Programmatic advertising is the automated process of purchasing and placing digital ads using software and algorithms. Instead of manual negotiations, this system uses data to make real-time decisions about which ads to show to which users. This ensures ads are strategically positioned where and when they will have the most impact.
This automated approach offers significant advantages over traditional methods. By leveraging technology, advertisers can enhance their campaigns' effectiveness and efficiency. The primary benefits include:
While powerful, programmatic advertising is not without its hurdles. Navigating the ecosystem requires vigilance to overcome significant obstacles and ensure campaign success.
While often used interchangeably, programmatic advertising and real-time bidding serve different functions within the automated ad buying landscape.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning are set to redefine programmatic advertising. These technologies will drive hyper-personalization and predictive optimization. The shift away from third-party cookies will also accelerate the adoption of first-party data strategies.
The expansion into new channels like connected TV (CTV) and audio will continue to grow. This creates new opportunities for cross-device campaigns. Concurrently, the industry is pushing for greater supply chain transparency to combat fraud and improve brand safety.
To maximize your return on investment, adopt a strategic approach. This involves leveraging data-driven insights and continuously optimizing campaigns for performance.
How is brand safety managed in programmatic campaigns?
Brand safety is managed using tools like blocklists, allowlists, and contextual targeting to ensure ads appear alongside appropriate content. Working with reputable platforms is also crucial for maintaining control and protecting your brand's reputation.
Can programmatic advertising work without third-party cookies?
Yes. The industry is adapting by shifting to first-party data, contextual targeting, and other privacy-safe identifiers. These methods allow for effective audience targeting while respecting user privacy, ensuring campaigns can perform well in a cookieless future.
Is programmatic advertising only suitable for large companies?
Not at all. While powerful for large-scale campaigns, programmatic is accessible to businesses of all sizes. Self-serve platforms offer flexible budget options, allowing smaller companies to run highly targeted and cost-effective campaigns without a massive initial investment.
Voice broadcasting is an automated system that delivers a pre-recorded voice message to a large list of phone numbers simultaneously.
A custom API integration is a bespoke connection between software, enabling them to communicate and share data to meet unique business requirements.
Revenue Operations (RevOps) is a business function that aligns a company's sales, marketing, and customer service teams to drive predictable revenue.
A Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API is a web service that uses XML to exchange structured information between different applications.
Event marketing is a strategy where brands engage directly with target audiences through live events like trade shows, conferences, or webinars.
Psychographics categorizes people by their attitudes, interests, and lifestyles, revealing the 'why' behind their purchasing decisions.
Lookalike audiences are groups of potential customers who share similar characteristics and behaviors with your existing, high-value customers.
A sandbox is an isolated testing environment where new or untrusted code can be run safely without affecting the host device or network.
A commission is a service charge paid to an agent for a transaction. It's typically a percentage of the sale, rewarding performance directly.
A cold email is an initial outreach sent to a potential customer with whom you've had no prior contact, aiming to introduce your business.
Marketo is a marketing automation platform used by B2B marketers to manage lead generation, nurturing, email marketing, and analytics.
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Lead generation software helps businesses automate finding and capturing potential customers' contact information to build sales pipelines.
Customer relationship marketing is a strategy for building lasting connections with customers to foster long-term loyalty and engagement.
Contact data is the set of details, like names, emails, and phone numbers, used to get in touch with a person or business for outreach.
An Applicant Tracking System (ATS) is a software application that manages your entire hiring and recruitment process from a single dashboard.
Responsive design is an approach where a website's layout adapts to the user's screen size, providing an optimal experience on any device.
Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) is the portion of the market your business can realistically serve with its current products and sales channels.
Technographics is data that outlines a company’s technology stack, helping B2B teams identify prospects based on the software and hardware they use.
Email personalization uses subscriber data—like their name, interests, or past behavior—to create highly relevant and targeted email campaigns.
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search results.
Sales automation uses software to streamline and automate repetitive, manual sales tasks, freeing up reps to focus on selling.
Trigger marketing uses customer actions or events to automatically send highly relevant, personalized messages at the perfect moment.
End of Day (EOD) refers to the close of business hours. It's a common deadline for tasks and reports to be completed before the workday ends.
Buyer’s remorse is the sense of regret or anxiety that can arise after making a purchase, often questioning if it was the right decision.
Docker is a tool that packages applications and their dependencies into isolated environments called containers for easy deployment and scaling.
Network monitoring is the continuous process of tracking a computer network's performance and health to detect and resolve issues proactively.
A Target Account List (TAL) is a focused list of high-value companies that a business specifically aims to convert into customers.
Closed opportunities are potential deals that have concluded. They are categorized as either 'closed-won' (a sale was made) or 'closed-lost'.
Pipeline coverage is a key sales metric. It's the ratio of your total open pipeline value to your sales quota for a specific period.
Sales enablement provides sales teams with the necessary tools, content, and information to help them sell more effectively and efficiently.
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Data appending is the process of adding new data fields to your existing database records to enrich and complete your information.
Cohort analysis is a behavioral analytics tool that groups users with common traits to track their actions and engagement over time.
Chatbots are AI-powered programs that simulate human conversation. They interact with users via text or voice, typically for customer support.
Website visitor tracking collects and analyzes data on user behavior to understand their journey and improve the overall user experience.
Hadoop is an open-source framework designed for the distributed storage and processing of extremely large data sets across clusters of computers.
A buying signal is any action from a prospect that indicates they are interested in making a purchase, helping sales teams prioritize leads.
