Are Marketers Paying For Quality Impressions?

With programmatic spending increasing in digital campaigns, it’s more important than ever for marketers to bid and pay only for quality inventory that meets campaign standards.

Clem Birdsall (Pictured above), strategic partnership director, ANZ at IAS, writes, worldwide advertising spending is expected to touch half a trillion mark in 2022.

This will rise to US$785 billion by 2025 according to eMarketer.

Programmatic buying is so obviously becoming the backbone of digital advertising and still, the programmatic landscape faces scrutiny from advertisers concerned about transparency, brand safety and evolving targeting challenges.

Demonstrably, the IAS 2022 Industry Pulse Report found that poor viewability levels and data privacy legislation will remain top challenges into 2022.

Applying Pre-Bid

Applying pre-bid removes ad spend wastage and creates positive campaign outcomes.

Put another way, when one goes grocery shopping and is flooded by a variety of produce, despite their glamorous packaging or discounts, one does check the quality of the produce before paying for it.

Why should your media spending be any different?

Although programmatic can be complicated, it drives efficiency and it’s about time marketers approach pre-bid controls to reach quality impressions.

Since the payment is only done once a bid is won, marketers can decrease ad serving costs and lower post-bid block rates.

This is assuming they’re only bidding on inventory that meets their unique needs.

Seasoned marketers recognise the tremendous financial and reputational risks from misplaced advertising.

Fraud and viewability issues can drain your ad spend and damage your results.

While the association with offensive or inappropriate content can result in more wasted ad spend or even lasting brand damage.

Pre-bid solutions offer a way to protect media spending for advertisers by checking quality in real-time during the bid process.

Thereby avoiding inefficiencies by preventing bids on auctions misaligned with their media standards.

The key benefit of using pre-bid segments is that it saves money by driving efficiencies. The other is that it aligns pre and post-bid settings.

Pre-Bid Alone Is Not The Answer

Brands utilising post-bid wrappers or pixels have reported upticks in performance when applying pre-bid.

These brands have more media quality information to optimise campaigns alongside that last layer of defence for tricky ad slots.

The preferred approach for both media buyers and sellers is to avoid the attempted delivery of an impression that is unsuitable for the brand during the ad selection process.

Determining brand suitability prior to matching a brand to an impression opportunity, is the ideal outcome for all parties.

Must-Have Considerations For Marketers To Build Programmatic Strategy

Define your media quality objectives and how they’ll be measured.

Before developing a winning programmatic strategy, you’ll need goals, KPIs and an understanding of how they’ll be measured.

Use pre-bid filtering to avoid buying fraudulent and non-viewable impressions.

This will also help allocate budgets to the most promising opportunities.

Birdsall also recommends avoiding unsuitable and risky environments.

He says to use post-bid blocking to safeguard your brand from unsafe, unsuitable environments and gain better insights.

But, at the end of the day, it’s about understanding and agreeing on how these goals will be measured.

Setting up a reliable infrastructure to measure them accurately will determine long term success with programmatic advertising.

Also critical, before execution, doing due diligence in whose technology is employed.

Birdsall stated that the following be evaluated.

Coverage across platforms and scale afforded, how sophisticated modelling is, company growth trajectories and ensuring local support is available.

By Clem Birdsall – Strategic Partnership Director, ANZ at IAS

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