How to increase your advertising ROI with Programmatic buying

Programmatic buying is a relatively new concept in South Africa and it uses highly advanced technology — both of which can make it seem intimidating. If you are a marketer who has mainly operated outside of digital — planning a programmatic ad buying budget probably feels very overwhelming.

The reality is, programmatic buying allows more control over your advertising campaign than most traditional platforms.

Media buying and selling is fast-paced and being able to make decisions in real-time can give your brand a competitive edge. Simply put, programmatic buying enables brands to utilise audience insights and technology to tailor messages to the right person, at the right moment, in the right context. This means that the real-time data provided through the technology creates the opportunity for greater efficiency and improved campaign outcomes. Here is a case study that proves just that.

Goals of the Campaign

A sports betting company wanted to test an online campaign to generate new business by garnering new client sign ups to increase deposits. Their secondary goal was to reactivate existing, but dormant clients.

The campaign setup was configured in such a way that every conversion recorded captured the deposit value as well as the user ID, thereby allowing the client to attribute a direct value to the conversion and also determine whether the converted user was a new acquisition or a reactivation.

The ability to know exactly what the value of a conversion is, without estimating, is a powerful measurement tool that programmatic buying, if set up correctly, can provide to buyers.

The approach

The campaign was run over two phases:

• Phase one was to test the inventory.

• Phase two was to optimise the campaign based on the results of the first phase.

Phase two is extremely important for a number of reasons, firstly to have the ability to optimise your campaigns based on actual data is immensely powerful; it ensures that you’re getting the best results for the money that you spend on the campaign.

From a data perspective, it would be a shame to only run a standard display campaign when you could also be building an audience segment of users that can be excluded from the current campaign once they have been converted — and then retargeted in future with a very specific campaign.

The Process

In phase one, both mobile and display inventory was targeted across three publisher groups on the SouthernX platform — sport, motoring and news, with unique creatives developed for each channel.

A post view and post click attribution model was used, which means that:

• A post click was given the full value of the conversion.

• Post view conversions were given full value if the conversion happened within 24 hours of the user viewing the advert.

• Post view conversions that happened within 48 hours were given a value of 50%.

• No post view conversion was attributed after 48 hours of seeing the ad.

The Results

The results for phase one proved that the news channel outperformed sport and motoring across both mobile and display. In addition, display outperformed mobile, both in terms of number of conversions and the value attributed to conversions.

This was contrary to what was expected, as one would have assumed that the sports channel would perform best for a sports betting business.

As a result of the above, for phase two the majority of the budget was moved to the news display channels, where underperforming creatives were also taken out of rotation.

• In phase one 62% of all conversions were attributed to display.

• In phase two, this increased to 67% of all conversions.

• The total number of conversions increased by 126% in phase two in comparison to phase one.

• 83% of all recorded conversions were post view — proving that optimising to clicks is not an optimal strategy for display when campaign goals are conversions with a CPA metric.

• The overall campaign resulted in a 20% increase in deposits by existing clients and the value of the deposits received also exceeded the total media cost of the campaign.

Programmatic buying is a way to fully automate the often complex processes that advertisers must consider when purchasing display, mobile and native ads. Simply put, programmatic buying gives marketers, media buyers and brand managers a simplified way to read analytics and make more intelligent decisions going forward.