In recent months we’ve covered an up and coming traffic source called real time bidding. If you want to get caught up on RTB you check out those posts below. Fair warning though – we’re about to blow the lid off of everything you think you know about media buying in today’s discussion.
Media Buying For The Little Guy
Exclusive Interview With RTB Platform Pioneer Part 1
The Traffic Source Affiliates Aren’t Using Yet
As you may have gathered by now, RTB is all about precision. The days of planning your media buy to the Nth degree are still here – but they’re dying every day. You see, RTB allows media buyers to buy on an impression basis. If you don’t like what you’re seeing in terms of conversions simply stop bidding. That’s just part 1 of the home run slam this technology brings to the table.
Part 2 is the incredible targeting options that are coming becoming available on a self serv basis. We’re talking about not only targeting on a geographic, contextual, or url basis but targeting based on thousands of demographic and psychographic data points.
Here’s what that means in a nutshell. If you want to target a 42 year old caucasian male that lives in the area code 46145, drives a Ford 150, and has played in a fantasy football league – you can do that. This is all brought to you by the beauty that is 3rd party data. Companies like Bluekai are bringing this kind of targeting to RTB.
Just 12 months ago much of this technology was unavailable to companies that make less than $100 million a year. That in itself is worth a million dollars in the right hands.
But wait there’s more!
Let’s talk about the icing on the cake. Programmatic buying. Essentially it’s this, when you get a conversion on your site of any kind the system slowly learns about those that convert. It records the data attributes like demographics and builds an ideal customer profile. From there the programmatic buying kicks in and goes out and only buys media that advertises to EXACT look alike audience profiles.
Read that again.
The system learns who your ideal customer(s) are and only advertises to those people with maximum efficiency. It will optimize lowering ad spend and increasing reach. Oh and it does all of this in real time.
That is programmatic buying in a nutshell. Technologists have brought wall street systems and are putting them in the hands of main street business owners.
