Many digital marketers have begun to realize that programmatic advertising is a crucial part of their advertising strategy. However, some may still be uncertain if investing in it is worth it. If that is the case for you, you have come to the right place. 

In this post, you will gain a thorough understanding of the basics of programmatic advertising and all of the advantages it can provide for your business, should you utilize it correctly. 

What is programmatic advertising? 

Put simply, programmatic advertising is a way of buying (and selling) digital advertising space that involves automated technology, an abundance of data, and algorithmic tools. It replaces manual methods and consequently offers greater efficiency, leaving more time for campaign optimization, and better focus on the important metrics relevant for your app or brand. 

How does it work? 

Programmatic advertising uses a platform like a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) and Supply-Side Platform (SSP) that allows buyers and sellers to interact and buy/sell ad slots in the blink of an eye, almost without any human interference. 

Real-time bidding (RTB or Open RTB) describes media buying via open auction in real-time. In this automated auction, all advertisers can participate, and the highest bidder wins the ad placement. Private Marketplace (PMP) works similarly to RTB, but advertisers must receive an invitation from the publisher to join the closed auction. Programmatic advertising platforms guarantee is a form of programmatic direct advertising where a fixed price and specific inventory are agreed upon in advance, but the advertiser isn’t obliged to purchase it. With Preferred deals, a fixed price and specific inventory are prearranged between the advertiser and the publisher, however, the advertiser is not obligated to buy the placement and if declined, the deal will be transferred to the Open RTB or Private Marketplace. 

Programmatic advertising’s benefits for advertisers. 

Programmatic advertising offers plenty of advantages for advertisers, with improved efficiency, additional time for optimization, and a sharper focus being among the most prominent. Here are some of the other key reasons why programmatic advertising could be a great asset to your business: it saves time, optimizes budget spending, enables target marketing, ensures data privacy, provides detailed tracking and analytics, allows real-time adjustment, and more. 

Here are some main challenges hitting advertisers’ daily work, that might be resolved using advanced programmatic software: 

• Reaching the right audience: With the vast number of devices, platforms, and applications, it can be difficult to reach the desired target audience with relevant ads. 
• Inefficient use of resources: Without proper targeting, advertisers may waste resources on impressions that do not reach their desired audience, leading to low conversion rates and a poor return on investment. 
• Ad fatigue: With the increasing number of mobile ads, users may become fatigued and less likely to engage with them, leading to decreased effectiveness of advertising efforts.  
• Lack of transparency: Traditional mobile advertising methods can lack transparency, making it difficult for advertisers to track the effectiveness of their campaigns and make informed decisions.  
• Complexity: The process of purchasing and managing mobile ad impressions can be complex, requiring specialized skills and knowledge. 

Why use a DSP for mobile: 

Outstanding reach:  

When it comes to digital advertising, as mentioned before, a DSP allows marketers to bid on ad inventory in real time while targeting specific audiences based on accumulated data such as demographics, browsing behavior, and location. DSPs typically use sophisticated algorithms to optimize campaigns and improve performance, and they provide detailed reporting and analytics to help advertisers make informed decisions about their digital advertising strategy. Furthermore, the reach of a DSP is crucial, as it allows advertisers to connect with potential customers across a vast network of publishers and micro publishers, reaching audiences on various devices and platforms and providing a more efficient way to target and engage with potential customers. The reach of an advertisement is calculated by dividing the total impressions by the frequency of the ad. KPIs such as awareness, interest, consideration, and preference can be achieved by reaching the desired audience with the optimal frequency. 

Algorithmic bidding on auctions (RTB): 

The process of RTB has many advantages for example it provides advertisers with greater efficiency, it improves targeting owns higher transparency, is cost-effective, and can have a wider audience reach, making it a valuable tool in the digital advertising landscape. 

• Increased efficiency: RTB allows advertisers to purchase ad impressions in real-time, allowing them to target the right audience at the exact right time. This increases efficiency and reduces the need for manual optimization. 
• Improved targeting: RTB allows advertisers to target specific audiences based on factors such as demographics, behavior, interests, and location. This enables them to serve more relevant ads to a wide range of users, which expands the chances of conversion. 
• Greater transparency: RTB provides more transparency as advertisers can see the specific websites and apps where their ads are being displayed. This enables them to optimize their campaigns more effectively.
• Cost-effective: RTB is cost-effective as advertisers can bid on ad impressions in real-time, based on their specific needs and budgets. This reduces the chances of overspending and enables them to get the most out of their ad spend. 
• Access to a wider audience and enhancing brand awareness: RTB enables advertisers to reach a wider audience by purchasing ad impressions across multiple publishers and ad networks. This increases the reach of their campaigns and can help to improve brand awareness. 

