Over the past couple of years, the industry has been obsessed over two unique trends: native advertising and programmatic media buying. Programmatic appears designed for large scale automated media buying, while native is so custom. Each buy must require manual execution. So, while these two trends do not seem to have much in common, the industry is already betting that these two strategies can coexist.
Programmatic ad buying is not really new. It’s been done on Wall Street for some time. With regards to advertising, it typically refers to the use of automated technology to purchase digital advertising inventory, as opposed to the traditional process that encompasses a whole lot of paper work and manual labour.
Native advertising, which seems to have several different definitions depending upon whom you ask, is really quite simple at its core. It’s advertising that aligns itself stylistically with the content of its host publication. In other words, it is commercial content that matches the look and feel of the site it is on. It can be editorial content, visual content, video content, etc. It can be served directly in-feed, or as a sponsored post.
Why Programmatic + Native Matters For You
The travel industry is one of the most volatile industries. Any number of variables and circumstances can effect pricing and inventory, which means travel marketers must stay ahead of the curve and offer the latest and most accurate information to potential customers.
With the ability to integrate all types of consumer data, programmatic helps travel brands identify who the best prospects are and where they go online so buying in real-time based on informative information is quite simple.
The good news is you can still serve up beautifully integrated native ads that are unique to specific sites, and do so programmatically. This allows you to not only create numerous variations of the same ad, but also modify creative on the fly if needed.
The ability to leverage programmatic for native creative allows travel marketers to adapt to evolving marketing conditions and be sure to have the best, most accurate information in front of the most receptive customers. It is the perfect way to achieve customization and scale.
Don’t optimize your content for clicks, optimize for your brand goals.
Optimize for awareness, recall and brand lift based on your brand’s vision. Buying programmatically, you can fine tune campaigns in real-time to ensure you are meeting these goals, but content should always be vetted to ensure meaningful brand lift.
Let performance dictate goals.
Machine buying translates to machine learning, so pay attention to what the numbers are telling you. Cut the losers, and focus on the winners. Adjust your spend so your budgets are equal to performance.
Even better, some vendors support RTB valuations and can automatically calculate price as a function of expected performance on each native impression. Finally, it may make sense to measure the impact of a display campaign against a native campaign – if the native campaign outperforms, the time is right to consider shifting budgets to native.
Discriminate!
Don’t look at native and display performance the same way. For example, viewability is a far different beast for native than it is for display. Similarly, what is the impact of your non-click users – display ads always have some branding up front, but certain native ad formats are less transparent. This means the brand impact for your non-clickers is significantly impacted.
Put context in context.
When building out your campaign, select contextually relevant sites first and foremost. Native ads perform better when served in similar contextual surroundings. If it’s relevant, it has a better chance of being read.
Courtesy: www.tnooz.com
Author: Anoop .N
Anoop works as Delivery Manager in Teknokraaft.