Many advertisers work with programmatic buying campaigns to enhance brand awareness and engagement, while their actual sales take place at bricks and mortar sites (stores) or other offline channels. This means that the overall campaign metrics should be measured offline.

Some of the most advanced programmatic buying solutions can optimize toward offline shopping data either through partnerships with Nielsen or by direct integration with the customer’s buying data (cash register database).

If neither Nielsen surveys nor direct integration are possible, purchase-intent surveys may be an alternative option.

Conversion is most easily measured by determining the number of customers acquired at a given acquisition cost.

Advertisers may or may not care much whether the conversion is from somebody within the target audience; this typically depends on whether an overall multi-brand portfolio strategy is in place.

Many programmatic buying solutions support CPA-based campaigns, and some are willing to accept acquisition-based compensation. But if revenue growth is the goal, even better metrics may take into account the size of the shopping cart, return sales, upsales, or even customer lifetime value. Only the best programmatic buying solutions can optimize toward any of, or all of, these longer-term goals.

Once marketers start creating engagement, good programmatic buying solutions can optimize to engagement metrics like the number of different pages viewed, the time on site, and video completion rates.

Clicks alone, though easy to measure, are not the best metric to track and optimize toward engagement.

Large, experienced brand marketers know that a successful branding campaign optimizes to audience composition and then to effective exposure.

This means knowing exactly who was exposed to your ads: whom the ad was served to; whether or not the ad was actually visible to them, and if so, when they saw it; and whether or not that consumer was part of the target audience. This is what brand marketers calls “effective CPM.”

An even more solid option for brand campaigns is to optimize toward lift in brand awareness, brand consideration, brand preference, or other brand metrics. Programmatic buying campaigns can include survey-based measurements with control audiences or partnerships with Nielsen or ComScore to produce these results.

Emphatically, clicks are as irrelevant a metric for digital brand campaigns as calls to a free phone number would be for a traditional brand campaign.

Programmatic buying was first successful in direct-response campaigns, with a focus on conversions. But now the potential of programmatic buying has greatly expanded, and so have the consumer behaviors that campaigns intend to change. Large marketers use programmatic buying to:

• Drive higher brand awareness
• Increase brand consideration
• Deepen consumer engagement with a brand
• Drive soft conversions like signing up for a newsletter or a test ride
• Drive hard conversions like increasing sales or increasing shopping cart sizes.

A good programmatic buying solution allows you to optimize the very core of each campaign to the exact metric that matters most to you.

In line with traditional marketing practice, much programmatic buying is priced on a cost-per-thousand (CPM) basis. Since exchanges are not aware of the advertiser’s target, it is only natural that they base their auctions on CPM prices.

But there is no reason for programmatic buying solutions to quote their own compensation as a percentage of CPM too, especially when they are fully aware of the revenue, conversion, CPA or CPC target that the clients wants to reach. Translating these goals into CPM can perversely incentivize programmatic buying partners to under deliver on the real goal, so that the client has to spend even more money to reach their corporate goals.

The best way to employ programmatic buying is to optimize the campaign directly for the goal or goals that the advertiser has set as a corporate target for the campaign.

If the campaign is supposed to bring in a number of acquisitions at a maximum CPA, then the best programmatic buying solutions will propose a revenue-sharing or CPA-based compensation model, not one based on CPM margin.

Most programmatic buying solutions have some way of predicting the value of a specific consumer impression. But they may waste a lot of money bidding on exactly those consumers that all the competitive programmatic buying campaigns are also bidding for.

Best practice is not only to predict the value of the consumer, but also the market behavior of the competition.

The best programmatic buying solutions can predict the future so accurately that they can confidently leave good opportunities to the side early in the day. They simply know that an even better opportunity will come up later in the day. Competition for that consumer will be much less fierce, and the cost will be less.

Programmatic buying has exploded so quickly that every advertising company wants in on the game, whether they have the technology or not.

This means that most “solutions” on the market today are simply white labeling others’ technology, often in a daisy chain of partnerships that each add a layer of margin but add little value.

Smart marketers insist on knowing as to who buys which services from whom, and how much they are paying for each providers’ services—as opposed to margins for anybody in the value chain.

In traditional media buying, having multiple partners on the plan is a tried and tested way of keeping campaigns efficient.

But in a real-time bidding environment, having multiple programmatic buying partners just has them bid against each other—and thus increase the load on your budget.

Since the exchanges already provide the competition and the liquidity, it is most efficient to have only one programmatic buying partner—or at most, one per region.

Most programmatic buying solutions interpret “at the right time” very narrowly: retargeting consumers extremely aggressively when they think those consumers are ready to buy the product. But “at the right time” can be so much more specific than that:

• Is this a product that sells best in the morning, the afternoon, or the evening?
• What is the day of the week when this product category is top of mind?
• Should we expose consumers to this ad at home, on their way to work, or at the office?

The best programmatic buying solutions take a completely agnostic view of “at the right time.” Instead they gather all the data, let the models run, find out what works and what doesn’t, and at what time. Only then do they scale up the campaign—targeting only the best-performing times.