Programmatic Buying is all about how we use data more efficiently to reach a target audience

The ability to analyze and act upon data is important to any business. In programmatic advertising, data is the most essential thing that makes it so effective. It helps find ideal customers on the web. It allows us to segment, target and buy the right audiences instead of mere placements. The more quality data a trading desk/agency can collect and aggregate, the better its results will be.

Deciphering user behavior from the data at hand is the first step towards an effective programmatic strategy.

There are three broad kinds of data to look at. First-party data is the advertiser’s own data collected from their customers. This is the most powerful data of all, because it’s collected directly from the advertiser’s web page, its mobile apps or physical business and is therefore the most relevant and accurate. For example, email ids and phone numbers of a company’s customer base is a kind of first party data.

While second-party data is collected by someone other than the advertiser, Second party data is essentially another advertiser’s first party data that you can purchase. It is more often used when both the brands gain from the sharing of data. For example, if you are a hotel booking website, you could partner with a travel site to share information about customers who have recently booked their itinerary. If a customer books a ticket, you can use that data from your travel partner to reach those potential customers and offer them hotel rooms. Conversely, the travel partner can reach out to customers who have booked a hotel room on your site.

Third-party data is available to anyone at a cost and is usually sold on a CPM basis. Third party data is collected by someone other than the original data source, who then sell it to other marketers. In other words, the data aggregator doesn’t directly collect data from customers/shoppers/visitors but has relationships with several companies and sources that collect first party data. Some examples of third party data providers include Bluekai, Acxiom, and Epsi.

You can also add a layer of DMP to complement your programmatic strategies. A Data Management Platform is a data warehouse. It is used to store and analyze the data. DMPs help agencies make best use of the massive amounts of data they collect, by analyzing data from multiple sources like the web, mobile app, email marketing, physical retail stores, CRM platforms etc and presenting it in a comprehensible manner/format. DMPs are used by ad agencies, marketers, and publishers to create rich, custom data-sets and target users more effectively through online advertising.

There are several added advantages to using a DMP, such as being able to re-target clicks and impressions without placing a pixel on the advertiser’s web-page, track average user session durations on a web page etc. DMPs can be used to collect and organize data and also push it to other platforms or your existing Advertising/Marketing Technology stack (such as DSPs, SSPs, and ad exchanges) for targeted advertising.

We should think about all these data sources as representing potential customers. For programmatic success, we should concentrate on the Current Database, Inventory, Technology and knowledge. Here, we are looking for the audience that we are trying to reach, for a given day, operating software, device, age, gender, browser, mobile device and recency time etc. We look at what we know about them behaviorally, based on their habits.

By using all the above types of data and strategies, we can enhance programmatic tactics, pre and post-campaign.

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