When you’re running a small business, advertising is crucial.

The right advertising campaign puts your business in front of hungry customers and allows you to build trust and sales that keep revenue flowing in.

But you need to know what type of advertising is right for your business, and programmatic advertising is making serious waves as the secret to faster, more efficient, more successful ad campaigns.

In short, programmatic advertising, or programmatic ad buying, is the use of software to buy digital ads in real-time.

Instead of you doing the heavy lifting and setting up each campaign on Google or Facebook (which is time-consuming and complex), ad buying is done via software using automated bidding and placement platforms to buy ads across popular mobile apps and websites.

Programmatic advertising has the potential to be one of the most valuable tools in your digital toolbox, but it’s highly misunderstood - so we’ll explain how it works and whether it’s right for your business.

If you’ve used Google Ads before, you’ll already know how valuable the platform can be. But while Google has the potential to place your ad in front of a hungry, ‘ready to buy’ audience, you miss out on customers using Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or any other website where they spend their time online.

You could run dozens of ad campaigns on each platform, but that’s going to use up valuable time (not to mention money). That’s where many small business owners are turning to programmatic advertising.

Programmatic advertising lets you consolidate your efforts into one platform.

With programmatic advertising, audiences are segmented using hyper-specific data including their age, location, career, consumer interests, and more. Like Google Ads on steroids, a programmatic ad campaign can supercharge your results and 20x your online reach.

Most business owners ignore programmatic advertising because it sounds like another language. Between terms like ‘AI software’, ‘Demand Side Platform’ and ‘Exchange Bidding’, programmatic can seem overcomplicated.

This means business owners are missing out on the benefits.

With programmatic ads, your audience is divided up using targeting practices that make sure the right ads are seen by the right people at the right time. Using advanced algorithms, this process is more advanced than a Google Ads campaign.

Imagine you sold fitness apparel to women… The algorithm might identify your ideal customers as females, living in warm climates, who often use social media at night. If the algorithm determines the most effective ad placement for this audience is on Facebook, that’s where your ad will appear. If the algorithm decides the ad would be more effective on a specific website with a high concentration of your target audience, your ad will appear there instead.

All the power of Google Ads, with none of the limitations on reach. You use innovative AI software to define your perfect customer, and appear where they’re most likely to see you. And your sales grow. Simple.

Forget endless jargon and technical definitions, that’s the simple power of programmatic advertising.