Myth-Busting Programmatic ’s Top 5 Biggest Misperceptions:
Targeting is now easier than ever. With the growing utilization of digital advertising and the plethora of companies offering it, the ability to leverage programmatic geo and demo targeting is at everyone’s fingertips. Despite the increase of use and availability, there are still some major misperceptions in the market: over what programmatic can and cannot do, best practices, and plain-out incorrect information. We’re taking on the top 5 biggest offenders and hoping to set the record straight.
#1. “Hyper Targeting is always the way to go”:
When we have the ability to geotarget a specific address or demographically target as granularly as ‘soccer moms’ in a specific neighborhood, the temptation is to say “heck yeah!” and go all gusto with the targeting strategy. However, there are times that broader is better.
Depending on the product or service, and the specific goals of a campaign, we often encourage our clients not to drill down too deep. The more data layers you add, the higher your CPM (cost per thousand) and the fewer the available impressions. It becomes a balancing act of cost to market penetration. Each data layer eliminates a pool of marketable individuals.
A good example is when given the option to layer in a gender demographic, unless your product or service is only used by or benefiting one gender, don’t do it – adding a gender layer effectively reduces your available reach by 50%. So, if the bigger driver is location, as within a 10-mile radius of your address, adding a layer like females in a specific age bracket, can be detrimental to a campaign. This specific focus is only effective within a large enough geo reach: highly populated urban centers, entire states, geographic regions like the mid-Atlantic, the South East, or Pacific Coast, and alignment to the product/service needs to be strong. Sometimes we might use a data layer to shrink a market to increase share of voice, but more times than not we are looking for the most available impressions for a campaign. It’s a dance of effectiveness vs targeting, and comes with understanding of the data segmentations, which demos are drivers for a company, and which can be eliminated.
#2.“I can run targeted geo campaigns myself through Google Adwords and Facebook”:
“In general, Adwords is not difficult to use but if you don’t know how to use it correctly, you may end up losing a lot of money.” Digitalmarketingpro.net
This is why we do what we do at Enradius. Researching and negotiating, monitoring and realigning campaigns is just part of the service we offer clients. And it’s a full-time job. Here are the pluses to working with a firm over do-it-yourself:
- Time – A professional service provider makes life that much easier, more professional, and let’s face it – more effective. And that’s one less thing on your plate.
- Cost savings – just like filing your taxes, you can do it yourself but at what cost? What are you leaving on the table or letting leak through the cracks? A well executed plan not only drives better results but puts the most impact behind the dollars you are spending.
- Optimized campaigns that deliver the best results. This also falls into the time category – monitoring and re-allocating budgets, evaluating A/B campaigns and CTR, generating campaign reports, and fine tuning strategy throughout not only deliver better results but create efficiencies in defining a company best practice. Let us help you understand what works instead of taking shots in the dark.
“…staff still need to know where to buy, what they’re buying and who they want to target for campaigns. Getting an untrained staffer to start clicking and buying is likely to result in wildly misguided advertising campaigns.” Tech Digest. The digital landscape is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. Staying on top of and anticipating this change is what makes us an expert.
#3. “One ad fits all”:
Advertising on laptops, tablets and mobile phones have differences which may be subtle to someone not in the know, but if not set up with differences in mind, can tank an otherwise beautiful digital campaign. What we need to plan out is device optimization and cookies. Mobile ads need to be scaled, and cookies are largely ineffective on phone-based browsers. With mobile viewing on the rise, it is a factor that needs to be considered when designing ads and for overall targeting and retargeting strategies.
#4. “It’s all the same”:
Nope – some firms offering digital have access to premium channels, proprietary sites, and unique local inventory not available through anyone else. It’s pretty straight-forward stuff – think of it as a stock market – real time bidding, but instead of stocks, we’re bidding on open ad inventory on behalf of our clients. Available inventory in the ad network, pushed there by participating web publishers, with data on who is visiting their page in real time. We set a bid amount for a certain demographic and geographic target and when that lines up, our ad is pulled down from the network and is visible to the intended target. The myth here that it’s all one ad network is the challenge. There are networks and then there are networks – we work to ensure that our clients ads are running on solid inventory, not junk inventory.
#5. “It doesn’t work for us”:
So maybe you’ve dipped your toe into digital, tried out a few Adsense campaigns or spent some budget with the local paper who said they can offer you a digital package with your ad buy. All to no avail, there was no capacity to understand the impact it had. We hear this all the time. Unsatisfied advertisers who want to step up their game, who have heard about mind-blowing digital campaigns but haven’t been able to realize it’s potential. Digital campaigns fall down when the legwork doesn’t happen up front. The targeting isn’t vetted or as in myth #1, isn’t necessary; no one is monitoring the campaign-it’s just running on auto-pilot; alignment between goals, targeting strategies and creative is out of whack; or the people selling it don’t really understand what they are selling. We have seen it all.
Given strong alignment between campaign goals, ad creative and landing-page call-to-action with conversion tracking, with transparency and reporting to redirect and optimize a campaign, advertisers can expect successful results.
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