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Programmatic has come a long way since it was welcomed into digital. So much so that it can be hard to keep up with! This exciting way of buying media is continually becoming the primary way for advertisers and brands to manage campaigns – particularly in growing channels like video and audio.
With these developments, programmatic demand-side platforms (DSPs) look to make media buys simpler. DV360 has made attempts to do this by announcing a revamped experience for advertisers when choosing the environments and positions our ads will show in. This will come into play on 26th August.
The change is subtle, but it’ll give more accuracy for future media buying – and this is so important for everyone involved. Now we can prepare for the many ways to position ourselves to make sure we achieve the best performance possible.
What’s changing?
Essentially, the changes will make it easier to choose more accurate targeting for all media buys, including display, video and audio ads.
Environment targeting
This refers to the layout where the media appears (e.g. mobile web or mobile app). This will now focus on web or app inventory, with an ‘opt-out’ for those not optimised by device type. This is a useful update which will help avoid buying ad space on websites designed for desktops but viewed on mobiles.
The environments perform differently, so it’s important to split them out within your mobile activity, or even focus on one tactic depending on your campaign goal.
Position targeting
The biggest change we’ll see is a new targeting option for position, which will combine some of the well-known features used in contextual targeting. Position-based targeting is now split into two segments; on screen and in content.
Position on screen relates to the location of the ad (i.e. above or below the fold). To make it clearer and easier, display and video are now separate.
Depending on the strategy for your display or video campaign, you might want to use position targeting features to maximise performance. A brand awareness campaign might work best with above-the-fold targeting, as this will mean the ad’s serving almost as soon as the user lands on the publisher site, before they even scroll down the page.
Position in content relates to the other content visible on screen and where the ad is shown. Before this change, many ‘positions’ were bundled together for certain devices, but now we’ll be able to precisely target positions across several formats to find our audience in the most appropriate place.
This granularity will help manipulate the context ads are seen in. For display, not much has changed as we’ll still be able to target the same position-based placements, but these are now explicitly available for video outstream formats. This means if you want to serve your videos within articles your audience are reading (in-article), you can!
Other available positions are:
On the other hand, in-stream video and audio positions still function the same, which allow for pre-roll, mid-roll and post-roll. In layman’s terms, your video will play before, during or after the media your audience has chosen to look at. Pre-roll is the most common and has high view-through-rate performance.
Another targeting option related to this is viewability. Powered by Google’s Active View technology, nothing’s changed to the functionality of this. Using Viewability will only allow bidding on impressions with a certain level of predicted viewability (ads that can be seen by users). This can work as a strong alternative to position on-screen targeting, as we bid for viewable ads regardless of where they appear on the webpage.
With these changes, and more options available to advertisers, the ability to make updates to campaigns in bulk will be key to streamlining programmatic activity. An updated version of Structured Data Files (v5) will let us change targeting more quickly, and allow more time for optimising and planning. Roll on the end of August…
Need help running your programmatic activity? Contact us at results@icrossing.co.uk
