Digital marketing constantly evolves based on new technologies, data insights, and ideologies. The industry changes quickly, making it all too easy for those without experience in the field to misunderstand or misuse available marketing strategies and platforms.
These tools are designed to grow a business or brand, not sabotage it. It’s critical to use them wisely.
Online advertising — the core of any strong marketing strategy — is essential to business owners who desire to develop their companies to their full potential. If a brand or organization is aiming to expand its reach and connect with a new target audience, it is necessary to understand how the message should be applied and delivered.
This is where programmatic and display ads come in. Although they are different elements of digital advertising, non-marketing professionals often confuse them as the same thing.
Programmatic advertising refers to how ads are purchased and placed online, while display advertising is the actual formatting of the ad. However, in some cases, programmatic ad campaigns rely heavily on display ads, which adds to the problem of differentiating between the two.
Understanding the key elements of programmatic versus display advertising is an essential step in creating the perfect marketing strategy for your company.
What Is Programmatic Advertising?
Programmatic advertising uses artificial intelligence and real-time bidding (RTB) to help automate and streamline the ad buying process. This lets the creator set or “program” a target market, budget, and goals for the campaign.
For example, let’s say a pet store is trying to promote or sell a safety device that protects dogs in cars — essentially a seatbelt, but for animals. The ad for this product should be “programmed” to target consumers who have dogs and drive cars. Once the demographic is set, the programmatic campaign’s objective must be determined.
If the store owner or manager decides the goal is to drive e-commerce purchases, the programmatic campaign should be automated to scour for bids and digital media platforms that would best achieve that objective.
Programmatic advertising has various perks when it comes to placement and reach.
- Accessibility: Programmatic platforms give you access to a large selection of ad networks, including access to private marketplaces like Hulu, YouTube TV, and Buzzfeed.
- Targeted Campaigns: Programmatic platforms have connections to tons of world-class data providers, allowing advertisers to access tens of thousands of first- and third-party audience lists. Essentially, the better a campaign is targeted, the better the ad is likely to perform.
- Versatility: Programmatic advertising can reach people not only through desktop computers, smartphones, and tablets, but it can also expand to television and radio broadcasting.
The opposite of programmatic advertising is manual ad buying. This form of ad buying typically involves much more human-to-human negotiation.
Continuing with the example of the pet safety belt product, manually buying ads instead of using the automated process of programmatic advertising would require someone to diligently manage the campaign. This includes determining which platforms to use as well as negotiating with the platform’s ad directors to ensure the advertisements run and perform as expected.
What Are Display Ads?
Display ads are visual-based digital ads. They may contain images, video, text, and audio and come in various formats, including banner ads and video ads. Display ads can be placed on websites through ad networks like the Google Display Network via Google Ads.
The term “display” is often used to differentiate image and video-based ads from text-based ads on search engine results pages (SERPs). Display ads appear as users browse various websites, while search ads appear after users search for terms on search engines.
Is Google Ads a Programmatic Platform?
Google Ads is a leading platform for digital advertising campaigns, but does it feature programmatic display ads? In short, Google Ads is a platform with programmatic features, but those features are limited when compared to a true programmatic solution.
Both systems offer auction-based ad placements, use display advertising to reach a specific audience, and target specific devices, geographics, demographics, interests, and behaviors.
However, there are a few key differences between Google Ads and a pure programmatic platform:
- Placement: Google Ads only allows users to serve ads on the Google Display Network (GDN), while a true programmatic platform offers access to several high-quality ad networks, including GDN, and private marketplaces (PMPs).
- Providers: Google Ads is limited to its own third-party audiences while a true programmatic platform connects to a multitude of data providers, giving advertisers access to tens of thousands of first- and third-party audiences.
- Accessibility – The Google Ads platform is much more accessible to most advertisers, mainly because there are no minimum budget requirements to use the platform. Programmatic platforms typically require minimum budgets of at least $10,000 per month to use. However, these minimums may be much lower when working with an agency like Elevation Ten Thousand that already meets the threshold.
- Creativity: Google Ads is generally limited to display ads, text-based search ads, and video ads, while programmatic platforms can also run audio ads, native ads, and video ads.
Optimize an Advertising Strategy for Your Business with Expert Marketers
Navigating the nuanced world of digital advertising is one of the many advantages of working with experienced marketers to promote your business. Aside from lending their expertise, marketing strategists or analysts can also devise customized media buying plans that are tailored to your desired audience, budget, and brand.
If you think your business could benefit from running programmatic ads and want to learn more about what we can do, we’d love to help. Use our contact form or give us a call today!