A marketing automation platform is software that automates marketing actions. It helps manage tasks like email campaigns and lead nurturing.
A Salesforce Administrator is a certified professional who manages and customizes the Salesforce platform to meet a company's specific business needs.
A User Interface (UI) is the point where humans and computers interact. It encompasses all visual elements like screens, icons, and buttons.
Outbound sales is when reps proactively contact potential customers through cold calls or emails to generate leads and build a sales pipeline.
The FAB technique is a sales framework connecting product features to advantages and then to the specific benefits for the customer.
“No Spam” is a commitment to sending only relevant, solicited messages. It means avoiding bulk, unwanted emails to respect the recipient's inbox.
Cross-selling is a sales tactic of encouraging customers to purchase products or services that are related to what they're already buying.
Audience targeting is the process of segmenting consumers into specific groups to deliver more personalized and relevant marketing messages.
The marketing mix is the set of marketing tools a company uses to sell products, defined by the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
White labeling is when a company puts its own branding on a product or service that was actually produced by a different company.
“End of Quarter” (EOQ) refers to the final weeks of a business quarter when sales teams rush to meet quotas, often leading to a flurry of deals.
Sales partnerships are strategic alliances where two companies co-sell products to expand their reach, generate new leads, and increase revenue.
Event tracking is the method of collecting data on specific user actions, or 'events,' on a website or app, such as clicks or downloads.
Sales metrics are quantifiable data points that track and measure a sales team's performance against specific goals and objectives.
Product-Led Growth (PLG) is a business strategy where the product itself drives user acquisition, conversion, and expansion.
Stress testing is a type of software testing that determines a system's robustness by pushing it beyond its normal operational capacity.
Logo retention is a key B2B metric that measures a company's ability to retain its customers, or 'logos,' over a specific period.
Lead enrichment tools are platforms that automatically add missing data to your leads, like contact info, firmographics, and buying signals.
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Personalization in sales means tailoring outreach to a prospect's specific needs, interests, and context to make communication more relevant.
Webhooks are automated messages sent by an app when a specific event occurs. They push real-time data to another app's unique URL.
Accounts Payable (AP) is the money a company owes its suppliers for goods or services bought on credit. It's listed as a current liability.
GDPR compliance means following the EU's strict data protection laws to ensure the secure and lawful handling of personal data.
An account is a company or organization that you're targeting for sales. It can be a prospective, current, or even a past customer.
Lead nurturing is the process of developing and reinforcing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is the total cost a business spends to gain a new customer. It includes all sales and marketing expenses.
Process Builder is a Salesforce automation tool that lets you create 'if/then' business processes with a user-friendly visual interface.
Scrum is an agile framework that helps teams structure and manage their work through a set of values, principles, and practices.
An Account Development Representative (ADR) identifies and qualifies new business opportunities, creating a pipeline for account executives.
Lead qualification is the process of determining which prospects are most likely to become paying customers based on predefined criteria.
Sales Engineers blend deep technical knowledge with sales acumen, demonstrating a product's value and solving customer problems to drive revenue.
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Lead generation is the process of identifying and cultivating potential customers for a business's products or services.
CRM enrichment is the process of adding third-party data to your existing customer profiles to make them more complete and accurate.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are websites that look and feel like native mobile apps, offering features like offline access and push notifications.
A marketing attribution model is a framework for assigning credit to the marketing touchpoints that lead a customer to convert.
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Objection handling in sales is the process of responding to a prospect's concerns about a product or service to move the deal forward.
A canary release is a deployment strategy where new software is rolled out to a small user group first, minimizing risk before a full release.
Digital advertising is the practice of delivering promotional content to users through various online and digital channels like social media or search engines.
An enterprise is a large-scale organization, often a corporation, defined by its complex structure and substantial number of employees.
Microservices is an architecture where apps are built as a collection of small, independent services that communicate with each other over APIs.
Key accounts are a company's most valuable customers, vital due to their significant revenue contribution and strategic importance for growth.
A knowledge base is a self-serve online library of information about a product, service, department, or topic.
ABM orchestration aligns marketing and sales actions across channels to deliver seamless, personalized experiences to high-value accounts.
Revenue intelligence is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data to provide insights that help sales teams make smarter decisions.
A sales call is a real-time conversation between a salesperson and a prospect, aiming to persuade them to purchase a product or service.
Rollback procedures are a set of steps to restore a system to a previous, stable version after a failed update, ensuring minimal disruption.
A headless CMS is a back-end content repository that delivers content via API to any front-end, decoupling the content from its presentation layer.
A Sales Development Representative (SDR) is a sales specialist who finds and qualifies new leads, building a pipeline for the sales team.
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Data security protects digital information from unauthorized access, corruption, or theft throughout its entire lifecycle.
Closed Lost is a sales term for a deal that didn't go through. The prospect decided not to buy, or the sales team disqualified them.
A Single Page Application (SPA) is a web app that interacts with the user by dynamically rewriting the current page rather than loading new pages.
Programmatic display campaigns use automation to buy and sell digital ad space in real-time, targeting specific audiences across the web.
De-duping, or data deduplication, is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data within a dataset to improve accuracy and save space.
Copyright compliance is adhering to laws that protect creative works. It involves legally using content by obtaining permission or licenses.
Retargeting marketing is a digital advertising strategy that targets users who have previously interacted with your website or brand online.
Lead scoring is the process of assigning points to leads based on their attributes and actions to determine their sales-readiness.
X-Sell, or cross-selling, is a sales strategy of selling additional, related products or services to an existing customer base.