Category: Paid Search
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Defining the Concept of Programmatic Buying
Programmatic buying is gaining increasing traction lately. Recent research shows that programmatic ad buying is going to increase in the coming years
Many marketers are showing a lot of interest in programmatic buying. They are seeing it as a useful tool and want to know more about it.
What is Programmatic buying?
It is a system that allows buyers to purchase online display inventory from multiple sources such as, ad networks, ad exchanges and a few direct publishers.
Programmatic Buying is different from the traditional form of media buying that is done by individuals. This software driven approach to media buying comes with a host of benefits from speed to versatility to effectiveness that makes it attractive to marketers.
Programmatic Buying Process
Here’s a graphic that depicts the process of programmatic buying:
Source: Ogilvy grow (a Demand Side Platform or DSP)
The entire cycle of ‘bid-call-response’ illustrated above happens in real time and is completed within a timeframe of 100 milliseconds.
Advantages of Programmatic Buying
- Single Platform Execution – programmatic buying is a one stop solution to bid on online display inventory across multiple marketplaces
- Enhanced real-time targeting capabilities for optimization – programmatic buying allows you to implement numerous strategies such as:
- Behavioral targeting: you can utilize first party data captured on your website (IP address, cookie pool, user demographics) and third party data segments bought from Data Management Platforms (DMPs) like Bluekai and Lotame that will let you maximize campaign reach
- Audience or affinity group targeting: you can buy specific, appropriate audience groups and not irrelevant audience on websites. With audience analysis and segmentation, you can ensure increased reach with effective utilization of your spend
- Keyword contextual targeting: your ad will be featured on web pages that include specific, contextual keywords related to your campaign
- White-listing: you can create and use a white list of sites that have shown impressive performance in previous campaigns
- Re-targeting: you can re-target audience segments that have visited your site but did not take up any further action. This strategy is mostly used to engage your audience better and help them progress along the buying funnel
- SEM re-marketing: this tactic allows you to re-market to audience segments that are using campaign specific keywords on search engines
- Lookalike audience targeting: you can target audience groups with characteristics similar to customers who have completed the sales cycle
- Process transparency: The entire process is transparent, which includes real-time reporting, allowing you to have full access to all imperative metrics related to the promotional activity
- Programmatic buying provides the capability to post edits on the DSP, which is mirrored across the campaign’s reach in real time. Programmatic buying’s artificial intelligence based approach without human weaknesses (subjectivity, inconsistency etc.) makes it sound like the best of both worlds
Its early days and the jury is still out.
What do you think about the capabilities of programmatic buying? Do you think it will help marketers run better performing campaigns and derive more ROI?
Technical contribution by Kishore Kangokar, Group Head- Media, Position2 Inc.
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Twitter Opens Analytics to All Users and Facebook Allows Advertisers to Target Mobile Users by Bandwidth
Twitter
The micro-blogging site has given all users access to its analytics feature. This was initially limited to advertisers, Twitter Card publishers and verified users only.
Twitter Analytics provides real time insights into how your tweet is performing by showing you the impressions, clicks, retweets and replies for each tweet. You can also get a report on monthly engagement and engagement rates for your account and download Tweet metrics.
This has been an eye-opener for many users since they realized that their organic reach and engagement rates are not at par with their expectations. But, in the future, this could be a very useful tool to measure your Twitter campaigns.
The Analytics feature is available to people who tweet primarily in English, French, Japanese and Spanish and who have had an account for at least two weeks. Twitter is looking out to extend this service to the rest of the users, though the company did not specify a time frame.
Twitter has become very popular in recent times, for news dissemination, joining forces for a crucial cause and the like. The analytics dashboard will help you gauge the reach and engagement of every tweet. This insight is helpful in making sense of your tweet and its effectiveness amidst all the clutter.
Better campaign measurement means better planned Twitter campaigns with an increase in ROI. The analytics dashboard can also encourage more marketers to run Twitter campaigns. Real time insight into tweet engagement rates allows you to know how your campaign is running at the moment. If you are running a campaign for a long time and you have periodic milestones during that time, you can check if users are engaging with your tweets the way you expected at those milestones.
Have you used Twitter’s analytics? What do you think about this update?
Facebook
Facebook is now allowing you to target mobile users in the developing world with ads depending on their bandwidth. This way you don’t waste your company’s resources in showing a video ad to somebody who is on a 2G mobile network.
This has huge implications for digital marketers who want to target mobile internet users. Mobile penetration today around the globe is truly phenomenal. But, this is not backed by robust mobile data network, particularly in the developing countries. Until now, advertisers had no choice but to target all mobile internet users with one strategy irrespective of their data speeds.
For instance, with this new feature from Facebook, you can target your video ads to only those consumers who have sufficient bandwidth to support live streaming. For other customers with slower connections, you can resort to image or link ads.
Being able to target users based on their data speeds will help you be more confident that users would have access to technology to support your ad format. Knowledge of user data speeds will also help you plan your ad campaigns better resulting in more ROI since you wouldn’t be wasting valuable creatives and money on advertising to users who will not be able to even view your ad.
