Programmatic advertising

Programmatic advertising is the automated process of buying and selling digital ad inventory. The traditional process of advertising involved multiple parties negotiating and purchasing ad space directly from publishers. With programmatic advertising, ad exchanges automatically connect these various parties in a real-time auction. In the world of programmatic advertising, the real-time auction for ad inventory takes place at the very moment a visitor lands on a web page or app in the time it takes to load the screen. In other words, this automated process happens literally in milliseconds.

In short, programmatic advertising refers to the use of technology that automates the media buying process and uses data and machine learning algorithms to deliver the most relevant ads to users at the right time. Matching any known data on either a user’s profile or the context the ad will be placed in with the advertiser bidding on relevant interests or audience demographics ensures that advertisers are able to generate a return on their marketing efforts.

In order to understand programmatic advertising, there are three main types of media buying to be aware of:

• Real-time bidding (RTB): RTB refers to an open auction in which the price of ad inventory is determined in real-time.
• Private marketplace (PMP): Private marketplaces are similar to RTB, although there are restrictions on which advertisers can participate in the auction.
• Programmatic direct: This refers to a publisher that sells ad inventory at a fixed price to an advertiser or several advertisers, thus bypassing the auction process.

There are also three main components that go into facilitating programmatic advertising:

• Demand-side platform (DSP): DSP software allows advertisers to buy inventory from various publishers.
• Sell-side platform: Sell-side platforms enable publishers to list and sell their ad inventory to potential buyers in real-time.
• Ad exchanger: The ad exchanger is how the supply side sends inventory to the ad exchange. The DSP then connects to the exchange and facilitates the bidding and buying process of ads

With programmatic advertising and the various software that connect all parties, this automated process makes the buying and selling of ad inventory much more efficient and theoretically more cost-effective for all parties.

In order to make the most of their programmatic advertising, advertisers often rely on third-party marketing analytics solutions that collect and visualize data from various platforms in a single platform.

Programmatic advertising often involves various marketing channels and platforms, which means that analyzing the data can be a challenge. 

As a leader in marketing analytics, Singular enables advertisers to take a scientific approach to their growth strategy and discover optimization opportunities that can maximize results with accurate and granular performance insights. By exposing accurate and timely ROI insights, both at a high level and granular level, this allows marketers to optimize their marketing spend. Specifically, Singular provides eight layers of granularity that can be used to maximize the ROI on your marketing efforts. In addition to marketing analytics, programmatic advertisers can use Singular’s cost aggregation tool, which allows you to extract cost and marketing data from any source with flexible ingestion methods. 

In summary, by aggregating costs across platforms and analyzing data with easy reporting, Singular helps marketers achieve a higher return on their programmatic advertising spend.