Say you were going to launch a product line that’s geared toward a certain segment of the market who tends to be rather picky about what sorts of things they buy into. Programmatic advertising might be the best way to reach these kinds of clients. Other ad campaigns would tend to cast too large a net, which would end up sharing your message with huge numbers of people who may not even have much if any interest in the types of goods that your firm is selling.
A programmatic advertising campaign works by compiling a list of potential keywords someone would be searching for if they were trying to purchase a certain good or order a particular service. Once this list gets finalized, it’s fed into an artificial intelligence model that positions ads on sites that return these keywords. Someone might see them when using a search engine or a popular video streaming site.
Only potential buyers are ever shown these ads, at least in theory, since the computer program running the campaign carefully screens out any irrelevant keywords. Small businesses that find it difficult to compete with larger firms can narrow down their programmatic keyword databases until they’re only focused on the types of searches they’d most likely do well with. Others may instead wish to emphasize a certain geographical area so that they can get traffic from people who want to hire skilled professionals in their community. Both of these uses are likely to become even more common over the next few years.