Trends In Programmatic Advertising To Watch This Year

Post written by

Sheila Kloefkorn

Sheila Kloefkorn is CEO/President of KEO Marketing, a full-service B2B marketing agency.

Programmatic advertising has taken digital marketing by storm. In fact, a Search Engine Watch writer said that "Dun & Bradstreet Report predicts almost 70% of B2B marketers plan to increase spending on programmatic advertising in 2017." The study also found 65% of B2B marketers currently buy or sell advertising programmatically.

This figure represents a substantial increase from the 54% reported in 2016. If this trajectory holds, programmatic advertising spending will likely surpass social media and online video by the end of 2017.

Why You Should Care About Programmatic Advertising

As a form of marketing automation, programmatic advertising streamlines the ad buying process with data-driven, automated technology. You can buy and sell ad inventory through computers.

However, the technical concept is much more complex. Programmatic advertising includes several platforms:

  • Demand-Side Platforms (DSPs) facilitate open market ad purchases.
  • Supply-Side Platforms (SSPs) manage ad inventory for publishers.
  • Data Management Platforms (DMPs) collect and analyze user data to help with targeting and messaging.

You buy advertising space and place ads through an auction process. Programmatic advertising platforms use advanced algorithms, historical data and other parameters to calculate bids in real-time for each ad placement. Purchasing transactions take place instantly.


Why Adopt Programmatic Advertising?

In a nutshell, you can boost efficiency. By automating the digital ad buying and placement process, you remove ad buyers and salespeople. Without humans in the mix, purchasing becomes more reliable and less costly. You can also generate greater insight into consumer behavior and optimize your key performance indicators (KPIs).

We have found that programmatic advertising enables better targeting of prospects, more highly relevant ads and higher quality conversions. For one telecom client, we were able to gain 508% more conversions using programmatic advertising than pay per click (PPC) advertising alone.

What To Expect In The Coming Years

At my agency, we specialize in business-to-business (B2B) marketing with a primary goal of generating high-quality, high-volume leads. If you are also a B2B marketer, how do you leverage programmatic advertising in your business? These six trends will help you prepare for the growing use of this innovation:

  1. Programmatic advertising purchases will continue to grow. Eventually, these purchases will exceed traditional, manual ad buying. In the next few years, industry experts predict programmatic advertising will drive 100% of advertising purchases. Organizations not championing automation will fall behind those that do.
  2. Programmatic mobile advertising will increase dramatically. This surge in popularity can be attributed to consumers switching from public social networks pages to messaging apps like Snapchat and Viber. A growing mobile audience creates opportunities for your paid media campaigns on mobile messaging apps.
  3. Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) will gain traction. DCO refers to display ad technology that automates multivariate, or A/B, testing. Programmatic advertising uses algorithms to interpret results and determine how to serve ads that perform better.
  4. Header bidding will become more accessible. Both advertisers and publishers recognize the benefits of header bidding. Header bidding offers a technically sophisticated technique for publishers to offer inventory simultaneously to multiple ad exchanges. Numerous advertisers can bid on the same ad inventory at the same time.
  5. Campaign metrics used to measure success will evolve. To evaluate the actual results of your programmatic campaign, you must measure the right KPIs. Too often marketers use metrics that do not relate to bottom-line results. Rather than track web traffic, clickthroughs, or social shares, you should focus on more meaningful measures like lead volume, lead quality, conversions, and revenue.
  6. Personalization will grow more sophisticated. When you accurately target your programmatic advertising to individuals, you leverage strategies such as geolocation and detailed demographics. Numerous studies confirm customers feel more positively about a brand when you personalize messages.

For success in the future, you must understand programmatic advertising and the role it plays in your overall marketing strategy. Technology lets you use data-driven targeting to deliver impactful messages to your prospects in the most cost-efficient manner.

Sheila Kloefkorn is CEO and president of KEO Marketing, a full-service B2B marketing agency.