Facebook is a quick learner on leveraging its one billion+ user database to its advantage. First, it gave advertisers the ability to target devices and operating systems. With this new addition, Facebook is all set to give you powers that will help you run better performing, cost effective campaigns.
Will this new Facebook feature help your brand?
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Pinterest Provides Businesses with New Analytics Dashboard
Businesses actively using Pinterest have one more reason to rejoice. Those that were not have one more reason to join it.
Pinterest is offering an Analytics Dashboard to business users, through which you can find out how your content are faring on the platform. You can gauge your content reach and access information on the number of impressions and views received.
The tool also provides insights into how each user interacts with your content. It keeps a record of the impressions, clicks, repins, likes, which enables detailed analysis. The dashboard also has the ability to record the traffic your website receives when you add the ‘Pin It’ button.
All this helps you understand what works and what doesn’t for your business, thus allowing you to make informed decisions like optimizing click through rates by sharing a particular Pin that is doing well or scaling impressions using Promoted Pins. You can now get a detailed idea about what your fans like and can adapt likewise.
Whenever a social networking site reaches a critical mass, as a brand, you would want to leverage it to your advantage. Pinterest’s Analytics Dashboard will go a long way in helping you understand your performance on the platform. This insight can help you formulate more effective Pinterest strategies for better user engagement.
Pinterest is steadily becoming ambitious in the paid ad market. After the launch of Promoted Pins, the visuals-focused network is bolstering its ad offerings with an Analytics Dashboard that will help you measure the performance of your Pinterest campaigns. Despite the existence of numerous third party tools to analyze brand performance on Pinterest, an in-house tool like this could make a lot of difference in the insights that can be gained.
What do you think about Pinterest’s new analytics?
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Understanding Predictive Analytics- [Infographic]
Predictive analytics has been gaining momentum as a tool that supports business objectives with respect to sales, marketing, customer support and finance. Check out this infographic to know more about the field of predictive analytics and its role in businesses.
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Instagram Increases Emphasis on Ads with Debut of New Business Tools
In order to help brands evolve more creatively, Instagram is providing a host of new tools that will give you more insight into user engagement and sentiment about your Instagram content.
In a rollout spread over the next few weeks and months, Instagram will be making these tools available to all Instagram advertisers and their feedback will be incorporated into the product before it’s released to other brands later this year. These tools for businesses will help you understand the performance of your organic and paid Instagram content better.
According to Instagram, the tools will add value in the following areas:
Account insights – allow you to study the way you are raising awareness using impressions, reach and engagement on Instagram
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Conversion rate optimization, ROI in B2B and much more…| Best of the Week
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
Best of the Week Video
Watch this video to know how you can find the best time to send your target audience an email.White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn: - SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
- Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
- Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
- How EVA benefits businesses.
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Facebook Eliminates Like Gating and Twitter Launches Promoted Video
Facebook ‘Like’ Gating
In a blog post on their Developers’ page, Facebook recently announced that from November 5, 2014, they will be eliminating ‘like gating’ for Facebook pages. In the near future, this might be a setback for brands that relied on fan gating to grow their fan base. However, in the long run, brands can focus on gaining relevant fans who also engage with the brand.
Brands can run Facebook campaigns that don’t require fans to like their Page in order to participate in the campaign. You may lose out a few likes by doing this, but you will gaining relevant fans who will engage much more with your content. What’s more, when you don’t insist on Page likes, you might gain other valuable information such as email addresses.
Twitter Promoted Video
Twitter has launched the Promoted Video feature in beta.
The Promoted Video feature draws on the Twitter Amplify program and provides quality content producers a set of new video tools. According to Twitter, Promoted videos will help brands upload and share videos on the Twitter platform while also measuring reach and effectiveness better.
Twitter has also started offering the ability to run ads with a new Cost Per View (CPV) ad buying model. This means that you are charged only when a user starts playing your video. You also have access to robust video analytics including competition percentage and a breakout of organic vs. paid video views.
Coupled with the traction tweets gain, you can now also garner user attention and engage with them through Twitter videos. Promoted video can be a cost effective tool where you pay only if a user clicks on the video to play it.
What’s your take on these developments? Let us know…
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Google Pigeon update, SMB B2B marketers and much more…| Best of the Week
This week’s hot news, events and videos from the online marketing and social media world. 
From the Position² Blog This Week: Pigeon – Local Search Algorithm update from Google
Google’s Pigeon algorithm update will have considerable effect on local search results. Read this blog post to know more about the update and understand its effects. Position2 clients – check this out to know what we’re doing to ensure you’re covered for the Pigeon update.
Best of the Week Video
Check out this Google AdWords video that educates you step-by-step in the process of setting up location targeting for your campaign.White Paper: Increase Visibility for Your Content by 4x Today’s traditional SEO is inadequate: Ignite your search results by accelerating visibility in more places than ever before.Download this White Paper and learn: - SEO, why the way we know it is not enough
- Introducing and implementing Enterprise Visibility Accelerator (EVA)
- Using multi-channel tracking tools for effective monitoring
- How EVA benefits businesses.
If you are reading this blog post via a RSS reader, please click here to subscribe.
