As technology improves we see it bring many different advantages that affect almost every aspect of our personal lives and our businesses. This applies particularly to marketing which has changed a huge amount over the last few years. Not only have the mediums that marketers are advertising on changed, but so too have the very nature of those adverts and the tools used to create and manage them. Concepts like PPC and Programmatic Advertising are quietly changing the face of advertising on the web and the ‘bid manager’ is central to this change.
The role of a bid manager is to help any website or advertising platform to make more money. This works by allowing advertisers to bid for a spot and thereby ensure that the highest paying advertiser is the one that gets their ads displayed and that the owner of the website or the advertising platform gets the highest possible payout for that slot.
PPC advertising is the most popular form of advertising on the web right now. It means Pay Per Click, so that advertisers only pay each time one of their adverts is clicked on – not for a set number of months in advance.
Advertisers get to set their own ‘maximum bid’, which is the most they’re willing to pay ‘per click’ – their maximum CPC (cost per click). If an ad slot comes up when a website is loaded and it is deemed to be suitable for two different advertisers, then an automated bidding war will begin. The advertiser with the highest maximum bid will win the competition and their ad will then display. However, they will only be charged just above the maximum bid of their competition. Like bidding for items on eBay then, you only get charged the amount you need to win – rather than the amount you were willing to pay. The bid manager is what handles these bids.
In programmatic advertising, this is taken to the next level. Programmatic means that ads will be optimized and shown based on what will earn the advertiser the most clicks and what will earn the publisher the most income. This means that a publisher doesn’t have to work with just one ‘ad platform’ and it means that the advertiser can have their ads show in multiple locations with the best possible targeting. Here, the bid manager reigns supreme and manages all of the ads and which will be shown.
Find more statistics at Statista
Programmatic Buying and Selling
Not so long ago, PPC was a foreign concept but since then it has become one of the most powerful tools anyone can use to spread a message to a large targeted audience. Now the new kid on the block is programmatic buying which takes PPC to the next level and which will very likely become the principle advertising tool used across all mediums. Until the next development at least… Here are five reasons why that's likely to be the case.
1 It's Faster
At its heart programmatic buying is essentially automation. Whereas an effective PPC campaign would have once required you to spend a long time reading and analysing data, then testing various different combinations to see which ads were most successful, programmatic buying now does all that for you and tweaks where and how you get your impressions without time consuming effort on your part.
2 It's More Targeted
As with digital manufacturing versus traditional manufacturing, using programmatic buying allows you to save time by automating processes, but also controls those processes in a far more precise manner than would be possible for one person alone. This improves your ROI meaning you get more bang for your buck.
This precision also impacts on the options you have when setting up your campaign. For instance programmatic campaigns allow you to target contextually which has been shown to always yield higher conversion rates.
3 It's More Relevant
These are some obvious benefits for marketers, but what about consumers? Well for their part, they get targeted ads that will actually be of interest to them and that will thus prove to be far more useful and much less annoying.
This relevance also extends to publishers, who this way get to benefit from more useful ads on their site and hopefully more profit as well as they attract both more advertisers and more viewers.
4 It's Adaptable
Because programmatic advertising campaigns rely on and yield so much data, it's very easy to monitor performance and adapt appropriately. Budgets can be freely increased and decreased at will and any advertiser big or small can find the perfect balance to suit their specific needs.
5 It's Evolving
Programmatic buying isn't perfect just yet and there are still cases where people are shown the wrong ads. This is nothing new, but where programmatic buying is different is in its potential to learn and improve. As technology improves, as we collect even more data, and as algorithms are tweaked to perfection, we can only expect programmatic buying to become more and more effective.
