Strategic Online Corp. – Real Time Bidding Program (RTB)
PerfectAdTargeting is our digital branding and advertising platform, combining Real Time Bidding, Internet Browser Cookie Placement, Credit Card Data, and Advanced Online Traffic and Conversion Techniques into an ROI based system.
Versions of RTB have been around for several years. RTB was once reserved for only the largest advertisers in the world, and is now available to all businesses. Today’s RTB benefits are accessible by all without the giant price tag which was only appropriate for large advertisers. From the local physician, grocery store or wedding planner, to product manufacturing and multi-national sales companies, RTB can be used by every business.
The advertising industry is being completely transformed by RTB. Strategic Online Corp. can help your business implement an RTB program and take advantage of methods your competitors may not be aware of.
PerfectAdTargeting 100,000 Ft. Level
Unlimited Reach of Tightly Targeted Buyers Who Are Perfectly Aligned
Target your ads to pre-segmented clients worldwide across over 60k categories based upon their credit card usage histories, online search histories, interests, business, professional affiliations, geographic locations, income, seasons and time.
Less Cost To Reach Those Buyers
Early adopters of RTB ad programs are enjoying an unprecedented low cost to reach their audiences. Most businesses are unaware of RTB, and there is less bid competition, offering early adopters large profits.
More Ways To Monetize The Buyers In The Future
Our team will help your business tie RTB into your website tracking and email lists. Building a beginning-to-end traffic generation, nurturing, and conversion machine.
Integration With Existing Online Marketing Systems
RTB, client relationship management, website visitor tracking, traffic analysis, email marketing, and social engagement are used together for even greater returns.
PerfectAdTargeting 10,000 Ft. Level
Precise ad targeting is only part of the power in PerfectAdTargeting. RTB builds a marketing database as people interact with your brand, website or offer by using standard internet browser cookies, a common practice used by virtually all business sites today.
The POWER is in the Pixel! The internet cookies grow your database of potential customers. With data, you can now remarket again and again into the future, to your own list, with even greater effectiveness and lower cost.
The same data can also be used to refine products, offers, and customer service.
PerfectAdTargeting goes well beyond basic segmentation and targeting of advertising. Our platform and process defines a campaign, and necessary reporting from beginning to end.
Unfortunately, most advertising is difficult to track and to prove it’s value. RTB’s return is visible – you see what is working. Everything is tracked and reported. It’s easy to understand results and make refinements, as needed, to improve the ROI.
PerfectAdTargeting 1,000 Ft. Level
Perhaps more than the technology platform, PerfectAdTargeting represents a team of skilled experienced professionals who are capable of building an online advertising conversion funnel for your business.
Our strategic partners are leading developers in the birth of RTB industry, generating an ROI for businesses of all sizes with over 80 million dollars of RTB ads per month. The mantra goes…”We Can Drive Traffic Profitably Anywhere In The World!” With RTB, it’s easier than ever before. Our process brings the right people to the table and makes it easy for our clients.
We offer both fully managed programs and consultive programs, where we train your staff to use our platform. Our platform can be scaled for any size of company.
The remainder of this document will go deeper into the concepts of RTB. It is our sincere desire to help your company transform it’s advertising efforts with RTB.
Steve Bailey – Co-Founder and Technical Sales Support, Strategic Online
What Is Real Time Bidding?
Real-time bidding (RTB) is the evolution of the digital marketing space. The excitement around this new(ish) way of running display campaigns is on par with where Google’s Pay Per Click Ads was less than a decade ago.
In 2011, the biggest hype, the loudest buzz, and the best conversation starter in digital media advertising was without doubt RTB – (Real Time Bidding). In four short years, RTB has become the best method for placing digital ads.
At it’s most basic, RTB is a mechanism for trading ad space in real time – sellers can essentially hold an auction for each ad space they offer and advertisers can assess, price and bid for it dynamically.
Going a little deeper, RTB brings together dynamic buying of ad space with the world’s most advanced consumer profiling and targeting. Advertisers can reach pre-qualified consumers with the perfect profile of interests and purchase habits, eliminating waste, and thereby increasing sales or conversion action.
The main benefits for advertisers are indisputably cost efficiency and targeting – you pay the right price for what you need and discard what you don’t. But in practice, what does this mean for advertisers?
Today, RTB is predominantly used in trading banner display advertising on websites. In the coming months, RTB will be extended into other media such as television, radio, and online video. Advertising has fully merged creativity with actionable data.
Dollars spent by advertisers on internet based display advertising surpassed traditional advertising in 2013. Television, radio, and cable are quickly redefining themselves as internet data-based delivery systems. All types of content are consolidating into digital delivery to meet the demand of RTB.
The Web Worldwide: The Internet Advertising Bureau projects double-digit growth in spending through 2014, when global revenue should approach $100 billion.
RTB effects are being felt in three key areas:
- Leveraging Existing Client Data: RTB is a tool for managing and maximising the value of existing customer relationships. Coupled with client-side customer data, RTB can facilitate segmentation, pricing and optimisation across many dimensions related to your clients. More sales and better service to the same audience.
- Faster Growth With Highly Targeted Prospects: The cost efficiencies and targeting benefits of RTB are helping advertisers move their display activity further into the purchase funnel. In addition to capitalising on existing intent like re-targeting, display is increasingly being employed as a ‘cold’ acquisition channel to stimulate initial contact.
- Product or Service Awareness and Branding: Headlines suggested that online brand spend may shortly surpass direct response. In most communities nationwide, there are brands we all recognize. Say Italian Beef Sandwich in Chicago and Al’s Beef or Portilio’s comes to mind for most residents. Using RTB, brand recognition can be built for companies of all sizes in almost any user niche or a geographical area at low cost.
