When you think about your day-to-day online media consumption, are you confined to New Zealand searches, or are you an omnivore that searches and clicks any link and site, not confined by any global limits?
The latter, right? That’s what the web is all about – the limitless opportunity to gather and seek as much as you want. So, why would you only want your advertising messages to be confined to New Zealand?
We still find that many companies only use New Zealand publishers, or if they don’t, they use the Google Display Network (GDN) for display advertising.
What are the options beyond this and how do I get to them, you might ask?
Today, there is artificial intelligence (AI) technology, which encompasses very smart advertising digital display networks onto grouped publisher sites, known as exchanges. These allow targeting by many different ‘user’ audiences and other endless parameters. They are known as ‘programmatic buying desks’.
Programmatic buying is anything that is ‘automated media buying’, but the essential part is really the real-time bidding capability (also known as demand side platform). If you think of stock market trading where you might put in a rate that you are willing to buy or sell at, this is similar. You set your levels and, ideally, as you learn what is working or not, increase or decrease with a focus on hitting your key and most desired audiences at the right time and place.
The beauty of these desks is also their targeting ability; things like geography, age, interest, technology platform and time of day. But it is far more sophisticated than this. Each exchange collects a growing group of sectors based on user behaviour. More often much of this information is overlaid with third party data that it has bought. e.g. investment, car interest and the list go on. There are also many different ad formats that can be used, including video and native (content). Importantly, the disks automate targeting to find your audiences wherever they are globally or locally as they are surfing the web, including just targeting New Zealand eyeballs (or other geo targets).
These programmatic desks do require a level of expertise, so that targets are set up correctly, bidding is cost effective, budgets are set correctly, and ads are loaded and tagged. But, the true skill comes from the optimisation outside of the AI automation, ensuring that the learnings are quickly implemented and sent back to management and relevant people.
Key tip: You are probably going to need help setting this up - so we’re here to help
What is the difference between Google and GDN
If you are already using Google Display Network (GDN), you might be asking – why do I need programmatic when I have already got it in place?
Google’s largest client is the Google Adsense programme, made up of publishers who are happy to accept ads from Google within their site. You may have used it to gain some revenue in sales on your website. Google also owns DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM), which is their version of programmatic and is the technology that supports the GDN. So in short, GDN’s biggest client is Adsense; publishers wanting some revenue who pass criteria, but of course it isn’t all of them.
A strong programmatic desk will have relationships with many of the exchanges (AppNexus, AOL's Marketplace, Microsoft Ad Exchange, OpenX, Rubicon Project Exchange and Smaato) including GDN. They will also be validated sites.
Therefore, the wider set of publisher sites that you can advertise on, which meet with your targeting criteria is going to have greater chance of finding that boundless, limitless web explorer at the crucial moment, to convert into an interested or converting customer.
Key tip: You want targeting and capability for placement within omni-channel these days, not just digital, therefore you need to understand how the consumer engages with these mediums here to help