Did you know that, among the main channels you can activate, programmatic advertising was one of the most profitable to drive traffic to your website? 

In this post, you’ll discover all the tactics to create programmatic campaigns that will drive traffic to your website, while ensuring your brand image remains consistent on the Internet.

4 reasons to integrate programmatic advertising into your traffic acquisition marketing mix

You have probably already implemented channels to drive traffic to your website, such as SEO based on high-potential keywords, in an Inbound marketing or Content marketing approach. 

But are you aware that programmatic advertising can successfully complement your marketing mix? 

Here are 4 good reasons to integrate programmatic into your acquisition strategy: 

• Inbound methods to increase traffic to a website (such as search engine optimization, or organic posts on social media) can take a long time to be profitable when starting a digital marketing strategy. On the other side, programmatic allows you to quickly deploy a traffic acquisition device. 
• Programmatic advertising ensures that you reach the right person, at the right time, to drive qualified traffic to your site - i.e. real potential customers.
• Measuring your programmatic campaigns’ performance, combined with continuous optimization, allows you to finely tune your marketing budget. Unlike other acquisition channels that are more complex to track, this is a true ROI-driven webmarketing approach!
• Your competitors are probably already doing programmatic advertising! So if you don't want to lose market share or visibility to them, you need to get started as well. 
  

Are you ready to jump into this great web traffic acquisition method?

Keys to successfully drive traffic to your site with programmatic advertising

Driving qualified traffic on your website with programmatic advertising means thinking about a rock-solid mechanism to attract your target audience, while offering an optimal user experience to web users. How do you do it? Here’s a guide to help you out! 

Choose the right targeting method 

As you probably know, in programmatic advertising, everything starts with the right targeting method. After all, you want to attract new customers to you, not people outside your target audience!

The key to good targeting for traffic acquisition? Thinking in terms of audience planning rather than media planning, i.e. choosing your targeting based on the profile of your target audience, rather than starting by focusing on your ads location or media. 

In short, it's all about knowing what the browsing habits of your targets are, by thinking about what they do on the Internet during their day.

For example, we know that worldwide internet users spent 6h54 using the internet against 3h24 watching television (broadcast & streaming).

Moreover, internet users spent:

• 2h25 using social media, 
• 2h02 reading press media (online and physical print), 
• 1h31 listening to music streaming services, 
• 1h listening to broadcast radio, 
• 0H54 listening to podcasts and, 
• 1h12 playing video games on a games console.
  

For example, if you are a travel advertiser and decide to target only travel sites, your advertising pressure may be too limited to effectively engage your target and generate action. 

Therefore, make sure you use audience analysis tools, such as Comscore or Médiamétrie, which will allow you to analyze your audience's browsing. This will allow you to create whitelists of sites where your targets are most present, both in volume and in time. However, be careful to create whitelists that are broad and exhaustive enough to collect a large volume of data in the first few days, so that you can quickly deploy your first optimizations.

You can also complete this first targeting by integrating intentional data segments in relation to the service or product you have chosen to communicate about. 

However, be careful! Data can be costly. To be profitable in terms of web traffic acquisition, the performance gain from the data segments must offset this cost. 

For example, if it costs you three times more to communicate to a data segment purchased from a third-party data provider than it does to target via whitelist, your ad click-through rate will have to be at least three times higher for your ads to be profitable. 

Select the right programmatic formats

The second key to a successful traffic acquisition programmatic strategy is to select the advertising formats that generate the best performance, and therefore, the best return on ad spend (ROAS). To do this, you need to choose impactful and personalized display formats. 

So choose a mix of... 

• Highly engaging formats, such as wallpapers
• Less expensive formats to work on your ads repetition, such as native ads to drive engagement or IAB banners
  

Your digital advertising strategy should be based on this mix of formats, according to your target and your budget, to create an optimal user experience. 

Do you have an e-commerce product feed that is updated in real time, highlighting your current bestsellers? Then it can be relevant to activate a DCO format (i.e. Dynamic Content Optimization) to push these best-sellers in your ads, and to boost your prospects’ engagement with your banners.

Whatever formats you resort to, don't forget to include mobile: you need to plan specific acquisition strategies on this device, according to target media consumption. Our tip? Ask yourself where your target is looking for information about your offer first, and adapt your device/format mix accordingly. 

