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Programmatic
Buying Platform
A demand-side platform (DSP)
evaluation and selection guide
Table of Contents
Programmatic: Scalable, efficient, and effective
marketing
Beginning the selection process
What to look for in a programmatic buying platform
1. Unified access to inventory and audiences
2. Smart targeting and optimization
3. Controls for brand safety
4. Performance delivery and measurement
5. Intuitive digital marketing
1. Unified access
to inventory
and audiences
2. Smart targeting
and optimization
3. Controls for
brand safety
4. Performance
delivery and
measurement
5. Intuitive
digital
marketing
1. Unified access to
inventory and audiences
Beginning the selection process
Its now possible to connect with your audience in digital no matter where theyre
spending time, but it takes a programmatic buying platform with unified access to
digital inventory across formats, channels, and devices to do so. Unified access to
inventory empowers you to plan, execute, and measure campaigns with a single view
of the consumer, which can dramatically improve your advertising results. Imagine the
power of instructing your programmatic platform to reach your audience anywhere in
digital instead of having to guess the right formats, channels, and devices to focus on
at the outset of a campaign. Unified media buying is the future of digital advertising
because it allows advertisers to truly focus on their audience. It also solves many of the
challenges that come from operating in silos. For example, unified media buying makes
universal frequency capping possible. This reduces waste and prevents the same
people from getting overexposed to ads as they move from smartphone to tablet to
computer. In this way and many others, a programmatic platform that unifies your
access to inventory and audiences will help you reduce waste and improve the overall
experience that audiences have with your advertising.
A programmatic buying platform can be your first line of defense in protecting both your brand and your
budget across screens and formats. It can provide the guardrails you need to ensure that your ads are
only placed in environments that are safe for your brand, that your money isnt wasted on illegitimate and
fraudulent traffic sources, and that the majority of your ads are in view.
Built-in verification
The more that verification protections are built into your platform, the more they can work as intended.
Built-in protections may include blocking, filtering, and brand safety controls. You may also want
the flexibility to use your choice of third-party tools from verification vendors, data quality providers,
and others.
Transparency
Look for transparent access to verification insights in the form of alerts and on-demand
reporting. Its very helpful if your platform can send custom alerts to your inbox that deliver
the information you need to know to ensure your campaigns are running as expected. For
example, if you want to be notified if more than 3% of your campaign is serving in off-target
geographies, you should be able to set a preference to receive an alert for this. Further,
your platform should offer on-demand access to granular verification reports inclusive of
contextual, geographic, viewability, spam, and fraud insights.
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4. Performance delivery
and measurement
Performance is at the heart of programmatic buying. The best programmatic platform will be able to
implement your direct response (DR) or brand advertising strategy across screens and formats to deliver
the maximum value for your advertising dollars. This requires measuring what matters with the right
metricswhether they are DR or brand. The next step is ensuring those metrics are actionable in real time.
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Or, lets say youre running a display and video campaign in the U.S. to reach the same
demographic segments across the web and traditional broadcast television. GRP-based
online metrics can help measure and optimize reach and frequency among a TV
demographic in real time. With this, you can optimize to total GRPs, or to components
of GRP, such as the TV demos average frequency of exposure or percent composition
versus the total audience reached. This allows you to direct spend away from areas that are
reaching the same people over and over, or away from areas that have a low composition of
your TV demo.
Another powerful feedback signal to look for is real-time brand lift surveys integrated into
the programmatic buying workflow. Brand lift metrics can provide a very quick feedback
loop that measures how well a campaign is delivering upper-funnel metrics such as brand
recall, change in awareness, change in consideration, and purchase intent. The real-time
component lets you instantly modify campaigns to dramatically improve brand performance
while campaigns are running.
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5. Intuitive digital
marketing
To navigate the complexities of digital marketing,
it helps to have a programmatic buying platform
thats part of an integrated platform. This brings
together all your display formats, data, and digital
channels in one place for faster access, better
insights, and more effective campaigns.
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We hope these questions can serve as a guide in your evaluation and selection process for
choosing a programmatic buying platform. Think about the selection criteria that makes up your
must have requirements. Then find the platform that meets as many of your requirements as
possible and that has a credible roadmap for delivering on any of your missing requirements in
a reasonable time frame.
If you would like to learn about how DoubleClick Bid Manager can take you to the forefront of
programmatic buying, please contact our sales team at
http://www.google.com/doubleclick/advertisers/solutions/
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