...And that’s a big deal. Programmatic is an essential marketing tool that’s here to stay – not only due to its value in processing data, but because it’s so much easier for marketers and agencies than the old, manual ways.
So, how can your company climb on top of the programmatic juggernaut and get the most impact for your marketing spend?
The answer can be summed up in two words: manumatic and attribution.
About 10 years ago, programmatic buying – which uses algorithms and automation to target an audience and direct ad spend – became available to replace a manual process, which required painstaking site selection, insertion orders, and collation of results by hand. Marketers embraced programmatic enthusiastically. Today, three quarters of digital display ad dollars in the US transact programmatically and eMarketer estimates
But there’s trouble in programmatic paradise. While providing important benefits, programmatic buying also takes away control. Marketers set parameters – who they want to reach and where they want to be – but they don’t know whether those parameters are actually adhered to.
Too often, programmatic buying is a spray-and-pray system. Maybe you appeared on every newspaper site in the country. But maybe you were supposed to be in the online finance section and ended up in sports, where the ad lost context. Maybe you received 3,000 calls or 10 million impressions but customers are calling about the wrong product – a low-margin one – or the people who are seeing the ad are in the wrong demographic.
Or worse. Since networks get paid for impressions, they want to be in as many sites as they can, so rogue sites creep in. I've seen blue-chip companies appearing on sites that just weren’t proper for them. But they don’t know it – because they are only getting information in the aggregate.
When an ad campaign succeeds, marketers don’t know exactly why. How many leads or calls came from Google v Bing v Facebook? From what geographies and during what times of day? What impact did social media have?
Companies usually don’t know the answers. In that case, how can they know when to spend more or less and develop a powerful strategy?
Getting under the hood
Auto enthusiasts will know the term "manumatic". Manumatic is a process that combines the best of human intervention and technological power.
If you rely fully on programmatic buying, your campaign is only as good as the person who created the algorithms that power the software. With a manumatic approach, a programmatic system alerts a human – in real time – when results are falling significantly outside expected norms. Then, that person can make a judgment whether things are going really wrong or really right.
Here’s an example: Ai Media Group was handling the ad spend for a major telecom when Super Bowl Sunday came along. We expected higher-than-normal volume of calls and clicks for that day. But our system alerted us that we were getting an extremely high call count – as much as three or four times normal, particularly in the Southern California area.
In an all-programmatic system, the software would assume that more calls are good and more money should be pushed to that geography. But when a human looked at the keywords people were typing in, the geography that was lighting up on the map, and the content of customer service calls, we learned that the issue wasn’t increased demand – it was that the telecom had had an outage in Southern California on Super Bowl Sunday.
Because we were using a manumatic system, we were able to override the programmatic system and pause all the acquisition campaigns in that location. This saved the telecom about $33,000 in one hour, which could then be redirected toward more productive ad spend.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that teaming the human brain with programmatic technology leads to smarter marketing decisions. Even so, those decisions can’t be optimized without the other leg of the stool –namely, full attribution.
Over the long term, true full-channel attribution can follow an individual buyer from his or her first exposure to a topic, product or service, all the way across IP addresses, domains and devices, to the point of conversion. It can tell you about the most effective sites, geographies, times and copy for your ads. You will know what tactics are actually succeeding.
Ideally, your programmatic buying will show you all of this in real time – not with a model, not with a spreadsheet, and not three months after the fact.
And when that happens, you’ll have a programmatic buying system that really lives up to its promises.
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