With such a heavily saturated online world, at some point the quality of your digital marketing ad matters less than who your ad gets in front of. At least, that’s the notion behind programmatic advertising. Gone are the days of simply posting an ad out there and hoping for the best. With programmatic advertising, you can take steps to ensure your ad finds your target audience and optimize its effect.

But what is programmatic advertising exactly, and how can it help you?

What Is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic advertising is the use of software — often AI software — to buy digital advertising spaces. You create the ad and determine who the ad should target. The software then uses AI to determine where the target audience would be most likely to find that ad.

This is something that Amazon uses to promote products, particularly something that independent authors selling books on Amazon KDP might use to promote their books.

How Does Programmatic Advertising Work?

While programmatic advertising can save you significant time in your marketing, it is not completely effortless. You still have to create an effective ad, and you still need to plug in tags and information about your target audience that the software can work from. Once that’s done, however, the program takes care of the rest, buying digital ad space for you.

Most programmatic ad software companies will allow you to set a budget beforehand so that you don’t spend more than you intend on your ad. When you hit that budget cap, the program will stop buying digital ad space.

Benefits of Programmatic Advertising

The benefits of programmatic advertising are endless. Here are the advantages that are most beneficial to brand owners or marketers:

Find Your Target Audience

With programmatic advertising, AI can keep track of where your audience is most likely to be and can buy the advertising space for you. This increases your chances that your ad will land in front of consumers who are more interested in buying your product.

Save Time

Determining where to buy digital ad space and going through that process can be a time-consuming pain. With programmatic advertising, it takes seconds and the program does it all for you. This allows you to focus on more important aspects of your brand.

Suits Any Budget

Because you can adjust your budget as needed, this is an option that suits any budget. You can start small. If your business grows — hopefully due to the increase in sales — you can increase your ad budget. This makes it perfect for businesses just starting out or for growing businesses.

Tips For Programmatic Advertising

Programmatic advertising is a tool at the end of the day, and it has to be used well in order to yield the right results. Here are a few tips for utilizing programmatic advertising.

#1 – Set Specific Goals

Know what you want to gain out of programmatic advertising. Do you want to boost engagement with a product page? Corner a niche market? Or simply boost your digital sales? When you know what your goals are, it can help you structure how you go about developing your plan.

#2 – Know Your Audience

AI may be able to help you here, but it does not remove the need for market research. You need to know your audience well enough to come up with the right tags to find them. You also need to know what kind of ad would appeal to them. So just because AI is here to help, it doesn’t mean you should let it do everything.

#3 – Be Careful Where Your Ads Land

Programmatic advertising uses an algorithm to determine where your ad should go, as we’ve discussed; but in the past, this has led to issues of ads appearing on sites that do more harm than good. Consumers are growing more diligent about fake news, and if your ad is on a site that promotes fake news, it can easily harm your reputation. Similarly, if your ad ends up on a site that is controversial for bigoted language or ideologies, it will look like your brand supports those views.

#4 – Watch Out For Ad Fraud

In 2023, $84 billion dollars were sunk into ad fraud — programmatic ad campaigns that never actually bought any digital space or provided only low quality, ill-fitted leads from the ad campaign. Make sure that you work with reputable programmatic ad companies and software. Check reviews so you know what you’re getting into before you make a decision.