Maximize your own first-party data (connect to your MMP): 

Collecting first-party data when it comes to mobile app marketing is crucial when wanting to engage with existing and new users. It’s probably one of the most important tools a company has in order to understand its audience. To retain current customers and gain new ones, this understanding is vital. The accumulated data about customers and potential customers allows better retargeting and reaching the most profitable geos as well as predicting trends that could become valuable to the business. For example, first-party data such as a website’s cart information, page visits, etc., helps implement the right retargeting strategies. Connecting to an MMP of your choice gives you the ability to create look-alikes and expand reach and outreach to new and unexpected audiences based on the data collected.  

Conclusion about mobile DSP: 

Investing a great deal of your marketing efforts in a DSP platform may be one of the smartest decisions you could make for your business. Its ability to provide highly targeted ad campaigns and an exceptional audience reach with more precision and by spending less is a huge advantage to any advertiser. 

If you’re looking to simplify your ad-buying process and reach more users, check out our mobile DSP technology and start watching your numbers grow.  

By Barak Vinkler, Product Manager at Zoomd

ROAS, or Return on Ad Spend, is a critical metric for any marketing campaign. It measures the amount of money a company earns for every dollar spent on advertising, helping to identify which strategies are the most cost-effective. In the world of mobile app user acquisition, achieving a high ROAS is essential for driving growth and maximizing the return on investment in marketing efforts. 

One way to boost ROAS in user acquisition campaigns is by using artificial intelligence (AI). AI can help optimize campaign performance by automatically adjusting bids and targeting based on user behavior and other factors. This allows marketers to maximize their ROAS while minimizing wasted ad spend. 

As a product User Acquisition expert, I will share my insights on the advantages of incorporating AI into user acquisition strategies and guide how to effectively set up and optimize AI to achieve a high return on ad spend across various channels. 

The Benefits and Challenges of Advertising in Multiple Channels 

Advertising in multiple channels can be a powerful way to reach a wider audience and drive growth for a business. By expanding beyond a single channel, marketers can access new audiences and increase their chances of finding and converting potential customers. 

However, advertising in multiple channels also comes with its own set of challenges. Each channel has its own unique features, targeting options, and ad formats, which can make it difficult to manage campaigns across multiple platforms. Additionally, different channels may have different audiences, which can require customizing campaigns and targeting to fit each platform. 

Despite these challenges, the benefits of advertising in multiple channels can be well worth the effort. By leveraging the unique features and audiences of each platform, marketers can reach a wider range of potential customers and drive growth for their business. By using AI to optimize campaigns across multiple channels, marketers can streamline the process and make it easier to manage campaigns and achieve great ROAS.  

Understanding AI for User Acquisition 

AI for marketing refers to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to analyze data and automate marketing activities. It can be used to identify the most effective strategies for reaching target audiences, improve KPI, and optimize campaigns for better results. 

AI can be used to automate bidding and targeting decisions based on user behavior and other factors such as event, impressions, or location. This can help marketers tailor campaigns to specific users, resulting in higher ROI from each ad spend. 

Applying AI for User Acquisition

Setting up AI for mobile user acquisition requires collecting user data, training a machine learning model, and implementing the model into your existing campaigns. This can be a complex and expensive process, but many tools are available to help marketers get started, including Skipper by Zoomd.  

AI for user acquisition requires testing new media strategies, analyzing user data, and adjusting bids and budgets regularly. In order to maximize ROAS, advertisers must pay attention to trends in their field and adjust their strategies accordingly. 

Maximizing ROAS with Skipper: A Tool for User Acquisition Across Multiple Channels 

One tool that can help marketers achieve great ROAS in user acquisition campaigns across multiple channels is Skipper, created by Zoomd. Skipper is a powerful platform that helps marketers optimize their campaigns by automating decisions such as bid and budget, campaign status updates, and more. 

One of the key features of Skipper “Automation Center” is its use of the “IFTTT” (If This Then That) methodology, which makes it easy and fast to create and edit campaigns. With IFTTT, marketers can set up simple “rules” that dictate how their campaigns should behave based on certain triggers.  

For example, a marketer might set up a rule that says “If the ROAS of a campaign falls below a certain threshold, then pause the campaign.” This allows marketers to automate their campaign management and make real-time adjustments based on performance for multiple campaigns and channels.

Skipper also offers a range of features that make it easy to track campaign performance, such as real-time reporting, budget allocation, graphs, and dashboards. This allows marketers to stay on top of their campaigns and make informed decisions about how to optimize them for the best results. 

