The digital marketing and advertising world is constantly moving forward, advancing to be more effective. What’s recently become prominent is Real Time Bidding or RTB, which has become the buzzword for precise ad display target marketing for the budget conscious.
The technology of RTB allows the advertisers to dynamically run display campaigns based on an auction platform that anyone can bid on. Experts in digital marketing predict that this will become the premier preferred method of serving ads in the future.
Real Time Bidding is on track to become the fastest growing digital advertising segment in the next few years, this according to every market intelligence report.
What Is RTB
The definition of real-time bidding is a method based on an auction on how ad inventory is bought and sold on a per ad, per impression basis, this based on an instant bidding protocol that’s similar to the financial markets.
What real time bidding ad buyers will do is they’ll bid on ad impressions one at a time, and if it’s won, the winning bidder’s banner ad will be displayed instantly on the publisher’s site.
Real time bidding is an auction process where each single ad impression is bid upon and then displayed simultaneously in “real-time,” this opposed to a static auction where ad impressions are bundled in groups of one thousand.
Real-Time Bidding Ad Serve
There’s a growing number of digital marketing companies who are heavily investing in RTB, along with a large number of advertisers who are entering into RTB as an efficient advertising model.
The hype that currently surrounds RTB focuses on its precise targeting capabilities as well as the bidding process and the auction itself. To understand these features, what’s needed is comparing traditional display and RTB buying.
Traditional Display Buying
What traditional display buying requires is negotiating with the various publishers, and then buying advertising space from them, this to guarantee visibility of their ads for a specific number of impressions, or a set date frame.
Advertisers will then choose the websites for their ads based on the sites content and their predicted audience, but they have limited flexibility on its optimization once the campaigns are launched.
What this means is that there’s the potential for money to be wasted on impressions which produces very little, which is also the advertisers biggest nightmare.
Programmatic Display Buying
What “programmatic” buying does is it allows display inventory to be released on a bidding process. Advertisers are able to choose to purchase ad inventory that’s based on precise pinpointed audience targeting, this by bidding on the available impressions once their targeting methods matches the available impressions.
The option to bid for inventory only when the appropriate audience is available, means that advertisers can then be precise when targeting their market, while being in complete control of their ad spending budgets.
The display process for the visitor of the site who may be serving these ads which are bid on, takes place in an instance, usually 100 milliseconds quick.
What the accuracy along with the lightening quickness of the real-time bidding model does is it provides a huge opportunity for budget conscious advertisers, who may not be wanting to blow their advertising budgets with the traditional display buying methods.
Real Time Optimization
This bidding process and the display of the ads takes place in real-time, the biggest advantage is the process which occurs after launching a RTB display campaign.
What the demand-side platforms will typically allow for are highly targeted campaigns, which is great, but it’s still up to the campaign managers to make sure that their return on investment is reached.
What the real-time data from these campaigns does is it allows for the campaigns optimization to be taken right from the exact moment of the ad launch, which gives the advertisers the opportunity to realize any improvements which needs to be made in their campaign performance.
Market Research Still Needed
Collecting precise analytical data is still the key when it comes to RTB, along with targeting the precise online user and then making the right bid. The advertisers still needs to research the users online habits.
When making the transition from SEO to display advertising, you need to focus more on the creatives (banner ads). There’s no point targeting an individual user if you’re not serving them the precise ad that they would click on.
There’s also no point getting stuck with a creative that you can’t change immediately. The dynamic ad units which are available using RTB, however, makes this possible as you can adjust or switch your creative at an instant.
Just make sure that you begin with a handful of creatives, and then test and retest them to find out which ones has the best conversions.
Knowing The Users Behavior
The power that RTB offers is the ability to target each individual based on their exact intent signals. For search engine marketing, the signals are through the keywords that they enter, while RTB has their own distinct signals of intent.
What Is Retargeting
The most effective is using a RTB technique which is known as retargeting, which involves the ability to target users with display ads that’s based on their behavior, such as keywords that they type into a search engine.
RTB And Retargeting
Audience retargeting is a method of online target advertising where the ads are targeted based on the users previous Internet actions, this usually after the user didn’t take action which would of resulted in a sale or conversion.
When combining RTB with retargeting, what this offers is you bidding to get the lowest possible cost of advertising, while precisely targeting the users who want to see your ads. What retarging does is it tracks the users by displaying your ads regardless of which site they visit.