The following blog post is a translation of an article originally featured in the Italian site Programmatic-Italia, authored by Adform's Country Manager for Italy, Valeria Mazzon.

In 2017, a Publicis Group Zenith study estimated that by 2019, two-thirds of all digital display advertising will be done programmatically, reaching approximately $ 84.9 billion media spend. With the programmatic market growing, it is essential to understand the mix of technical optimizations needed to achieve your performance objectives with any type of budget. In this article, we want to share some of the techniques and functionalities of our DSP that can help you better manage your programmatic campaigns.

Let's first review together how these 3 types of data differ from one another. With 1st party data, we indicate cookies owned and collected by the advertiser on their site. Advertisers can track the actions performed by users while browsing the site. 2nd party data, is 1st party data that is however collected by another player, for example, data collected from your online campaigns (social, display, etc.). Finally, 3rd party data is collected, grouped, enriched and re-sold by independent data providers.

The use of any of these datasets in Adform allows you to easily and accurately find your audience. For example, one type of strategy you could use is to combine 1st party data collected on the advertiser's site through Adform conversion pixels with 3rd party data in order to target users who performed specific actions on the site and/or that have particular attributes (such as gender, age, interests, etc.)

Another effective way to reach a specific audience is via geographic targeting. This strategy will allow you to show your ads only in certain countries or cities where your services and products are currently available. You could leverage different types of geographic targeting with our platform:

a) Geo & Zip code: our DSP allows you to target users by country, regions, cities as well as Zip Codes.

b) Hyperlocal targeting: this feature allows you to target users real-time based on the location detected by their device GPS. Hyperlocal targeting can be used in several ways, for example by inputting latitude and longitude coordinates, one or more physical addresses, or more simply by pinning the exact location on the map found in our platform targeting rules. You can then specify the radius within which the ads will be shown. This approach (called proximity targeting or GEO fencing) is particularly advantageous for advertisers wishing to show their ads to users on mobile devices who are near a store (Drive-to-Store strategy).

In addition, using the Cross-device technology available in our platform, you could track and target the same user even when he is logged on to multiple devices maximizing, therefore, the potential of your display budget.

This Data-driven approach uses signals collected by the advertiser and various media partners to dynamically assembled a personalized ad based on the audience, the context and the environment in which it is displayed. Dynamic Ads make storytelling and personalization of advertising messages quick and easy putting an end to the "one size fits all" approach. It also solves a multitude of problems related to the optimization of creative assets while culminating in a substantial improvement of the workflow. For example, users who visited the site will be shown ads with offers related to the product or service they browsed on the site; Users in a certain geographical area will be shown custom ads for that city or region without having the creative agency develop a specific version for each. 

Brand safety has been a popular topic in recent months that has prompted all operators, including us in Adform, to develop solutions to protect your Brand Safety.
When it comes to RTB buying, our DSP platforms will not bid on URLs that are considered non-safe. Through the use of whitelists and blacklists, you can activate Brand safety in all or some of your campaigns, while leveraging the technologies of top providers that we integrate with such as DoubleVerify, ADmantX, Grapeshot, IntegralAds, BatchMedia, and comScore.

Last but not least, the work on a Programmatic campaign doesn’t end with the completion of its setup. Monitoring its performance against specific KPIs - defined during the setup phase - has its challenges. Below you can find some suggestions for optimizing your campaigns, to be implemented one at a time, in order to better understand which leads more successfully to the achievements of said KPIs

a) Audience: We have already seen how to target ads on a specific type of users. To increase the likelihood of reaching these audiences, we recommend using bid multipliers which increase the bid on a specific set of users. For example, if the strategy requires increasing sales on mobile devices, using audience-level bid multipliers allows you to raise the bid only when users are connected through their phones.

b) Inventory: we always recommend to regularly monitor the performance of each media so that it can be blacklisted if they struggle to reach certain KPIs such as viewability, CTR or even conversion rate.

c) Dynamic: the use of dynamic creativities requires an effective communication flow is in place between media and creative agencies. This is necessary in order to optimize creatives real-time based on their performance and/or geographic targeting, audiences or conversion data.