Programmatic advertising is the use of a software to buy
digital ad space, it provides complete autonomy for businesses. In the past few
years it has made great strides in its development with a whole heap of tools,
platforms and resources available for businesses looking to streamline their
online advertising.
This form of advertising uses data science to improve your
online conversions, it considers seasonality, user behaviours and much more to
model paid search results. It essentially uses predictive analytics to monitor,
maintain and enhance your ads based on a number of behaviours namely customer
demand.
For this you need the right data sources, this allows you to
build models to explore customers behaviours. There is a whole heap of data out
there when it comes to Online Marketing and your business (I would argue too
much, some useless data which only causes confusion when trying to make
decisions).
A fully data driven approach requires autonomous decision
making such as AI & Machine Learning provides has become vital over a
manual approach analysing 1000s of sets of data. Using AI & ML provides
valuable Marketing insights which a manual approach can’t deliver and can be
used to streamline future campaigns.
There are a few things to consider when using an
automated approach:
- Define your goals & outcomes: What is your
campaigns end goal? What data is relevant to be collected and collated? Knowing
your aims & goals allows you to decipher what data is the most relevant and
appropriate to use.
- Complete a data audit: Your business probably has an
abundance of data readily available. Data from Analytics, Webmasters & Ads
plus any CRM data or transactional data from previous orders and enquiries.
Assess this data and work out what is relevant, what can be used and what would
provide value to your business and its online efforts.
- Consider external data sources: Alongside having data
about existing customers, creating an online profile for a new potential
customer is essential. Use public data sources such as Google Trends, UK Data
Service and other readily available datasets to identify any existing online
retail trends.
Undertaking Machine Learning & utilising AI in Marketing
is in its infancy for businesses with only large multi-nationals having the
facilities and resources to build bespoke software to fully utilise it. But
there are a growing number of software available for small businesses to
utilise with the pick of the bunch being Phraseee, Optimove, Rapidminer and
Automat.