Overall, Skipper is a tool for app owners, campaign managers and overall marketers looking to achieve great ROAS and stay on top their data in their UA. By automating campaign management and making it easy to track performance, Skipper helps marketers focus on driving growth and maximizing the return on their marketing efforts. The use of the IFTTT methodology makes it easy and fast to create and edit campaigns, helping marketers to quickly optimize their campaigns and achieve great ROAS. 

In conclusion, achieving a high ROAS is essential for driving growth in mobile user acquisition campaigns and AI can help in optimizing the performance. Advertising on multiple channels can be beneficial, but it can be challenging to manage campaigns across different platforms. Tools like Skipper can help streamline this process by automating decisions and optimizing performance across multiple channels. With Skipper’s automation center, advertisers can easily maximize ROAS and drive growth for their business. 

By: Ifa Reist, Zoomd Director of Products

Mobile app user acquisition campaign management can be complex at times, and with an ever-growing number of media channels to keep up with, maintaining high converting and engaging user acquisition campaigns is more complex than ever before. As a result, many organizations have become reliant on SaaS solutions to manage intricate mobile marketing and social media campaigns. While smart technological solutions are both fascinating and extremely useful, the behind-the-scenes of creating one can be even more intriguing.

What Does a User Acquisition Software Do?

Before we begin examining the design process behind our software, it’s essential to define exactly what our platform does. The Zoomd platform allows app developers and advertisers to create, run, automate and optimize user acquisition campaigns from one dashboard across multiple media channels. Many businesses struggle to keep track of and maintain various campaigns concurrently across different platforms as it can be time-consuming to set up, optimize and track cross-channel campaigns all at once.

Our platform gives you the opportunity to smoothly manage and craft engaging ads and campaigns across the top media channels. These channels include Facebook, Instagram, Google UAC, TikTok, Apple Search, Twitter, and even Snapchat. In addition, keeping track of all your campaigns simultaneously allows you to gain unique insights into the effectiveness of your campaign and all your creative assets’ performance.

So what goes into creating such a cutting-edge user acquisition software?

Considerations Before Creation

When we set out to create Skipper, our self-serve user acquisition platform, our goal was to create an easy-to-use product that would allow advertisers to optimize their campaigns automatically. Designing software that could accomplish all of this wasn’t done in a day. It required hours of preliminary research and self-learning. Before we could begin the design process, we knew that we would need to enlist professionals with experience in the field – our very own in-house media teams, who each have a deep familiarity with different media channels. We set out to combine the knowledge of all our campaign managers into one smart platform. It’s safe to say the platform was designed by campaign managers for campaign managers.

We designed the most effective user acquisition software based on our professional knowledge and experience with the industry’s pain points and managing media and social campaigns for clients. We combined this insider knowledge with our software’s machine learning capabilities and plenty of market research to design the ideal solution. As a result, our customers can rest easy knowing that their campaigns are being automatically optimized by a system designed with these purposes in mind – to simplify the campaign management process, to save them more time, and to have more insights about each campaign that they’re operating.

On top of that, we’re working with top-tier global advertisers that almost all run social user acquisition campaigns, either internally or externally. We had the opportunity to hear what a lot of them have to say on the day-to-day campaign management process, including what actions are the most time-consuming for them and what would help them become more efficient.

The Next Step: Knowing Our Customers

Once we had completed the research and development process, we were ready to onboard new clients and advertisers. The onboarding process gave us an opportunity to gain insight into our customers’ needs, giving us the opportunity to improve our platform. Knowing and understanding the customers’ needs and how to meet them was a core value behind our platform, and it still is – we’re constantly getting feedback and, when possible or relevant, we make adjustments along the way in order to improve. We invest effort in understanding the channels our customers use and their demographics to ensure our platform brings added value to our users across all channels.

Additionally, to create a machine learning algorithm that would meet the needs of advertisers and app owners, we needed to explore their goals and pain points and how our solution could address them. For example, we saw businesses struggling to juggle campaigns across multiple platforms and failing to adapt their campaigns to fit each platform’s user base. We knew our platform would need to address these issues and more, and once we identified our users’ needs, we designed our platform and automation algorithms to meet them.

Finding the Right Team

Once we established the parameters for our solution and the issues we wanted our platform to address, we were able to start building a powerful team. We built an organization made up of teams from around the world to ensure our staff consisted of the best out there – no matter where in the world they were. Our next challenge was to coordinate the work process between these teams across the globe.

Ensuring everyone was on the same page was essential so that our final platform would meet the goals and high standards we set out for it. Thanks to our teams’ hard work and dedication, we succeeded in developing a smart product that addresses clients’ user acquisition needs across various media platforms. Our platform allows our users to develop app advertising and social media campaigns quickly and efficiently.

