• by Jason Wolfson , March 8, 2015

Having success with mobile programmatic ads means harnessing the right data. All it takes is an approach that drives conversions while lowering ad spend. Sounds simple enough, right? 

First things first:  What is mobile programmatic? Mobile programmatic is the automated buying and selling of media on a mobile device. This type of ad buy removes the need for manual insertion orders and uses software to make intelligent advertising decisions, in real-time. 

And why must marketers master mobile programmatic? Because mobile ads help you shorten the gap between a consumer exposure to an ad and when they can act on it. By reaching consumers when they’re “out-and-about,” actively shopping, your ads can offer them a clear benefit and purpose that matches their location and use of their mobile device. 

Here are some suggestions for effectively implementing mobile programmatic to find your next customer. 

Access All Three Kinds of Mobile Inventory.

There's a growing and nearly infinite supply of mobile inventory available to you in real time but think of it in terms of display, video and in-app. With the increasing adoption of smart mobile devices, comes more moments for marketers to engage with consumers. Mobile programmatic ads meet marketers’ needs to reach audiences on the go. 

Don't settle for access to just one or two of these mobile inventory sources. You need all three because your audiences are searching, browsing, playing games, communicating, and purchasing in all three of these environments. Develop a strategy to use display, video and in-app inventory to engage customers throughout the mobile experience.

Use Intra-Channel Mobile Intelligence.

In mobile programmatic, adding the strengths of each mobile sub-channel (mobile web, cookie-less mobile web and in-app mobile) to your digital personas delivers better results. A digital persona is a model of an individual established through the collection, storage, and analysis of data about that individual.  

For digital personas, be sure to include intra-channel intelligence from the aforementioned three mobile sub-channels. This helps you get an even more unified view of your target customers. Without this, the mobile sub-channels could remain siloed where only in-app data powers in-app targeting or only mobile web data powers mobile web targeting. 

Run Persona-Centric Campaigns at Scale.

 Digital personas allow you to target mobile audiences based on their real-time and historical engagement across screens. It takes a scalable matching process, powered by deterministic and probabilistic matching, to associate the activities on different screens with the correct digital personas. In following this approach the audience will expand tremendously, expand the customer base, boost brand awareness and/or revenue. 

First, deterministic matches must combine the activity of one device to the activity of another with near 100% certainty for millions of computers, tablets and smartphones. Next, the millions of matches in the deterministic data set need to be used to validate a much larger quantity of probabilistic matches.  Probabilistic is a statistical model that matches multiple devices, using signals and ad-serving data generated on these devices, providing a match accuracy (accuracy dependent on programmatic partner) for brands and marketers to have much more mobile programmatic scale. 

Consider Data from Mobile Apps. 

Data from mobile apps offer very powerful signals for mobile targeting including location, time, context, frequency, and behavior. Location data, for example, is like a pixel in the real world that empowers targeting by real-time location or location history. Obtaining this app data can improve the richness of your audience profiles as well as enable customized and timely messaging to consumers.

 Including data from mobile apps in your cross-channel digital personas enables contextual data consideration with respect to everything else that's known about your audience across other channels. This results in better-informed ad targeting. 

Amplify and Target Profitable Segments. 

Mobile programmatic advertising benefits from finely tuned audience segments made from an intelligent combination of mobile app, geofencing, beacon and cross-channel data. However, some segments may not have enough audience members without amplification. The right algorithms can amplify a small audience segment into a larger one. For example, a social amplification algorithm can use social data to expand an audience segment to people that are very similar to, or even directly connected with, the digital personas in the original segment. Amplifying your audience data will grow the number of segments, which will then better position you to introduce new customers to your brand and product. 

Using amplification can help a marketer avoid inundating the same users with a redundant message but instead engage new ones, likely increasing campaign performance. 

Once advertisers implement these steps, their mobile ads can drive cross-channel performance. 

Mastering mobile programmatic can elevate your overall marketing results through persona-centric, cross-channel engagement with digital consumers. Brands now have another use case that supports the value in buying and planning against audiences rather than device or media type. 

If 2015 is truly the year of mobile then understanding and conquering programmatic will prove an incredibly valuable asset to obtain.