Surfside PPC Advertising Podcast Episode 6 - What Is Programmatic Advertising

Key Takeaways

you are now listening to the Surfside pay-per-click advertising podcast alright what's up everybody so welcome to episode 6 of the Surfside PPC advertising podcasts i'm your host money mccoy frankovsky and today i want to go over everything I can about programmatic advertising and how it relates to tpc definitely some strong correlations to PPC it's it's basically the biggest I say it's the biggest thing to hit digital marketing in years in my opinion I say so probably in about about 2014 programmatic advertising actually started to outpace spending for your traditional display advertising and some of your other advertising methods because advertisers were able to see basically how how effective this was so that's why I want to go over it you might already be using it you might already be familiar with it if you're an advanced advertiser you definitely should be using it I'd say for sure but there's a lot of different examples of it and different basic ways of going over so I want to go over programmatic advertising if you think you know everything about it already you know this might be a complete waste of time for you but I am going to go over some little details things that you might not know about where programmatic advertising really comes in handy so before we begin the best way you could support this podcast is basically to subscribe and leave a review if you don't like the podcast if there's something you're looking for differently please shoot me an email cory at surfside PPC com would love to hear from you so basically what the podcast you know we've kind of gone back and forth but what we want to do here so it's going to end up just being an informational podcast and where the news will come in is it's going to intersect with the information so we don't just want to report on it without kind of our initial plan which is to report on news but we're going to actually be going over basically lessons and every in our weekly podcast and want to incorporate news where it makes the most sense so so let's get into programmatic advertising so basic I was going to go to the you know who will win more wild type deal of this so to begin what is programmatic advertising so basically what it is is a way for advertisers to basically let machines use the data they already have to automatically bid for basically their key performance indicators so instead of you know in the past let's say let's use the example of display advertising so let's say in the past you say okay you know what I want to put my ad on these 100 websites and I want to bid two dollars per click and I want my ads shown all over these websites and basically what I'm doing is I'm bidding two dollars per click I want this traffic to come in and what I'm going to do is monitor my traffic into google analytics and I'm going to see what the results are see how many conversions I'm driving in Adwords so that was kind of how you did display advertising for years you just take the bunch of websites or interests or topics or keyword to be targeted and now with programmatic advertising it's basically the next step of that so it's programmatic in the same sense is you would pick a hunter websites and you let it run let's say for 30 days so you let it run for 30 days you collect all this data you collect all this data you have you know you figure out that hey these 10 websites are really driving conversions for us these are the three websites have a lot of opportunity here's another 20 websites that are big waste of money and you know and you basically start to narrow down this list so now instead of you doing this manually which you would do is and what's imagine you're in google adwords here you would go into google adwords and you would basically say it's called conversion optimizer way you use or target CPA bidding and basically what you say is ok I want you to use the data from the last 30 days I want you to use my conversion data history how much I'm paying per conversion and I want you to use that information to bid on these websites based on the data you already know based on the user data you already have collected to maximize the number of conversions I have so basically what programmatic advertising is is a way for advertisers to use the data that they've already collected in their advertising campaigns match that with the data that Google AdWords has in their back-end and basically use all of that together to maximize your marketing results so instead of using you know what I want to bid for traffic every day and maybe i'll drive some conversions you're saying i want to bid for conversions all day and in the meantime I'm going to drive some traffic so basically traffic to you becomes not important at all and that's how it should be what's important to you are your key performance indicators and your conversions traffic is not important I mean traffic you know in the sense is important but saying you know would you rather double your traffic or double your conversions the answer is easy in my opinion so that's basically what programmatic advertising is and now getting into how it works so basically it's a lot of data collection and the other thing that we're basically companies have been able to keep improving this you know with companies like Facebook companies like Google Adwords and Bing ads some of the different options that you have there they've been able to improve because they collect so much back-end data about their users that get they can see where they are in the buying process what their interests are you know how a bday are as an online shopper how often they convert if someone clicks on ads regularly and converts regularly facebook wants to continue to send their ad up for that person because that person is extremely valuable to Facebook the person's extremely valuable to the company that's bidding on them so programmatic advertising works by using the advertiser data that they already have so no matter what you're targeting you know if you're targeting 10,000 viewers in a google adwords campaign if you're targeting 20 interests in a facebook advertising campaign if you're targeting like we said before a hundred websites in a display advertising campaign after you start to collect some data and you start to collect you know spend all this money and you getting your results your clicks your impressions your click-through rate your cost per click and then you know the most important thing is your conversions and your cost per conversion as you get this data google adwords is able to basically you know put put you into a here the category of websites that's the most valuable for you here's the category