Introduction
Whether your advertising on social media, mobile devices or via email, programmatic advertising is quickly becoming the most efficient way to market. There are many programmatic advertising tools that you can use to help you adjust your marketing strategy. This article will introduce you to different types of programmatic advertising tools you will need.
Adobe Marketing Cloud
In 2017, Adobe launched its first 100% programmatic ad campaign, leading the industry with this new technology. Adobe now offers a suite of digital marketing solutions under Adobe Marketing Cloud, one of which is the Programmatic Advertising tool. With this tool, you can automate your ad buying to meet your customer demands. This greatly simplifies the way you buy your ads and see where your spending is going.
Fyber
Fyber is a mobile-focused programmatic ad company that helps you monetize app ads. Their platform has proprietary technology and was created when 4 ad tech companies combined. Now they offer mediation, real time bidding, video advertising and complete programmatic management solutions.
Centro
Centro is a platform that advertisers use to run their digital advertising campaigns across various channels. With centro’s flexibility, advertisers who have a mobile centric mentality can optimize their campaigns for the better. Centro’s programmatic solution gives advertisers the transparency that they need to succeed.
IgnitionOne
Programmatic advertising companies with strong customer intelligence like IgnitionOne, are worth investigating. They offer omnichannel targeting and personalization to customers, but it’s limited. Feedback on the suite is that it’s not the easiest platform to use, and it’s fairly expensive. Still, it’s one of the better platforms out there for customer insights.
DoubleClick
One of the most renowned tools in the industry is Google’s DoubleClick. Its suite offers a lot of insight across different channels and can help buyers with buys and how to act on them in real time. This tool is also great for publishers because it gives them a complete view of how inventory is performing.
SmartyAds
AdReady
AdReady leverages many different industry leading media stories and platforms to create strategies that helps you surpass your benchmarks and competitions. AdReady gives advertisers the ability to customize their campaigns to drive the performance that they need and want. Its cutting edge technology allows companies to focus on their ROIs rather than benchmarks.
SmartyAds offers a full-stack programmatic advertising ecosystem to cater to brand, agency, publisher, and app developer needs. This ecosystem consists of a Demand-Side Platform (DSP), Data Management Platform (DMP), Supply-Side Platform (SSP), and an ad exchange. SmartyAds also offers a white-label solution that allows brands to build their product on top of it.
The platform enables advertisers to run display, in-app, video, and native advertising campaigns across desktop and mobile devices. Features such as ad creation tools, robust analytics, and rich targeting capabilities help advertisers with inventory selection, ad placement, and campaign management.
SmartyAds’ header bidding solution allows publishers to run pre-bid auctions to sell the ad inventory at a premium price. App developers can use the platform to run in-app ads in formats such as rewarded video, native, banner, and playable ads.
Rubicon Project
Rubicon Project, founded in 2007, created a new model for the advertising world. Its unique platform to manage advertising streamlines the traditional RFP process and automates the negotiations for custom deals. Today, many different brands are leveraging Rubicon to connect with various consumers around the world and improve their brand in the eyes of the public.
Google Analytics: What Is It?
Google Analytics is another product offered within the Google Marketing Platform that is an essential piece to not only marketers, but to anyone who is curious about how people navigate their website or application.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics service offered by Google that provides data, reports and website tracking.
Tips for Goole Analytics
Put simply Google Analytics highlights three important pieces of information about your website. The first being Audience, which digs deep into who the people on your website are. What demographic are they in, what interest groups do they fall into, even insights into device usage.
The second is Acquisition, which shows the channels they took to get to your website. Where are a majority of your visitors coming from? Are they searching for your brand name directly, or are they being sent via a referral from a specific social media platform?
Finally it highlights user Behavior, which dives into what users are doing once they are on your site. Which pages have content that is showing to be the most engaging, how much time are people spending on specific pages on my site? Which sites are not receiving as much traffic as you thought?
All of these insights play a huge role in the optimizations of a marketing campaign, and can further ensure that your ads are reaching the right people who engage with your site.
Now having the ability to set up campaigns, and analyze the performance is all a very important piece of digital marketing. But how do we tie both of those together in a way that our clients can easily understand? That is where Google Data Studio, the reporting and visualization tool of Google Marketing Platform comes in.
Google Display & Video 360: What it is?
Google Display & Video 360 is the Google Demand Side Platform or DSP. This platform not only gives marketers access to purchasing ad space programmatically, but also provides an abundance of tools to help focus your campaigns targeting to reach the right audience at the right time, and provide users with a meaningful message and clean user experience.
Within this platform Marketers have the ability to run several types of campaign ads. DV360 has the option of Display, Video, Native, Audio, YouTube, and Email. This variety allows for all campaigns to be housed under one platform and budgets can easily be managed and adjusted.
Another added bonus of DV360 is the variety of targeting options available to you when building out a campaign. These range from inventory targeting, to geography, all the way down to the ability to serve based on specific weather conditions.
DV360 has all of your bases covered and is fully equipped with the tools to help make sure your clients ads are reaching the right users, at the right time.
Google Data Studio: What it is?
Google Data Studio is a completely free reporting tool that allows you to produce fully customizable dashboards to present the most important data to your clients. You have the ability to port over data and include a wide variety of widgets to create a clean and easily digestible report to tie the bow on the efforts put into a successful marketing campaign.
Data sources can be linked effortlessly to include metrics and statistics directly from Google Analytics and DV360, which again helps create a seamless connection between the tools offered within the Google Platform.
While each of these products can be used successfully as a stand-alone, the real benefit comes when they are used together. Being able to create a targeted marketing campaign through DV360, optimize that campaign based on insights gathered from Google Analytics, and report on those insights through Google Data studio is an easy and effective way to not only run a marketing campaign, but to share the success of it as well.
At Conduit we utilize the Google Marketing Platform everyday to ensure we are not only set up for success, but also to know we are offering the best digital solution available anywhere in our space.
Appnexus Console
One of the more technical digital advertising marketplaces around, AppNexus works best if you have an on-staff analytics team. Small and large buyers will like the self-service options.
On the whole, users tend to say that this company works best if you understand programming, but it is a solid DSP to use for skilled users.
AdRoll
Last on the list is Adroll, a single platform that helps you grow your display and other ad offerings online. You can’t conduct A/B testing, but people are still happy with their ad templates.
As an easy interface it makes launching campaigns simple, so this is great for beginners.
Conclusion
A simple Google search will fetch a long list of programmatic advertising platforms, and choosing the most compatible platform for your brand can get daunting.
Besides features such as transparency, interface, flexibility, and real-time analytics, here’s a checklist that will help you choose the right platform:What is the pricing structure? Is there an onboarding fee? Does the platform charge a monthly retainer fee or a certain percentage of the ad spend? Can the pricing be negotiated? What are the safety measures implemented to tackle ad frauds? Does the platform offer access to high-quality, multi-platform ad inventories? What are the audience targeting (geo-targeting, day parting, frequency capping, retargeting, etc.) and personalization capabilities?
Once you know the answer to these questions, it will be simpler to decide on the programmatic advertising platform that’s right for you.
Based on your specific needs, ad types and research, we hope this list helps you become better positioned to choose the best programmatic advertising platforms to use for your company!