Basic Introduction
- Introduction to Programmatic
- Introduction to Eskimi DSP
- Introduction to Successful Performance Campaigns
Introduction to Programmatic
Meet Stanley, a middle-aged man in Nigeria. The first thing he does every morning - he opens Punchng.com to see the latest political insights and sports news. Thousands of advertisers want to show their ads to Stanley and programmatic ad buying gives the possibility to efficiently do it. Even though Programmatic ad buying has changed the face of online advertising, there’s still confusion around what it actually is. Therefore, we wish to explore how the Programmatic ad buying works from the lens of the usual online users.
Online Advertising With Programmatic Buying
The easiest explanation would be, programmatic is buying digital advertising space automatically, with computers using data to decide which ads to buy and how much to pay for them, often in real-time. There is, however, a frequent misunderstanding that all programmatic is real-time advertising. That is a subset of programmatic. Real-time advertising is an auction-based model, whereas programmatic is based solely on automation. Programmatic can be split up into several features:
Data Management Platform (DMP). By enabling data and technology programmatic gives marketers the possibility to have a lot of data points about users like Stanley, from the device he is using to what interests him.
Inventory. Also, one of the key features of programmatic gave the possibility to move from one straightforward media buy with a publisher to conducting media transactions on an impression-by-impression basis. Rather than buying a million impressions on Punchng.com in one go and committing to that over a period of time, a brand can buy a million impressions and split them across multiple publishers or media owners, targeted at a particular audience segment.
Programmatic guaranty. Another aspect of programmatic advertising is guaranteed impressions. A price is pre-agreed by the buyer and seller before the impressions go live on the website.
Real-time functionality. Programmatic is enabling marketers to track the impact of their investment and optimise their ad campaigns when reaching their relevant customers. The real-time optimisation functionality gives brands the possibility to react to the market fluctuation, user interactions online, and other relevant data points.
To sum it, with the machine learning capabilities Programmatic gives the opportunity to reach users like Stanley and appear on sites such as Punchng.com. However, it is up to the brand to decide if the programmatic adoption goes along with its niche business goals.
Introduction to Eskimi DSP
Eskimi DSP is a demand-side platform that allows advertisers to buy inventory through ad exchanges in real-time. Using this platform, you can set up and launch your campaign by yourself which will save time and costs. Moreover, this platform helps to advertise and reach your wanted audience much easier by providing a variety of relevant information such as what are your target audience is interested in, what devices are they using, where do they use it, and so on.
Furthermore, Eskimi DSP is combined with a data management platform (DMP) where the customer and online advertising data is stored and managed. For example, DMP has a data dashboard that visually tracks, analyses, and displays your campaign metrics in real-time. On the Eskimi DSP dashboard, you can see impressions, CPM, Win rate, Clicks, CPC, CTR, best and worst-performing ads, Platforms, Operating Systems, and Delivery Map by Hour.
Introduction to Successful Performance Campaigns
It is hard to deny that performance campaigns are difficult to carry out, but they are the endpoint of all digital advertising. In the end, every client - no matter what his/her area of business is – will want to get conversions. Since the conversion flow is much more complicated than general brand awareness or traffic campaigns, we would like to share a few key steps before heading towards performance campaigns on Eskimi DSP. These guidelines should help you make your campaigns more efficient as the key takeaways are solely based on our previous campaign experiences:
Creative requirements
When analyzing previous performance campaigns, we have noticed that Native ads are delivering 3 times higher conversion rate compared to display ads. Therefore, if you want to have a successful conversion campaign, you should start with Native ads. Additionally, we recommend having at least 2 communication lines for Native ads. This way the user won’t be bombed with the same creative.
From display ads it is necessary to include creative dimensions - 300x250, 320x50, 320x100, 320x480, 300x600, 160x600, 728x90, 336x280. However, these suggestions do not guarantee successful conversions and should be taken as recommendations. Therefore we would still advise A/B test creative types, as for every business and market different creatives tend to perform better.
Communication message
We have noticed that it is difficult to deliver a good CPA without clear communication. In other words, the offering is very important. Ads have to clearly inform a user why they should convert. Our tests showed that ads with a clear offer showed 4 times higher conversion rate compared to ads without any offer.
We strongly advise having different language ads if you are working in multilingual markets. In this case, you will reach a wider audience.
Also, it is necessary to add a clear Call-To-Action that will inform what the user has to do after clicking the ad. Register Now, Sign Up works well when generating leads.
Additional Platforms
As we have mentioned performance campaigns are much more complex than other objective campaigns. One source may not generate enough results. In this case, we offer to add more than one channel for your conversion campaigns. As Eskimi DSP offers the possibility to launch 2 major digital players – Google Ads and Facebook - it becomes much easier to scale your performance. Enabling several channels will let you optimize your campaigns with higher accuracy under one umbrella.
You can test direct leads form on Facebook and/or LinkedIn to increase your conversion rate since both of these channels generate a 2-to-5 times higher conversion rate depending on the complexity of the form compared to click-to-website conversion.
You should keep in mind that each platform is unique and should be adapted to the business. Meaning, that LinkedIn which is solely profession-based platform may not work for food-based clients.
Technical Reuquirements
Eskimi DSP holds few technical requirements when working with conversion campaigns. We require to have a unique landing page. This helps us to efficiently track conversions on the dashboard. It is mandatory to implement tracking and conversion pixels.
We have noticed that the most efficient campaigns were those who had a minimum of 5000$ budget and ran at least for a month.
If you are a new player in the market, we advise starting with brand awareness and click-to-website campaigns. Then your digital advertising will generate a buzz in the market and will give the users a chance to learn about your brand.
Other
No performance campaign is good if it is not monitored. Therefore, we advise to track campaign performance on another 3rd party platform, such as Google Analytics, and share performance stats with your Ad-ops team. This way Ad-ops will have a better understanding of how the campaign is performing and will optimize it accordingly.
If you are still trying to understand which audience converts the most - try to segment the targeted audience so that you’d be able to see which audience pool is driving the best results.
Also, a more advanced lead flow has to be discussed beforehand. Then we will be able to give you the best solution for your planned goal.
To wrap it up - a lot of things come down to testing as each brand and market are unique. Thus, we advise to not fall over fast conversion trends. As in most cases, it would only bring a lousy performance that wouldn’t bring any benefit to your return on investment. If you have any inquiries or doubts feel free to contact us for a discussion as we believe we can find a relevant digital solution for each brand.