of websites that might be somewhat valuable and here's the category of websites that we're going to exclude because it's basically wasting you money and it's a huge huge advancement in advertising because in the past we used to all do this by ourselves you sit in Google Analytics you pull out the reports and you pull out every little detail of okay well you know people are converting more on Wednesday and females are converting more than men and the 8th bracket of you know 25 to 34 is converting more than the age bracket of 45 to 54 so we're going to adjust our biz accordingly like this so with programmatic advertising they're taking all that data demographic data as far as you know gender age all these different things to your graphic data where you located day of the week what device you're using what keyword did you type in all these different things and they're taking into account and as an advertiser and as I'm talking about this year I mean your heads probably spending because you realize there's so many different things to look at there's so many different things to look at that it's it's so difficult so programmatic advertising works by collecting all this different data and basically putting into categories hey this is optimal and hey this is not optimal and then maybe you have a middle category of opportunity and that's basically and that's basically how it works so you know the other kind of lever that polling there is the back-end data that Google AdWords already has about everybody so you know I have a gmail account I use it regularly as connected to my phone is connected to my desktop so gmail knows that you know I enjoy investing I enjoyed marketing I enjoy sports I enjoyed football all these different things that I basic that Google knows that I enjoy because that's what I do it online they might say hey this guy's not huge into politics this guy's not huge into I don't know gardening and he likes to cook so there are different things there where they know what you're already interested in so when I go and search you know best new baseball cleats or something they kind of have an idea of what I'm interested in you know what I'm looking for how I usually convert websites I use so they use all that data to basically give advertisers an optimal solution when they're spending their money and they combine that data with the data that they already have for that advertiser so that's basically what programmatic advertising is and how it works a lot of data collection and then using that data to basically create optimal campaigns and combine all of the data say that you're targeting the person that's going to convert rather than you know the person that's not going to convert so the next thing I have basically is why should i use programmatic advertising you might have already answered this yourself as your kind of listening to this you realize that there's huge value in this it's something where when it first started to hit the scenes I'd say 2014 and started over 2015 it's something where we got a lot of contacts where I was working at the time saying we need programmatic advertising right away you guys have that capability and we knew you know how to do that stuff we were able to quickly sign sign up some different clients and get them involved in it so why you should use it is pretty simple it takes basically you know all the data that you're looking for that might take you three hours to go through and it automatically optimizes for you so you can still your job becomes more about testing different things and continuing the test and continuing to challenge these you know these different advertising networks and adding different targeting methods to see where you have opportunity you might waste some money and the whole thing with advertising is testing I don't see as a waste of money because you need to test things I've tested things that have failed miserably at types of things that have basically given a huge resultant of you know help us meet our goals for the year so you really need to constantly test and with programmatic advertising what changes is that instead of you having you know seven thousand keywords 20 different campaigns you know thousand actors all these different things let's say you have all these different things you're trying to manage and stead of trying to manage all of those things it's much easier for you to hey you know what I can just kind of flip a switch and use my cot my historical conversion data and then continue to test alongside of that so why you should use it is because you know these channels where you're able to do programmatic advertising are able to basically optimize things for you so you don't have to worry about looking at every little detail of everything you're able to spend your time elsewhere and you're able to spend your time or in the nitty-gritty of the account in terms of testing you know try different ad extensions upload more ad extensions make sure you have a group level ad extensions split test your ads so all these different things that you're able to do that you might not have been doing because you're spending so much time trying to optimize campaigns and that's basically where programmatic advertising comes so much in handy and the other reason that you want to use it is so let's say you start a new campaign in Google AdWords the way their programmatic advertising system works when against a little more in the next you know basically the next question but the way their programmatic advertising works is that you need some data before you can start using it so you need their minimum is you need to drive 15 conversions for 30 days for them to help you basically bid for conversions to basically use programmatic advertising so the way that it's going to help you and why you should use it is let's say in your first 30 days you drive 20 conversions at twenty dollars per conversion without going up in budget the following month you might be able to drive you know 40 conversions at this time at ten dollars per conversion because Google AdWords is able to say you know at these five keywords are they sucked you know get them out and these five keywords we're going to put all of our budget science behind these five keywords that are driving conversions at ten dollars piece and that's basically where where you continue to improve and that's why you should use programmatic advertising is because and if you listen to one of our old episodes we went over benchmarking programmatic advertising helps you use benchmarking and continue to improve what you're doing basically what they do is they create benchmarks for you they say hey in the last 30 days you're costs for acquisition your cost per conversion with twenty