How to Get Started with Programmatic Advertising?

Getting your new business to profitability can be a slow and mundane process. It’s normal for it to take months, if not years, to validate the demand for your product or service. If you’re considering advertising, programmatic advertising is a great tool to get your brand in front of its target audience quickly and nearly effortlessly.

What is Programmatic Advertising?

Contrary to traditional digital advertising, programmatic can save you time and money. It automatically displays your ads only to the audience you’re interested in.

Before programmatic advertising, you’d either contact a publisher directly or go through a network, to put up an ad for a fixed amount of time. You’d get no control over who sees the ad, no real guarantees on the number of impressions/views and you’d pay a fixed amount of money upfront for all of that, no matter how it performed for you. That’s far from ideal, right?

Programmatic advertising tackles those obstacles by design. Here’s how it works.

In the programmatic ad platform of your choice, you set up your targeting criteria, such as consumers’ location or the device they’re using. Then you decide how much you want to pay for each click or impression (in programmatic terms, this is known as your “bid”).

Whenever a target consumer (one that meets your targeting criteria) loads a website – that’s connected by its publisher to the ad platform you’re using – a process called real-time bidding begins. If your bid (i.e. the price you’re willing to pay for click or impression) is the highest, your ad is automatically shown to that consumer. And all of this just takes just milliseconds.

You ask what if the consumer doesn’t meet your criteria? Then your ad campaign simply doesn’t enter the bidding war.

Why Consider Programmatic Advertising?

Money and time savings compared to more traditional forms of advertising is one thing, but why consider taking the paid advertising route at all?

Like we mentioned earlier, programmatic advertising accelerates the demand and market validation stages. You can also build this organically through SEO and business development, and choose to not spend a dime on advertising. But that’s a slow, time-consuming and risky route. Your business ideas can get invalidated by the market after you’ve already invested a whole lot of manpower and time.

With programmatic advertising, you can get the market’s feedback on your product or service within minutes, as you get your brand in front of the right people fairly quickly. Once you know your product or service is interesting enough, programmatic advertising is also an effective tool for driving conversions.

Your ads are only displayed to the group you identify as the most likely to purchase your product. And on top of that, you get full control over your ad spend. This translates into sheer performance.

How to Start with Programmatic Ads?

If you feel like you’re ready to dip your toe in the programmatic ad waters, we’ve got two excellent starting points for your business:

NewProgrammatic

NewProgrammatic is an advertising network designed to bring performance to brand advertising. Its ad formats enhance the user experience by shortening the customers’ path to your website while ensuring your brand’s safety.

The ad formats in question are Tiles and Instant Search. These are featured in various browsers (e.g. Opera), Search Engines (e.g. Qwant), or pre-installed mobile apps (e.g. Xiaomi). Whenever customers start typing in the search bar, a suggestion of your website comes on.

If your brand is already recognized by customers, NewProgrammatic delivers a fantastic tool to effectively scale up your sales.

Zeropark

Zeropark is a well-established performance ad exchange platform. The three ad formats offered include push notifications, pop-ups, and domain redirects.

Zeropark is recommended for businesses looking to get high volumes of traffic to their websites or landing pages, no matter whether it’s for scaling up your sales or market validation.

If you are interested in signing up to NewProgrammatic or Zeropark, we have a special for OnlyDomains’ blog readers. You can secure an extra $100 with your first deposit using the code ‘newdomain_100‘.

This blog article is published in partnership with Zeropark.