If you’re not entirely new to online advertising you’ve likely heard people raving about programmatic advertising. It certainly has its benefits, but it also has its downfalls. Programmatic advertising differs from the Google Display Network and traditional advertising. Still, it can be hard to discern the difference if you’re not keen on the pluses and minuses. In this guide, we’ll talk a little about each of these and help you understand when it’s right to pursue programmatic advertising versus when you should look into other options.
What is Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic ads utilize automated approval to display your advertisements. The software is in charge of automatically selling and buying ad space on the internet.
With programmatic advertising, software buys and sells the ads instead of conventional methods where there’s a ton of manual input involved, such as requesting proposals, quotes, and human negotiation. In this landscape, machine learning and algorithms do the work of buying and selling digital ad space.
The whole point of programmatic is to remove unnecessary manual work, enabling humans to have more time to optimize and improve their ads. There’s no middleman with a programmatic installation. In this instance, all you need to do is use software known as a ‘Display-side platform’ to enter the audience demographic you’re attempting to target.
You don’t need to send ad placement requests or negotiate price – once someone enters a particular site, the ad exchanges are pinged, and the audience members will see your ads if you win the auction that’ll take place against other bidders. If you had the highest bid, you’d get the ad slot, and your ads would show on the webpage – this all happens in literal milliseconds!
What is Google Display Network?
Google Display Network (GDN) is a system that enables marketers to reach their target audiences while they’re online. For example, this might mean when they’re checking emails, browsing for eCommerce products, watching YouTube, or hanging out on social media platforms.
GDN gets your advertisements in front of targeted audiences on the internet. It offers a super powerful system that can reach nearly all internet users and captures around two million websites across the digital sphere.
However, unlike programmatic advertising, which uses AI to deliver real-time buying and selling options, GDN offers a more passive approach to advertising. It’s integrated with your ads very carefully, placing itself on specific websites you or your team selected. You can talk to a honed-in market when people are shopping, reading, or browsing.
GDN functions as an interface between you (the advertiser) and the publisher. Marketers use this platform to choose their target audiences based on interest, domain, demographic, and other essential information. You’ll have complete control over ad placements and scheduling using GDN.
When to Use GDN
If you don’t have a significant budget, GDN might be the better option for you. Because it’s more manual, you’re not paying for the AI learning and algorithms with programmatic ads.
Here are some other things to think about:
- View-through conversions. If you don’t value view-through conversions, you should stick with GDN. View-through modifications are significant if your team values them, so programmatic might be the better option for you.
- You’re still new to this game. If you haven’t experimented with GDN, try it before moving up the ladder. There’s a lot to be learned by processing these ads yourself.
When to Use Programmatic Advertising
If you’ve outgrown the Google Display Network, it might be time to try programmatic. Here are some things you should think about if you’re leaning toward the programmatic movement:
- Data. You have a ton of data coming from CRMs, customer behavior profiles, conversion audiences, remarketing lists, and more. What do you do with all this information? Utilize programmatic ad platforms so you can dump all this data into them and let them figure out who your ideal customers are and where they’re hanging out.
- Personalization. If you have a wide scale of products, it can be difficult to target specific audiences all by yourself. Programmatic can do this on your behalf, providing specific messages to users at the right times.
How Zero Gravity Marketing Can Help
If you’re still unsure which route to take and the differences between programmatic and GDN online advertising methods, a quick chat with our team might send you in the right direction. Set up a call to speak with our digital marketing experts today!