dollars we see an opportunity where we can get it down to 10 so lets you know basically start programmatic advertising and we'll see if we can get it down I've gotten things from five down to one and I had a client with a pretty easy conversion basically just a link click out and when i started i was at five dollars per click out and they wanted to be at about three dollars per click out and you know after the course of a couple months we're able to get it down to about a dollar per click out and basically was just by using programmatic advertising features that were available through google adwords okay so another last and final question that you have is where can i use programmatic advertising so this is kind of one of those questions that people have a lot because when you hear the word programmatic advertising the first thought is usually i'm going to have to write some code i'm gonna have to build some custom software some custom programs to figure out how do you basically create my own programmatic advertising features and how do i offer that to clients that are contacting an irregular basis when everyone else is offering it luckily it's it doesn't work that way what how it works is there's channels google adwords there's channels Facebook ads there's channels Bing ads Twitter ads and what they're doing is they use your historical data to help you maximize your marketing results to help you get the most out of your budget to get the most out of your money so it's not that you have to write these custom programs or custom software to set it up it's more a matter of you setting up different campaigns testing different targeting methods and wear your new challenge comes into handy is would be 10,000 different options you have in terms of ad formats ad targeting and where you're sending your traffic your landing pages how how your whole conversion setup is every little detail like that that's where you can improve so basically conversion rate optimization becomes more of your more of your challenge than trying to do the correct targeting and trying to have pull the correct levers at all time while you're running your marketing campaigns and you create large marketing campaigns you let them run for a little bit you set up programmatic advertising features to optimize for your conversion what does that sales whether that's leads whether that's a page view whether that's a click out no matter what it is you're optimizing for your key performance indicator and you're telling Google AdWords Facebook Ads whatever channel you're using to use the historical data that they already have and to use the numbers they already have to keep optimizing your campaigns and then you improve by saying I continue to add new things into the mix so you slit test ads into google adwords maybe you go from ten dollars per conversion down the 950 per conversion and that's just something that you constantly have to test and tweak and figure out as you go so where you're using programmatic advertising is on all these different channels where where those capabilities exist now I've used programmatic advertising and I'll give an example there's a company i worked with called ivu digital and they ran video advertising online in different cities up north and the company that i was working for at the time wanted to run ads based around weather so this is another example of programmatic advertising here so how it worked was they could basically tell when the weather went below 30 degrees in different cities and an ad would run showing sunny skies down south so that when it was freezing cold out and people were coming inside angry upset they're on the computer or freezing cold or bundled up they see this ad for a beautiful beach community beautiful son you know and when you're sitting there and you're freezing cold and temperature drops below 30 degrees you see an ad for a 70-degree beach it becomes like paradise it becomes what you want so it makes people think about it more whereas if it's 60 degrees out and only 70 degrees at the beach you might be having a beautiful spring day and not care about going to the beach and getting out of that crappy weather where the huge snowstorm might make you book that trip today so that's another example where programmatic advertising comes into play you can do all sorts of different things like that and when it comes to where you do programmatic advertising its really three different advertising networks and advertising channels that offer them to you so that's you know Google AdWords being ads all these different things and you might be thinking well how do I get started the way to really get started is to get your campaigns going Facebook's one of the few where you can just get started right away and they'll automatically start bidding for conversions with google adwords you have to collect some data to begin with so that's where a lot of advertisers get hung up because they either don't have the budget to drive 15 conversions per month they don't have the knowledge and the expertise so that's kind of where there is some some pain points with programmatic advertising otherwise get started right away get your conversion set up get your key performance indicator set up whatever it is you're optimizing for the quicker you get started and more that data that they can collect you might even want to spend a little bit additional to begin with this is why I kind of have an issue with advertisers or companies that call me and say I need a profitable campaign in the first month because sometimes it takes a month or two to really you know sometimes it takes three to four months to basically create something profitable but it's just a testing process that you have to go through you might find that Twitter's profitable Pinterest is you might find that Facebook's profitable but google adword ism and i've had that before with different clients so it's all about testing it's all about collecting data and programmatic advertising is the next step for advertisers and it's not a new concept you know it's fairly new in the past several years but it's not a brand new concept and if you're not using it you need to get started it right away my google adwords make sure you're optimizing for conversions collecting data and driving them as much as you can so that's the show today that's our entire podcast if you have any questions and you concern make sure you reach email us as always the best way to to support us is just subscribe and leave a positive review that absolutely helped us big-time so thanks for joining me today this is episode 6 of the Surfside PPC advertising podcast thanks so much for listening to the Surfside pay per click advertising podcast we'll catch you next time