What is programmatic buying? Why is it currently on the lips of all e-commerce professionals?
Programmatic buying describes itself as the future, already present, of online advertising .
This system is a very valid alternative to traditional ad buying. Of course, it is not the beginning of the end for other digital advertising manuals, as many claim, but it is an alternative that is becoming increasingly popular.
Before we start discussing any of the points below, it is important to remember what programmatic buying means.
The problem with truly understanding this is that many guides assume we know a long list of jargon-based terms that are typical of online advertising professionals.
What is true is that if you find yourself in the position of researching programmatic buying, it is because you already know or have an idea of what it refers to. However, there are terms that sometimes escape us, such as Real Time Biding "RTB" , ad inventory , site demand platform , etc.
In any case, if you are working in the digital world and you have come across these terms without knowing what they refer to as programmatic buying, RTB, and you need a basic guide on what all this means, you have come to the right place.
The IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) has established that there are two types of programmatic buying: direct programmatic and RTB programmatic.
Programmatic buying
The term programmatic refers to something automatic. Programmatic buying refers to when an ad space purchase is made automatically, which consists of buying spaces on a website by bidding for those spaces or buying them directly, guaranteeing that they are yours.
RTB Programmatic
Let's start with a simple description: Programmatic RTB is like Google Adwords, except that Google Adwords is for search results and RTB is for display ads.
In Google Adwords you work with sites, you buy free spaces to insert your advertising. However, in programmatic RTB platforms you do not work with advertising spaces but with the target . You are not buying a space, you are buying an audience exclusively selected according to its characteristics.
Real-time Bidding is used to reach Internet users with display ads across the web.
These ad slots are exchanged, with the site offering information about the site itself and the users who visit it. An ad exchange platform is one where ad slots are auctioned off to the highest bidder. The winning advertiser will then appear on the website when the page finishes loading for the user. These auctions take place in the milliseconds it takes for the page to load for the user.
Available space is also known as an impression . Every time an ad loads, it is an impression. Some impressions are more valuable to some businesses than others, it depends on the particular website it appears on, this is important, along with the likelihood that a user will click on the ad.
The price of the print is determined by what buyers are bidding in real time.
Advertisers sometimes use demand-side platforms, known as DSPs , because they are a great help in knowing which impressions to buy. A DSP is entirely automated software that bids for impressions on an exchange where it receives data from the user who will receive the impression and data from the page.
This platform allows advertisers to enjoy great discounts on impressions, thanks to their negotiation skills, and offers you immediate bidding time, simplifying it so that the highest bidder wins.
Another word you might hear in this online advertising jargon is " ad inventory." Ad inventory is the amount of ad space that a site has to sell to an advertiser.
Using RTB means that advertisers will no longer have to purchase display ad space for a fixed amount of money and for a specific period of time, assuming that this page will bring traffic back to their website.
RTB offers you impressions to a specific audience that interests your company, according to previously determined parameters, and the printing agreement is made in real time.
Direct programmatic
Also known as “automated guarantee”, “programmatic guarantee” and “premium programmatic”. They are all the same thing but said in different ways, so don’t worry about the terms.
Basically, this is a process that is automated so that space purchases are guaranteed.
The traditional process of buying ad inventory was pretty inefficient before programmatic came along. Sometimes you had to go through a number of steps for a single ad, from conception to display.
An agency would have to research the best spaces to place an ad, and also rely on a lengthy administration process by sending requests for information on price rates, and the availability they had at that time in terms of spaces, doing all the paperwork for inserting the ad and manually adding the ad to the server. All this before the ad goes live.
Solutions are now more automatic thanks to the increase in programmatic advertising (RTB, Google Adwords), in this way entrepreneurs can have faster access to the inventory of spaces, complete price control, etc.
To conclude, Línea Grafica would like to point out that with this tool we are no longer talking about buying spaces in bulk, but rather what we are acquiring when we contract something like this are impressions, impressions that, depending on the page and the user profile, will be directed and segmented specifically towards the needs of your company like never before. This is the essence of programmatic buying, all of this combined with the speed and reduction of procedures and investigations that delay and make less efficient the strategies followed until now.
