Since its launch in 1994, programmatic advertising has gone from strength to strength. Today the industry is estimated to be worth $7.38 billion. But what about the future? In a world – and industry – that is changing fast, how can you keep up with the latest developments and ensure that your campaigns continue to deliver the results you need?
To help you, we’ve compiled six important predictions for the future of programmatic.
1) Mobile advertising will be increasingly important
Did you know that 99.3% of all internet users in China go online using their mobile devices? Or that 65.6% of Americans check their phones up to 160 times daily? Or even that 70% of all media time is spent on smartphones?
No brand can ignore the fact that mobile usage has grown enormously over the past few years. And the simple truth is that you cannot afford not to be showing your ads on mobile.
The problem for many advertisers though, is that their mobile ads are poorly designed and don’t genuinely get the attention of the very people they are paying to reach. We know that just because an ad has been served and appears on someone’s mobile screen, it doesn’t mean that they have actually seen it, let alone taken notice of it or engaged with it.
If you want to make the most of mobile advertising you need to work with a partner like Crimtan who is an expert at building mobile ads that properly leverage attention time.
2) Customer lifetime value will matter more
Measuring your ad campaign’s success based on immediate leads generated by it is shortsighted. The right ad campaign won’t just bring new customers into your lifecycle and sell to them, it will help you to grow your customer lifetime value (CLV).
It can do this through several ways. The first is by serving more personalised, relevant ads that are more likely not just to convert an initial sale, but to increase the value and frequency of sales, as well as grow your relationship with more loyal customers.
Another way is through the halo effect. When we run campaigns with clients, one of the metrics we track is the impact of our campaign on organic brand search. In one campaign with a global furniture company we increased weekly brand searches by an additional 50K a month through digital activity. Our activity had a halo effect on overall performance that cannot be tracked via standard attribution windows. The uplift was also a long-term shift.
These are just two examples of how programmatic can help increase your customer lifetime value, ensuring you maximise the returns on your advertising budget.
3) Data leakage will need to be tackled
One common – and expensive – problem of programmatic campaigns today is data leakage. When brands use different providers for each element of their digital marketing (DMP, DSP and DCO) they lose around 30% of data at each step of the chain.
And that’s not the only issue. When you have multiple providers handling different parts of your campaign, you lack a single overview. There’s also the temptation for each provider to claim responsibility for a sale as it makes them look good. This can lead to inaccurate attribution and marketing spend placed in the wrong places.
A single programmatic partner like Crimtan knows the time and place the ad was delivered, and can assign CTV to an IP address, giving a geo location. Then, when we look at browser behaviour, we can see whether activity not ID related either increased or decreased in that location.
Because everything is in one place, we know when and where the ad was delivered, and can connect activity not connected to the ID, to an ID – meaning we can deliver accurate campaign attribution.
4) Last-click attribution will become less popular
Currently too many brands are relying on the flawed last-click attribution model to track the success of their ad campaigns and base budget allocation on for future campaigns. But last-click attribution is a highly problematic and unreliable metric.
Why? Because last-click attribution falsely relies on the concept that the only important activity in a campaign is the final ad someone sees – where they literally made their last click. But this ignores what every marketer knows about the customer journey, and that is that people need time and information to make decisions.
In reality, a customer may make a purchase through one ad, but their decision to buy could easily have been made after seeing other ads. Take those ads away and they would never have made that last click.
Brands who rely on last-click attribution risk upweighting the importance of that final ad, while discounting the importance of other ads. And, if they base their future planning on this incorrect assumption then their campaign will ‘break’ and that last click will no longer happen.
As attribution becomes more sophisticated, more and more brands will move away from last-click attribution and find more accurate ways of forecasting and measuring campaigns, such as Total Media Attribution.
Whatever the future has in store, we will ensure your campaigns deliver the performance you need, with our own proprietary technology and a drive to innovate that keeps you ahead of your competition. If you’d like to discuss the future of your programmatic campaigns, get in touch and speak to one of our experts.