Five Ways to Use the Programmatic-Display Engine to Move Your Business Forward: A Discussion and Case Study With eHealth

You can buy ads nearly anywhere on the Web nowadays, and being able to scale your ad-buying program is a key component of driving your business forward. However, it’s one thing to say you can successfully execute a programmatic program — and quite another to actually make it happen!

The essential formula for executing a programmatic campaign is reporting, analysis, and action. In this post, we will look at how to measure that formula against the components of success: scale, using data to discover opportunities, and decision making.

Five Tips for Successfully Executing a Programmatic Campaign
Natalie O’Brien — from eHealth, a business operating at the intersection of e-commerce and healthcare — shows us some actionable techniques that can help you and your business launch a successful programmatic campaign. Here are five key takeaways from her session at Adobe Summit 2016.

1. Programmatic Is Not a Black Box.
It’s about not only scaling your buying power, but also understanding the site visitors you attract through ads and what to do with them once they’ve made it to your site the first time. Adobe Media Optimizer (AMO) and Adobe Audience Manager (AAM) help with that by making sense of the middle part. We know when people visit your website, when they convert, and when they leave. Now, with AMO and AAM, if customers leave and then return later to convert, we can begin understanding what happens during the time they are away. It’s not just about using tools to scale your buy; it’s about a cohesive campaign that allows you to also scale the way you digest and execute on data. You must step outside of the box to do all of these things well. This helps you successfully reach the universe of people you can truly retarget.

2. Organizational Buy-in Makes all the Difference.
There are two crucial aspects that are most helpful when diving into programmatic marketing. First, you must have an analytics team — not one that just has a presence at the table, but rather, a team that really leads the conversation. Second, the PR team, the content team, and the product team must all be together at the table so that everyone at every level of the organization is represented and on the same page.

3. Personal Information Is the Holy Grail of Data.
At eHealth, a lead may begin filling out an application, get partway through it, and learn some important information from the application form itself that they can begin using. You know that the lead visited the site seven days ago, which is valuable information. It’s not only one day ago, but it’s also not 14 days ago. Knowing when users last visited your site gives you a sense of whether you can reach them again, and if so, how likely that is to result in conversions.

You also have users’ previous search histories and search terms, which are good indicators of their intentions. You’ve stitched together their devices, so you know some users visited your site from their mobile devices and later from their desktops. All these data points are in there, and they’re popping up just from this one person on an ad exchange. If you’re unable to distill that information or capture it, there’s a good chance you’re wasting money on a dimension. If the marketer is unable to see any difference in performance on a more granular level, he or she is likely wasting money by pushing irrelevant ads to that particular audience.

4. Automation Is Necessary to Scale Analytics.
Automation is critical for doing analysis at scale. Techniques such as auto-targeting combine the targeting dimensions mentioned above. You can explore what categories worked, and it automatically comes up with a list of categories you should target, giving you the confidence needed to push ad spend at these subsections of the overall campaign. Updated constantly as new data and data points are received, this is something that just cannot be done manually at scale.

5. Use Data to Make Business Decisions.
With the fine-level detail available to marketers for using programmatic ad buying to address audiences and people, there’s a distinct need to roll all of the information into business decisions. Unless you use the data you are collecting and analyzing to drive your decision making regarding ad spend, then it is wasted information. This data can lead business decisions from the top down if you have the organizational buy-in mentioned previously.

Take One Step at a Time
Putting these five takeaways into action can help you begin piecing together your own programmatic campaign. It takes a lot of components to make a successful program — tools to scale buying and analysis, management buy-in, etc. — but, taken one step at time, any organization can successfully try its hand in the programmatic-display engine.

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