A Look at Why Programmatic Advertising and Paid Search Are a Match Made in Heaven

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(Newswire.net — September 15, 2022) — Paid searches or paid search ads are one of the most elaborate and effective digital marketing campaigns that have the potential to bring significant traffic to the landing pages. Although Google dominates the paid search industry, Bing and DuckDuckGo are frequently considered.

What Is Programmatic Advertising

A smart or programmatic ad is an ever-learning campaign strategy that utilizes machine learning algorithms to determine how and where the ads should be placed. It uses Google’s search network, display networks, and partner websites to maximize the strategy defined by the user.

Among small business owners, who don’t have the budget or intent to hire a marketing agency to optimize their campaigns, programmatic ads have proven to be a blessing to them. In addition to it being easier to set up, it has the potential to trump even the most successful manual campaigns in some industries. 

However, that only doesn’t define the relationship between programmatic ads and paid searches. A lot of different factors contribute to the success of smart ads. In this article, we’ll discuss those elements that make programmatic advertisements and paid search a match made in heaven. 

Benefits of Programmatic Advertising in Paid Search

Minimum Setup Hassle

Manual campaigns require extensive knowledge of keywords, negative keywords, CPC, extensions, scheduling, and many, many other things. We could also go on discussing the different types of campaigns, ad groups, bounce rates, bidding, and all other technical controls that it offers. In simple words, all these technical components make setting up a manual campaign a hassle. 

For an average inexperienced person, this can become overwhelming from the first step. But, programmatic advertising doesn’t require you to know any of these. 

If you know which industry you belong to and what kind of conversion you’re looking for, you can get started. Although you may have a greater chance of success with stunning graphics and great copywriting, that’s not anywhere near mandatory if you’re just trying out.  

Automatically Choosing the Best Campaign

We mentioned different campaign types, let’s get into that. Google Ads, or any paid search ad, offers a plethora of campaign options to start with. You may or may not be able to change that while the ad is running, but that doesn’t simplify the fact that you need to choose between “display” and “video” at the start.

If and only if you can get past this cryptic feature, you are bombarded with campaign goals. For search ads, there are three different options: Sales, Leads, and Website Traffic. Our designer knew performance marketing vs digital marketing, but he was confused between website traffic and leads. He had this perception that more website traffic means more leads. Which isn’t a universal truth. 

Programmatic ads allow you to skip all of these and get started with what’s best for you and your industry.    

Reach a Broader Range of Audiences

Don’t get us wrong, reaching a broad range of audiences is effectively possible with both manual campaigns and programmatic ads. But, as we’re keeping our discussion to the benefits of smart ads for inexperienced marketers, it may be tough with manual campaigns. 

With programmatic ads, Google decides which platforms are the best for your ads to be shown. Depending on your budget and maximum bid, the algorithm determines when and where it needs to push your ad and where it needs to subside. 

Less Management and Optimization

Manual ads require a great amount of optimization and tweaking to be effective and profitable. A single impact word or a single misplaced keyword can break the whole campaign down and compel you to start from scratch. Moreover, you may need to set up a multitude of different ads before you can finalize one or two to be run indefinitely. 

Programmatic ads are self-sustaining. They automatically keep changing the approach and placement of the ads to determine the best one for your campaign goals. You don’t need to keep coming back to your Ads account to tweak your campaigns every few days just to stay profitable. 

Zero Audience Targeting Efforts

Demographics, interests, intent, language, age, gender, education, and income are a few of the audience targeting options that Google Ads offers. If you set up a manual ad campaign, you need to determine each and every one of these to target the right audience. Which, in most cases, especially for new businesses, is tedious and often—impossible.

With programmatic ads, you can let Google determine the target audience by letting it learn from the campaign itself. The algorithms assess the audience that is most optimum for the industry and goal; and optimize the campaigns according to that. 

Much Simpler Reports

Programmatic ads are known for many things, but detailed reports aren’t one of them. For the convenience of the users (you), it keeps the analytics limited to impressions, clicks, cost, and in rare cases—demographics.

In comparison, manual ads offer hundreds of attributes related to the campaigns such as: 

  • Cost/Conversion
  •  Conversion Rate
  • Clickthrough Rate
  • Average Target CPA
  • Average Target ROAS
  • And many others

While these may seem redundant to some users, manual marketers make great use of these analytics to optimize their campaigns. 

Drawbacks of Programmatic Advertising

Minimal Control Over Your Campaign

We, marketers, often start our campaigns with website clicks. It gives us a general impression of the keywords that we used and the target audience. From there, we start optimizing our ads for conversion. The conversion can be anything. A phone call, a form submission, or a sale. Whatever the goal is, with manual campaigns, you can be in control of how much you spend on each bid, the keywords, search intent, and everything else 

In many cases, programmatic bids fail to bring any business to the website even after weeks of training just because the algorithm couldn’t consider buyers’ emotions. 

Potential to Lose a Lot of Money

As you aren’t in control, you can lose a lot of money while the campaign is training itself. Although it may also be true for manual campaigns, if you aren’t careful enough, programmatic advertisements can wreak havoc on your credit card within weeks. 

The Bottom Line

Programmatic advertisements are a blessing for new and small businesses that don’t understand the nooks and crannies of manual campaigns and bidding. Smart ads come with zero hassle and zero management requirements. 

It also allows you to reach a broader audience base and not stress over targeting the right demographics. Although programmatic campaigns offer minimal control over the ads and come with a monetary risk, both of them can be mitigated by careful spending and great assets.