examples showing how programmatic has taken off:

• The growth in connected TV has marked 2022 as the first year that video will surpass non-video formats in programmatic ad spending

• Advertisers in favor of automated purchasing options have shifted CTV digital display ad spending dramatically to programmatic channels

• Nearly 9 in 10 of all digital video ad dollars will transact programmatically for the next few years

Programmatic combined with OTT/CTV leads to purposeful messaging at the household level. Moreover, it has demonstrated extraordinary value to advertisers, modernizing the media buying landscape for the better.

Advertising's Programmatic Future

Keeping up with the digital marketplace changes and programmatic innovations requires ad ops expertise and a dedicated team. However, all these shifts also bring chances to improve performance.

Modifying traditional ad exchanges with programmatic capabilities offers more fulfilling pay-offs. Most advertisers realize this potential, and the digital advertising budgets echo that.

Adding programmatic advertising requires piecing together multiple moving parts. Not to mention, information learned during the campaign feeds back into optimization for long-lasting conversions.

After establishing the campaign, brand awareness connects to household CTVs and OTT devices for top-of-the-funnel exposure. Any viewer who watches it to completion signals interest and becomes a priority for retargeting techniques.

Retargeting inserts points of contact to guide lower funnel conversions regardless of screen. Never before can we identify and target audience segments so precisely.

Benefits of a Managed Programmatic Service

When you choose managed services, immediate access to industry experts provides clear answers to programmatic ad-buying questions and expectations.

Additionally, they have the technological solutions to ensure efficient ad buys and thorough analytics.

Whether gearing marketing goals to seasonal conditions or quarterly results, a managed service presents access to higher-quality inventory, best practices, and resources for targeting and measurement.

Managed services also cut costs by advising clients on how to avoid advertising mistakes, such as oversaturation and irrelevant messaging.

The total amount of streaming content appears limitless, with streaming becoming an everyday experience and more digital content pushed out every month. As a result, advertisers in the OTT and CTV markets can take advantage of rising audiences in this environment.

Programmatic Ingenuity and Quality Performance

The Strategus team has been pushing the programmatic OTT/CTV industry forward from the start. As we roll out innovations in programmatic automation, we continue to streamline marketing initiatives.

Partnering with Strategus customizes programmatic software to fit clients’ needs and explores the latest developments of this technology.

Advertising to modern audiences means reaching multiple screens and devices to drive conversions and increase audience engagement.

Strategus continues searching for what’s next in OTT/CTV advertising and commits to providing the most advanced programmatic solutions.

Contact us today if you want the most experienced programmatic provider in the field. Our managed services bridge the gap between traditional and programmatic advertising to enhance campaign performance.