Expand your display environment

Of course, you want to make sure that your web traffic acquisition campaigns are brandsafe. You don't want your ads to end up in an environment that could damage your brand image! 

However, keep in mind that your audience can be present everywhere on the Internet, and that your core target can potentially browse anywhere. Hence the interest to widen your display environment as much as possible, especially by choosing an open auction method (i.e. auctions open to all advertisers) to streamline the costs of your campaigns.

Choose the right display moment

If you've followed the best practices this post has given you so far, you've targeted the right individuals, and set up the right formats and website traffic acquisition channels. Now you need to make sure that you choose the right time to run your online ads.

To do this, it's essential to understand your prospects' browsing patterns and media consumption. The idea is to communicate at the right time with your targets, and thus generate high-quality traffic to your website. 

For example, it is known that tasks related to so-called administrative formalities (such as searching for information for opening a bank account, or subscribing to a home insurance policy) are mainly achieved during the week and during the day, especially during lunch breaks. 

On the other hand, searches for travel destinations or in connection with "leisure" products are carried out more in the evening or on the week ends. 

Integrating these simple mechanisms will allow you to effectively monitor the advertising pressure on your targets from the start, and significantly improve your cost per visit.

You can also automatically synchronize the triggering of your marketing campaign, the adjustment of budgetary pressure or the display of a message rather than another, in relation to external events. For instance, you can integrate a weather feed to condition the activation of banners promoting winter sports equipment when it is snowing, or ice cream when temperatures exceed 25 celsius degrees.

Finally, if necessary, think about synchronizing the advertising pressure of your programmatic campaign with your offline media plan, such as a TV appearance of your brand. Knowing that television consumption is mostly accompanied by a second screen (mobile), the digital overpressure during the broadcast of a TV spot can help to drive more traffic to your site.

Exclude your current website traffic and/or customer base 

When you plan on driving traffic to your website, your goal is to generate incremental visits: no need to spend media budget to reach again prospects or customers who already know your brand, and have already visited your site. 

Remember to exclude your existing visitor and/or customer database from your programmatic campaigns. To do this, your media partner will need to tag your site appropriately, sufficiently in advance of your campaign activation, to exclude the majority of your existing traffic and ensure you generate 100% incremental traffic.

Measure your campaign performance

As mentionned above, the major pro of programmatic advertising is that its performance can be finely measured and continuously optimized, thanks to precise key metrics monitoring. 

So how do you measure the performance of your traffic acquisition system? Take a look at... 

• The volume of visits or sessions generated on your website
• The volume of qualified visits (i.e. visits corrected by bounce rate, guaranteeing at least 2 page views, or visits having generated a minimum amount of time spent on the site)
• The cost per visit or per qualified visit, to estimate the profitability of this traffic generation 
• The percentage of new visitors, to verify that your strategy is meeting the goal of generating incremental traffic (and that it does not only bring back prospects who have already visited your site)
  

Remember that a good A/B testing method can help you to measure the increment of visits on your website. It's very simple: you just need to compare the percentage of new visitors on a page promoted via your programmatic ads, to the one generated by your other web audience acquisition levers. 

It is also important to take into account the visibility of your banners during a traffic campaign, to make sure that they have been seen, and that the campaign has indeed contributed to generate traffic on the website in post click (after the click on a banner) and in post view (after the exposure to a banner).

Indeed, a low visibility rate is often related to cookie dropping, which is a technique aiming at buying cheap impressions, with low visibility, in order to "cookify" a maximum of Internet users, and thus attribute natural visits to a site as coming from exposure to a display campaign. 

Lastly, here is a final key to successfully driving traffic to your website with programmatic ads: don't hesitate to conduct regular test & learn. Try new targeting methods, explore new creative avenues, A/B-test your messages, to find new growth strategies. Programmatic advertising allows it with moderate budgets and then replicate these strategies on your other acquisition channels: enjoy this benefit as you can!

And because programmatic advertising requires constant attention and expertise, don’t hesitate to ask experts for help! At Gamned!, our experts guarantee the performance of your campaigns, and use exclusive audiences to innovate and deploy the marketing channels that best suit your needs. 

How about contacting a Gamned! expert right now, to get your programmatic traffic acquisition strategy started?