Similar to the cloud, big data and machine learning, “programmatic” is becoming one of the latest buzzwords to take hold in the tech world.
In general terms, programmatic represents a program, schedule or method. It’s nothing more than the automation of things that humans can already do by hand. However, since computers can do calculations a lot faster than humans, and with the modern computer’s ability to process huge amounts of data quickly, the programmatic approach is really useful for advertising, even though it can be useful in anything that can be measured.
Programmatic Advertising
At Clickbooth, an online performance exchange focused on cost-per-action and cost-per-click affiliate marketing, we use a programmatic approach to serve the best offer to each and every visitor. This is one of those examples where programmatic really shines because our company is dealing with a lot of traffic, and more traffic means more data points, which translates to higher accuracy. Before we implemented the programmatic approach, every affiliate needed to manually select the offer they thought would generate the highest earnings per click. The affiliate would run the offer and then watch results. After few hours or so, the affiliate would determine how the offer is performing.
However, with programmatic, the affiliate doesn’t select one offer but many. The system then uses the programmatic approach to select the highest-converting offer for each and every visitor. This not only ensures that the system always routes traffic to the offer with the highest EPC, but it also determines the best EPC for each visitor separately. This means that for desktop users, the system will select one offer, but for mobile users, the highest EPC might be something completely different.
Working with a huge amount of data points, we’ve found that the programmatic system manages to generate 25-50% higher EPC in comparison to manually selecting a single offer.
As more and more marketers switch to programmatic, it will be harder for old-school marketers not utilizing the programmatic approach to survive. The sooner you jump on the bandwagon, the quicker you’ll see the benefits.
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by Dzenis Softic
source: Forbes
