June 4, 2021
Programmatic Pre-Roll Ads: What They Are, How They Work, and When Should You Try Them
As a little kid, you were always told to share – well, same goes for cross-channel insights. Is a keyword in Google absolutely crushing performance? Can you add that keyword as an interest on Facebook to expand your reach? Can you also target that (non-brand) keyword on Pinterest? This is the best way to start a programmatic buy as well. Rather than blindly testing a new platform with brand new audiences where you’re unsure if it’s the audiences underperforming or the channel, leverage historical cross-channel data to inform your strategy to test a new platform. This will help you decide if the channel is worth your dollars.
Strictly chatting about taking successful Facebook audiences to Programmatic audiences, there are two key ways you should go about this.
1. Identify your most successful lookalikes, and share those seed lists with your programmatic partner.
They should be able to build a lookalike to replicate the success you’re seeing on Facebook.
Most established programmatic partners have some version of Facebook’s lookalike tool. If not, programmatic partners usually have a tool where they can find who the core customer is with data sets, enabling them to dive deep into your audience and help you map what your audience should be. This is essential to the launch and initial success of your campaign. Let the data dictate who your core demographic is.
Glean insights from that seed list. Now that the information you can get from Facebook Audience Insights has been limited, you have the opportunity here to take advantage of these programmatic insights to help inform your Facebook strategy. Share this information across channels as well.
Next, consider third party audience data partners. Once you provide your programmatic partner with a list of high value users, they should be able to find niche audience insights. Some examples of data they could supply are:
- Which websites users spend the most time on
- What keyword packs your users spend the most time looking at
- Offline Activities – like, where they shop, what stores they visit, etc.
- Demographic information like age, gender, location etc.
2. Find your most successful interest/behavior targets, and utilize the exact or similar types of targeting on programmatic.
It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day grind when you’re managing one channel, but it’s important to take a step back as a team and share high level audience insights. Set up regular meetings with your overall marketing team to share these insights. A sample agenda for this meeting could look something like this:
- What channels are performing the best? In those top performing channels, what audiences are they running that others are not?
- For each channel, what is the top performing audience? What are key indicators of why that audience is performing well? (i.e. is it heavily skewed female? Is it high household incomes?
- What two new audiences should each channel test?
- Audience 1: A replica of an audience that’s working well on another channel
- Audience 2: A new audience to test that another channel has insight about. For example, if the long tail keyword on Google “succulents that require little light” is performing really well, ask your programmatic partner to find contextual keywords around low-light succulents. Or if your programmatic partner finds that your users are spending a lot of time on “Plant Health” pages, inject some non-brand plant health keywords into your search campaigns.
In conclusion, not only can you turn your Facebook audiences into programmatic successes, there is a multitude of opportunities for all channels to help each other. Identify what is successful about each channel’s audiences, and use those to strengthen your current program and/or launch a new channel, now with these tools in your pocket to ensure success.
