How to Choose the Right Programmatic Ad Network for Your Blogs?

What is Programmatic Advertising?

Programmatic Advertising is the use of software for digital marketing to buy target audiences instead of any particular media space. For instance, buying an ad space on a website that serves a specific demography instead of buying a primetime slot in media space hoping to reach the target audience. It aims to better optimize & improve the quality of Ads. Moreover, as human labor reduces, one gets more time to plan efficiently.

What to consider when choosing a Programmatic Ad Network?

Ad networks collect remnant inventory from multiple publishers & offer it to advertisers as packaged impressions on a CPM basis. It can be categorized as :

● Premium - Inventory from popular publishers.

● Vertical - Niche-specific networks like travel, fashion, technology, etc.

● Specialized -  Offers customized special inventory networks.

● Affiliate - Using the revenue share, CPC, or CPA pricing model.

One must choose their preferred ad network depending on their niche, audience, user demographics, and user engagement patterns.

As a solution, let's discuss Media.net, which makes things easy for its clients. Media.net, as one of the world's largest global AdTech Co., offers a spectrum of varied services to its esteemed clientele. It builds auto-optimized, auto-learning products to display sustainable value ads which maximize publisher revenue as well as the ROI of advertisers. It provides a platform equipped with advanced technology, class data processing, and machine learning algorithms to maximize monetization.

They specialize not in one direction but in everything that is demanded or required by the customer to understand their end goal. They specialize in the following:

■ Contextual Ads

■ Display Ads

■ Video Ads

■ Native Ads

The Media.net Programmatic Platform delivers the most powerful way to draw on the most competitive & unique demand with server-side enablement; they are leading the evolution of Programmatic Tech with a  fully managed Header Bidding Platform, Prebid Adapter & Google's Exchange Bidding (EBDA)

Media.net marketplace guarantees the best prices inventories; they minimize latency and keep user experience intact while giving complete transparency & greater control. Users get actionable insights from extensive reporting. A Global Account Management Team ensures quick turnaround times and ever-responsive 24x7 customer support.

When choosing an ad network, they generally come to what is known as a programmatic marketplace or a PMP, where the clients choose the Ad networks in the following ways.

Open Auctions is the official term for real-time bidding (RTB). Inventory prices are decided in real time through an auction. Publishers or advertisers place their media inventory in an ad exchange with prices varying across different metrics; generally, a minimum CPM is used & the highest bidder wins the impressions. Private Auctions are very similar to Open Auctions, except publishers restrict participation to selected advertisers only. Generally, it is on an invite-only basis. Additionally, a preferred deal is an option that bypasses auctions completely.

How to Choose the Right Programmatic Ad Network for Your Blogs?

Inventory Size - Numbers do matter. The larger size of inventories & more advertisers ensures better performance.

Reputation - Customer feedback and testimonials are a great pointer to how the Ad network is doing in the market; also, the portfolio, if it contains reputed brands, is also an assurance. Preferably one should go with an Adtech with a good reputation in their particular niche.

Performance - When running any type of advertisement through an Ad network, it's best to test the Ads first with a small budget; it's even better to do A/B split testing. This means having 2-3 similar ads that are all running at the same time to see which performs better. A/B split testing will help form a clearer idea of the possible analytic data of the actual Ad on the particular Ad network, thereby helping a client choose the best-performing ad network for their campaign.

One must first understand a few of these metrics:

1. Cost per Impression - CPI basically measures how many times the Ad has featured on a site and whether or not the users actually see or interact with it. Again, the actual figure is obtained by dividing the Cost of the Advertisement by this count.
2. Cost per Million Impressions - CPM, Same as CPI, but measured in millions
3. Cost Per View - CPV, similar to CPI, but here we measure how many people have actually viewed the ad, so CPV is more specific.
4. Click Through Rate - CTR, In order to calculate CTR, one needs to take the total number of clicks an ad receives & divide it by the number of times it was shown (impressions). Then convert that number to a percentage.
5. Cost Per Click - CPC basically measures how much it costs to get people to click on an Ad, the actual figure is obtained by dividing the Cost of the Advertisement by this count.
6. Cost Per Acquisition - CPA can be calculated by dividing the total cost of the campaign by the number of conversions. It measures how much it costs to acquire a customer through a particular A.d
7. Bounce Rate - a bounce is when a user lands on a page & does not visit any other page on the website, so the bounce rate is calculated as a percentage of the total Clicks.
8. Engagement Rate - More relevant in Social media & blogging sites, it is measured by the number of likes, comments, or shares a post has received, giving a better picture of how much the potential customers are interacting & reacting to the Post, it is great for a company's SEO.

Technology - Factors like how much the Ad network is using AI or Machine learning in its algorithms, how much approximations it is doing with the analytical data, and how user-friendly is the UI that shows the analytics are also factors that need to be assessed before proceeding with an ad tech network

Supported Formats - Ad networks offer multiple Ad formats like standard IAB display units, rising start IAB display units, custom display units, text ads, rich media ads, video rolls, interstitials, pop-ups, pop-unders, in-text ads, search boboxestag cloud, & other proprietary formats that are exclusive to them. It makes sense to go with a network that offers multiple ways of displaying Ads so that one can test them over a period of time & know firsthand which ones work best.

Customer Service - It is important to choose an Ad network with good Customer Support because it takes firms a bit of time to get acquainted with the software & or the working process of the ad network. Also, situations may arise during a campaign where a firm may need to talk to a representative of the Ad network for support.

Best Programmatic Ad Networks

Here are some of the best Programmatic Ad networks going around

1. Media.net
2. AdPushup
3. Setupad
4. Vdo.ai
5. iZooto
6. Adsolut
7. Revcontent
8. District M
9. Sulvo
10. Sovrn
    

So programmatic advertising is basically using computers to buy ads based on certain metrics so as to ensure optimal ROI, the process of choosing the best-suited Ad network for a campaign requires a deep understanding of how the entire process works and is often confusing because of the large number of Ad Networks offering similar kind of services. Media.net is one of the leading Ad networks in the world with one of the best programmatic Ad platforms.