To unlock RTB’s potential:
- You need a platform: Over three dozen ad exchanges need to brought together into one simple-to-use system, which can process incredible amounts of data instantly.
- You need access to the rightskills: There is little doubt that the requisite skills for trading RTB media effectively differ drastically from traditional media buying skills.
Digital advertising companies have grown from information management and programming. Those skills favor RTB in many areas – data mining, multi-variant testing analytics, reporting, and campaign management.
Traditional buying of media is replaced by the RTB system. Traditional advertising companies became experts in negotiation of media buys with select media companies. RTB replaces those coveted supplier relationships with fair and open bidding. With RTB, you are buying at the true wholesale rate, regardless of company size.
Traditional advertising companies grew from graphical design and the physiological impact of a design to trigger an action. Creative copy is still of significant importance for RTB’s visual ad medium.
- You need Experience and Vision to Build a Strategic Ad Program: RTB is an advanced system of advertising. Design of IF-THEN flow statements and integration into online offers require a background of marketing, programing, and traffic conversion. Understanding how to knit these powerful concepts together and tweak out a conversion rate is important to the success of any RTB program.
Looking a Little Closer at Traditional vs. Programmatic Buying
RTB offers a significantly reduced cost with greater consumer reach. RTB is more profitable for both the media seller and the ad buyer.
Most of the hype around RTB focusses on two things: the targeting capabilities and the auction. To understand why these features are so important, we need to compare programmatic buying to traditional display.
Traditional display buying requires negotiating with publishers and buying an advertising space to guarantee visibility of ads for a specific number of impressions or date range. Advertisers choose websites based on content and predicted audience, but have little to no flexibility for optimization once the campaigns were agreed and launched. This means that the potential for wasted spend on impressions is relatively high.
Programmatic buying allows display inventory to be released to auction. Advertisers can choose to purchase ad inventory based on highly qualified audience targeting, and only bid on available impressions when their targeting methods match the available impression.
The option to bid for inventory only when the appropriate audience is available means advertisers can be much more precise in their targeting, and more effective in spending their budgets. The process of a user visiting a website, to an advertiser serving an ad, takes place in one tenth of a second.
Programmatic buying is better for both the website owner and the buyer. Website owners needed a simplified method to sell their website advertising inventory to advertisers. Advertisers needed a fair and simplified way to buy that space without any term commitments. RTB filled this void. Website owners list their inventory with Ad Exchanges, and advertisers band together to bid on the inventory through Traffic Aggregators. RTB is a better and fair system, which explains its rapid adoption.
The speed and accuracy of this real-time bidding model provides a massive opportunity to advertisers who may not have been able to spend their advertising budgets effectively with traditional display buying, or for advertisers who had difficulty reaching their niche audience.
The nature of an auction allows both large and small buyers to compete at the same price. Large campaigns have a significant advantage over smaller campaigns. It’s an even playing field. Smaller advertisers can now create campaigns that were once available to only mega corporations.
Campaign Refinement and Optimization, Happens in Real-Time
While an auction taking place within one tenth of a second is a very exciting and much discussed benefit of real-time bidding, the process which takes place after launch of an RTB display campaign is what really allows advertiser budgets to go the distance.
In traditional advertising, space was purchased with little opportunity to adjust and refine. The advertiser was stuck with their poorly performing ad. In RTB, a campaign can be adjusted, tweaked, and optimized. The option for real-time (or very close to real-time) data from these campaigns allows for optimization to be undertaken from the day of launch, and gives advertisers the chance to see real improvements in campaign performance. Fast.
The real-time optimization means changes can be made efficiently and effectively, improving click-through rates. In the graph below, eight changes resulted in significant improvements. Traditional advertising does not favor making inline adjustments in a compressed timeframe.
Total Cost To Acquire a Customer Is Lower
Change takes time for massadoption. RTB is in an early adopter’s stage, where those who understand the power of this new way of reaching consumers can share an almost unfair advantage. Many old school agencies have been slow to let go of the traditional advertising cash cow. Most website owners have already embraced the RTB model and have made their inventory available. More advertising space with less competition between buyers results in a lower bid price.
Currently, it is not uncommon to see Per 1000 Impression prices to reach incredibly targeted consumers as low as $1.50, depending upon the targeted audience.
Lets explore a scenario where the Click Through Rate (those who click on the display ad) for an online coupon ad is just 2%, or 20 per 1000, and the RTB price is $2.00 per 1000 to reach the highly targeted audience. Compare a cost of 10¢ to drive a potential consumer in RTB to your offer with other advertising mediums such as Google Adwords. This is far cheaper, and the advertiser receives a side benefit in building brand awareness with all those who did not click on the offer, but saw the offer and brand in the display ad.
Targeting Is Better Than Other Advertising Mediums
RTB offers several methods to target and control a campaign, wIth over 60,000 consumer segments and online behaviors. Let’s explore a few of the options:
- Geographic targeting
- Income targeting
- Real estate value targeting
- Contextual or online interests targeting
- Individual website targeting
- Past credit card purchases and behaviors targeting
- Consumer search targeting in the last few days
It’s not hard to see the value to a wedding services business, who can get their message and brand in front of future brides as they take the first steps in planning their wedding, or to a new organic food product launch in front of consumers who buy organic products.
RTB has a clear data advantage over traditional advertising methods.
Leveraged Data Extends Into Other Common Online Marketing Tools
The online marketing community has made large improvements in the integration of powerful marketing techniques with consumer management systems. RTB was created alongside other powerful marketing tools, giving RTB additional advantages when paired with other common tools such as:
- Email marketing
- Client management tools
- Traffic and Analytic programs
- Website marketing
- Call centers
- Direct mail
RTB offers advertisers an advantage over traditional advertising. Schedule a meeting with Strategic Online Corp. and learn more about how RTB can drive new leads to your business.