Programmatic advertising is a mainstay for marketers using digital display in their media plan. If you are using multiple or individual DSPs for display, video or audio programmatic ads– this report template helps you pull the individual platform data together into one cohesive story.
Programmatic ad buying allows marketers to target ads to precise audiences while reducing errors through automation and streamlining the entire process. Advertisers use a demand side platform (DSP) to buy programmatic media. There are a plethora of platforms where advertisers can run programmatic campaigns. Some examples of commonly used DSPs are The Trade Desk, Simpli.fi, AppNexus, StackAdapt, Google DV 360, and MediaMath. Most of the major social media platforms also have programmatic advertising platforms. According to eMarketer, programmatic digital display advertising spend in the U.S. is approaching $100 billion. Programmatic now accounts for close to 90% of all digital display ad spending–that means around 9 in 10 digital display ad dollars are transacted using some form of automation.
Because there are so many programmatic ad platforms, the amount of cross-channel performance data can be overwhelming. One of the keys to building an effective programmatic advertising report is to reduce the cognitive load, and only highlight campaign-relevant and easily explainable information. Focus on calculated metrics and high level annotations to provide a balance of information and insight.
Start your programmatic ads report with an overview of the most important metrics for a bird’s eye view of the overarching campaign. Typically you’ll use common digital marketing metrics such as total impressions, clicks, and cost, formatted into an at-a-glance scorecard. Show details about which websites garnered the highest impression count for your display ads in aggregate. This site-level detail can help you understand more about where your audience spends time online and how to reach them.
One of the key reasons programmatic advertising is effective is because you can target audiences very precisely. Marketers will do research and segmentation up front in the media planning process to build targeted audiences. Use your report to highlight which audiences are responding most to your ads–whether through number of visits, leads or purchases.
Programmatic video advertising lets you run ads before, during, and after video content on streaming platforms and websites. Video ads can also be embedded within online articles or through banner ads. In your report, provide a break out unique to video ads along with KPIs and the top performing video ad creative to provide insight into how this particular format is working.
Programmatic audio advertising leverages platforms like Pandora, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and more giving you the ability to target by age, geography, and genre of music. Provide another detailed look at this unique ad format.
Alongside all of the figures and numbers in your programmatic ads report, be sure to include some narrative to help a reader understand the data. For example, if you are showing a pie chart with percentages of leads driven from each programmatic ad format–display, video, and audio–adjacent to the chart, write a few bullet points or sentences that explain why this information is important. Let’s say, for example, you see that video ads are driving more than half of leads. You should note some reasons why the distribution is weighted so heavily; perhaps you had twice the budget for video ads compared to audio, or perhaps you recently launched new video ad creative. Insights like this make your report more meaningful and actionable.
Wrap up your programmatic ads report with a summary of the most important takeaways and opportunities from the preceding slides. Always include next steps to make sure it’s clear what optimizations and action items will be underway before the next reporting cycle.
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