Continuing Our Legacy of Meeting Customer Needs

Although our platform has hit the market in a soft launch mode with multiple organizations already using it worldwide, we’re not planning to rest on our success. We are constantly upgrading, evolving, and developing our product together with machine learning and smart algorithms. We love getting feedback from recently-onboarded advertisers and use it to advance our product further.

One example of how we’ve advanced Skipper, our Saas platform, is by adding a feature that collects all the data on users’ campaigns across all active channels, and presents it in one central location, allowing users to easily see what works and what doesn’t. We understood that having a clear view of the bigger picture across all campaigns data, KPIs and creatives helps our advertisers perform better in their UA campaigns. Instead of attempting to get a clear view from several reports, we collect all the information into one easily understandable report which includes multiple sources of data according to the users’ Source of trues- streamlining the optimization process. This included direct data from the MMP such as Adjust and Appslyer. Whether it’s the campaign manager himself that might be in total control of his numbers, the platform is multi-user active, meaning all relevant people within the company get to see the numbers easily whenever they wish.

As the saying goes, knowledge is power. As such, another key feature we’ve decided to invest our resources into is providing advertisers with ASO data directly from the App Store and Play Store. The market analysis feature enables advertisers to gain key insights into app downloads, allowing them to compare their performance to their competition by GEO, see the number of installs, active users and much more. Additionally, the app provides data showing users which keywords can increase their ranking and popularity- so they can prioritize their bids on keywords. Even experienced marketers need new data in order to grow and bid on the right keywords to get their business noticed. Users have already expressed their appreciation of this feature, regardless of their industry experience.

In Conclusion

Skipper is ideal for any organization looking to create effective app marketing. Throughout the entire journey of creating our platform, we made sure to have our users in mind every step of the way. We are continually developing and improving our product to address users’ needs as they arise. We can help you coordinate your ads across platforms, allowing you to conduct effective mobile marketing campaigns on various media platforms.

Manage your multi-channel campaigns and increase your user acquisition automatically with Skipper.

With social media platforms growing increasingly numerous and diverse, advertisers have recognized that they can’t rely on achieving growth and success on just one platform when running a media ad campaign. Diversification is the key to reaching as many users as possible, especially on mobile.

Recent Roadblocks – Apple’s iOS 14.5 and Its Impact on Marketing 

Tracking users’ activity is essential for building a media strategy that works. Knowing which ads drew users in and where they came from can help set a guideline for future successful campaigns. Unfortunately, recent privacy overhauls in major companies make it harder than before to track users’ activities, particularly across multiple platforms.

Just over a year ago, in April 2021, Apple released their iOS 14.5 update, which included significant changes revolutionizing user privacy. One of the more significant changes made in the update was that now apps would need explicit permission from Apple users to track their activity across different apps installed on their phones. Unfortunately, few users were willing to waive their privacy and permit apps to track them. 

This development has made it almost impossible to track user registration or even downloads across applications, and the change has had severe ramifications across all platforms. The update has had a huge impact on Facebook, reducing the app’s ability to directly attribute ad spend and identify what ads work for which users.

What’s the Next Step for Media Strategy

Apple’s new privacy policy changes have made diversification in advertising campaigns more essential than ever. The inability to track users’ activity and not knowing which platform is responsible for bringing in the most users means advertisers need to treat every platform as their most important. Advertisers need to shift their focus to reaching as many users as possible without building too much reliance on any one platform.

The change has led to an evolution in user acquisition and forced app developers and advertisers to create campaigns for platforms that may have been previously out of their comfort zones. In addition, as the user acquisition process matures, advertisers are shaking up their media lineup and turning to less traditional social media sources such as TikTok and Snapchat and the traditional standbys such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google.  

While the transition to newer forms of social media is mostly a good one, new platforms also require advertisers to learn new strategies. The tried and tested campaigns that worked for Facebook and Google can’t simply be copy-pasted and applied to TikTok. Instead, advertisers must create new campaigns, and without metrics finding out what works and what doesn’t is complicated.

How to Know What Works 

Apple may prevent advertisers from tracking user activity and collecting metrics from applications, but platforms such as Zoomd’s SaaS still allow you to collect all the information you need from one screen. Keeping track of how your campaigns are going isn’t always easy, especially when you’re running a campaign on multiple channels simultaneously. Zoomd allows you to see how all your social channels are doing simultaneously, gathering all the information and presenting it on one easy-to-read dashboard. See which media strategies bring the best results and focus all your energies on the most efficient channels with Zoomd.