Basics of Mobile Programmatic Advertising
Have you heard about Mobile Programmatic Advertising before? If you follow the latest trends you might saw this element in all the reports which refer to the fast evolution of mobile advertising. But, when you read the term for the first time, how many of you thought that it has something to do with coding? Actually, Programmatic Advertising is the process of purchasing ads in an automatic manner while the amount of data gathered helps the message of the ad to reach the target audience. So, Mobile Programmatic Advertising means that the ads are displayed on mobile devices. As Martin Beauchamp, MEC’s head of programmatic, says:
“You can’t disconnect from your device. From a marketer’s point of view, it is a dream; mobile is becoming increasingly important, not just because of consumer adoption, but also because of programmatic technology.”
To handle better this type of strategy you need to know the insights of this revolutionary method. Let’s proceed with some useful details which will show you how you can spend less money with smart ads for more efficient results. There are three types of programmatic buying:
- Open Marketplace (Open Auction) – Real-Time Bidding represents the purchasing of ad impressions in real time using auctions within seconds before the app starts. RTB is divided by two main elements:
- DSP and SSP for placing bids for impressions;
- AD Exchange where publisher sends the inventory.
- Private Marketplace (PMP) is an exclusive marketplace for publishers which sell special inventory to preferred buyers, but the auction still takes place, even if it is just for private players. PMP is considered an intermediate level between Open Marketplace and Programmatic Direct. yu
- Programmatic Direct as you can easily understand is the buying of the programmatic ad without an auction. These campaigns are for premium brands who afford to buy their preferred space for advertising. These special transactions aren’t for every company, just for adepts with a huge budget.
For a better understanding of the factors that determine the fast growth in this domain, we invite you to check Global mobile programmatic trends.
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What are the Benefits of Programmatic Advertising
The best advantage of programmatic advertising is that it creates momentum. When your ad reaches the exact audience who need the app, in the exact time when they search for the product you promote and by the exact format they enjoy, you can be sure that your money is well invested. Let’s describe it this way. Traditional advertising is just like trying to sell a pair of slim jeans to all kinds of silhouettes. Maybe one or two persons would be interested in your ad, in the happiest scenario. The rest of the people who see it remain indifferent or they start planning to go to the gym. Anyway, your money is thrown away. So are your chances to attract customers. On the contrary, programmatic advertising allows you to show the same pair of jeans only for those who consider buying this product and, more important, those who can fit into this size. Another gain of using this method of advertising is that you can handle multiple devices and multiple channels from only one dashboard reaching a great number of publishers. There is no need to explain how effective can be this strategy compared to the traditional one. We can’t pass further without mentioning the accurate system of tracking the most important metrics, because of the data used for analytics. With programmatic advertising, you have a clear vision of the success of your campaign. Gathering information like ad sizes and formats, App IDs, operating systems and other details about mobile devices during the programmatic strategy will help you observe the performances of your ads. This means that all the images and videos are displayed at their maximum capability. The level of customization will reach greater levels at right prices based on impressions. With traditional advertising, you could never follow users by their geolocation information, preferences or activity on devices or social networks. For example, using Rubicon Project’s exchange API, Flipboard announced 6 months ago the beginning of a new era of advertising for the well – known mobile app with the new service of selling programmatic and native ads. Its objectives are described by Nicole McCormack:
“One of the things we bring to the programmatic space in a mobile environment is a really high-quality audience and a premium one.”
What Are The Challenges Of Mobile Programmatic Advertising
As you can understand, with the effects of programmatic advertising for targeting the right audience, comes a great responsibility for advertisers to create appealing visuals. This stage is not that easy to be completed by all companies since the methods used are not as innovative as they should be. In the same time, the number of different screen sizes and devices is another issue that can interfere with the choice of this method of promotion. Despite the fact that the ads are displayed to the right customers, there are studies which show that only half of the users really see the ads. For more information regarding Ad Fraud, we wrote just a few weeks ago and we highlighted that everybody can participate in the permanent war against this phenomenon. Meanwhile, efforts are made to reduce all these disadvantages for a better experience of those who prefer programmatic advertising. For example, HTML5 is considered as a great solution for building mobile responsive ads and there is an increasing interest for programmatic creatives. As long as the learning curve goes up, so will be the adoption of programmatic advertising.
What Is The Future Of Programmatic Advertising
Taking into account the advantages of programmatic advertising and the concern in preventing the issues that may appear during the process, there is no wonder that the future will be dominated by programmatic techniques. BI Intelligence forecasts that programmatic and real-time bidding will gather more than $18.2 billion of US digital ad sales by 2018 with an annual growth rate of 42%. If you look at the next chart you can discover that mobile and video are the most rapidly growing formats in terms of RTB sales.
A more recent study made by eMarketer shows that US programmatic ad spending will reach $37.88 billion by 2018.
Furthermore, the same research reveals that mobile programmatic ad spending will exceed desktop programmatic advertising in a few months by 70.2%.
As you can see there is no turning back now for the growth of programmatic methods in the advertising area. It will be a dominating field for marketers, mainly in the mobile world because of the innovative solutions and for demanding users which won’t accept any more old boring and irrelevant ads.
Final Thoughts
Optimizing marketing efforts can be done with programmatic advertising methods which saw fast growth and they continue to rise, leaving far behind the traditional ways of promoting your app. As in other domain, there are few downsides but studies show that this is the path which will lead marketers to more impressive results for the future and the number of adepts for the automation of purchasing ads continues to grow day after day.