As human beings it’s in our nature to choose the easier route. Just look at Amazon for example, shopping with a click of the mouse . Publishers and advertisers are no exception to this pattern.
Programmatic advertisement is a prime reflection of our need to simplify. Shifting advertising buying over to a more automatic system makes digital advertising that much easier. It’s all removing as many unnecessary meetings, conversations, and interactions from the buying process.
In simple terms, programmatic advertising is the automatic buying and selling of impressions. Before programmatic all online advertising deals had to be done directly. That means each advertiser had to contact every website they wanted to run ads on. If a publisher wanted to monetize their site, they too had to contact enough advertisers to fill having every single ad unit. Now advertisers are simply given demographic and site information to help them decide which impressions to bid on. Publishers can now partner with ad networks like Monumetric and never have to worry about their ads being filled and can see a higher return for their ad spaces.
Think back to the Amazon or Ebay example. Instead of going to each store in the mall to decide what you want to buy you instead turn to your suggested product section in Amazon and buy.
This type of advertising strips down a once very timely process to guarantee a highly targeted campaign for advertisers and direct revenue for publishers without a lot of the hassle. Software is used to purchase ad units based on data instead of humans. Browsers gather data on the demographics of the user and the type of website so advertisers can just choose their impressions and fire their campaigns.
How Programmatic Works
When you click on an a webpage and it loads a call is made to an ad exchange saying “fill me, I’m an ad”. After a browser gathers all the information about the type ofimpressions, the data is sent to an ad exchange where advertisers and agencies can bid for the impressions.
Inside of the exchange there are two parts. You have the publisher side, the SSP (Supply Side Platform) where publishers sell their ad spaces. Publishers can set some standards regarding what types of ads, but once again your ad quality is usually maintained by an ad network or third party like Monumetric. On the other side, advertisers and agencies get audience information and bid on a DSP (Demand Side Platform) to decide which impressions to buy and for what price. They use specific targeting to buy impressions that coincide with their campaign goals.
Once an ad is called brands compete in an ad exchange to get the best price for their targeted impressions. Within our network we use header bidding technology to secure the best return to the publisher. To better understand how this type of auction happens see this post.
After the auction, the ad space is filled by the highest paying bidder and the reader sees the creative. The best part is this all happened without an advertiser having to contact a publisher independently and vice versa.
Why You Need Programmatic
Besides saving you a ton of time and energy, more and more advertisers are rerouting their efforts to programmatic. In speaking with our CRO Josh Smith, he says more than half of display ads served are done through programmatic That means if you want advertisers filling ads on your page, it might be beneficial to understand how programmatic works and how you can take advantage of it on your site.
People live online, especially advertisers and publishers. It would be next to impossible to manage all of your ads directly and less efficient for a lot of brands to use only direct sales for their campaigns. Oftentimes neither the publisher or advertiser has the time and resources to make every digital advertising deal. That’s where companies like ours come in.
At Monumetric we make programmatic work for you. We bridge the connection between advertiser and publisher. Both sides care about quality for their revenue. At Monumetric we not only partner with top quality advertisers so publishers can get paid what they deserve, but only partner with quality publishers as well, creating a greater desire for advertisers to partner with us.
To discover what you could be making with programmatic advertising today try our free site audit.
