Should you run programmatic campaigns in-house?

One question we hear asked often, is whether advertisers should run programmatic in-house. But a better question to ask is: could you run a programmatic campaign in-house?

And to answer this, there are two more questions you need to consider.

1) Do you have the right amount of resources?

In order to run a campaign with great viewability, data usage, attribution, brand safety and no fraud concerns, you need the right amount of manpower to apply the right techniques and optimise precisely.

More resource means more testing of new areas, more optimisation and more analysis – all of which leads to greater results and better campaigns.

However, you need to apply the right amount of resource to the campaign, and to know which types of campaign need and deserve more resource than others.

And very few in-house campaigns, even with considerable resources invested in them, get close to addressing all of the concerns in a programmatic campaign to an acceptable level.

2) Do you have the right expertise?

This is where the second question comes in. You can throw all the manpower in the world at your programmatic campaigns, but if you don’t have the right expertise in-house, you won’t see the return you need.

Every programmatic campaign needs to be monitored by an expert, and given a health check on areas such as viewability, brand safety, fraud and strategy.

An expert may also advise a change in KPIs or a shift in bids, and make other tactical changes to the strategy or optimisation of your campaign, including technology needed, to ensure it is genuinely successful.

Larger campaigns need a much larger amount of expertise still, and more advanced technology (perhaps specialist technology for DMP, attribution, fraud and creative).

And finally, an expert will also advise you on how to appropriately balance your spending for each campaign on creative, data and media. For example, some articles suggest splitting it as: 60% on media, 10-15% on service, 10-15% on technology and 10-15% on data.

However, the real split between each will be dependent on a number of variables, including industry, strategy and scale. And only a true programmatic expert can determine this.

Could you run programmatic in-house?

So, to return to the question we started with: could you run a programmatic campaign in-house?

The answer is actually simple: yes, as long as you have the right amount of resources and expertise to guarantee its success.

If not, we recommend outsourcing it to an expert who will deliver the ROI you are looking for. And save you time, headaches and money.

If you’d like to know more about programmatic and how it can work for you, we’d love to explain more about how we can help. Just email us or call us on +44 (0) 20 7821 6864.