5 Tips That Will Save You Money When Planning Your Programmatic Advertising Campaign
Updated: Aug 29, 2022
You know some of the inherent advantages of programmatic advertising, but how do you actually take advantage of them to create a successful campaign? What happens when you are working with a smaller budget and not as much money to throw around? Are there any ways for small business marketers to excel at programmatic advertising when they have such disparate goals than the big brands?
With Programmatic Advertising, you can run campaigns to discover, analyze and optimize your audience. This can mean more clicks, goals and sales at a lower cost. But there's a learning curve with Programmatic. In this article, I'm going to give you 5 tips that will save you money when it comes to planning your programmatic ad campaign.
Tip 1: Start by setting up your programmatic advertising goals
For small businesses, finding and reaching the right customers is tough. Smaller companies often don't have the budget to build a wide-reaching ad campaign in order to pull in potential customers. Programmatic ad buying is a robust way to reach your audience, but it's important that you plan out your campaign before diving in.
Figure out what you want to achieve by running this campaign. What are your primary and secondary goals? All of the following are good options for programmatic ad campaigns:
Increase brand awareness
Drive website visitors
Increase online sales
Generate leads
Tip 2: Consider the target audience and the type of data you want to use.
Programmatic advertising is among the most effective methods of reaching the right audience and expanding your customer base. However, it can also be quite expensive. What’s more, it is easy to make mistakes that would cost you a lot of money unnecessarily.
Before setting up a campaign, you should know what your target audience looks like. This will help you narrow down your options and avoid wasting time and money trying to reach people who aren’t likely to buy your product or service.
The first step to having a successful programmatic campaign is to understand the different types of audiences available to you and your brand.
There are two major types of data for targeting: first-party and third-party.
First-party data is information that you've collected about your customers from your website. It's usually very accurate, but takes some time and effort to develop, since you need to collect a good amount of data before you can use it.
Third-party data comes from outside sources and is more readily available, but typically less accurate than first-party data.
Consider the target audience and what type of data you want to use. Do you want to target based on demographics, behavioral or intent? If so, then make sure the DSP is able to reach that audience and it’s integrated with the major audience providers.
Tip 3: Get Your Business The Attention It Deserves By Using Contextual Targeting
You can use a range of different digital marketing tactics to get the word out about your products and services. But what if you could get in front of new customers when they're already thinking about your industry? That's the power of context.
The first thing you need to do is think about who your ideal customer is and where they spend their time online. The best way to do this is to start with a list of websites where your customers are probably hanging out.
This means that you can run your ads on these sites, which will give them more context than just showing up on random sites across the web that your potential customers probably aren't even visiting.
Tip 4: Define the Parameters of the Campaign
This step involves refining how you want to deliver the campaign. The goal is to get as much information as possible from as few users as possible so that you can spend less money on data collection. You should consider how many times you want your ads displayed to each user before they convert, if there are any specific time of day or day of week when your target audience is online or if there are any local events that could affect how users interact with ads in those areas (e.g., bad weather).
Tip 5: Incorporate the customer journey into your campaign goals and strategies.
By understanding where each audience member is in their journey, you can better determine which strategy you need to use and how. As a result, you waste less money by showing the right audiences the right ads at the right time.

Takeaway
When it comes to planning your programmatic advertising campaign, there are certain areas that you should consider to ensure the best results.
Know what you want. Before you start running your campaign, be sure that you're clear about what you want to achieve. If you know exactly who your target audience is and which channels will help you reach them most effectively, then the journey to conversion will be a lot smoother.
Be smart with your budget. Know how much money you can allocate towards the campaign, and then work out how much of this budget can be used for each channel.
Set goals. If you don't know where you're going, how will you ever get there? It's important to know what benchmarks need to be met in order to measure success, so set some realistic goals before starting a programmatic campaign.