Programmatic advertising challenges that marketers should know Share via

The usage of automated technologies to buy advertising space for the brand’s campaign is called programmatic advertising. This advertising method utilizes algorithms and data insights to serve ads to the right users at the right time across the right platform. The benefits of programmatic advertising far outweigh traditional or manual digital advertising as it saves marketers much time and is highly efficient and fast. In addition, the process also provides advertisers with excellent control and transparency about their advertising spending and how well they are performing.

But if the programmatic advertising strategy is not chalked out carefully, then the spending on the technique can pose some challenges for the brands and marketers, including advertising fraud, poor visibility, viewability issue, high costing, and brand safety issues. This blog discusses some challenges that brands can face with their programmatic advertising approach.

Advertisement Fraud

One of the biggest problems with programmatic advertising is its high percentage of ad fraud. According to leading research reports, most brands spend around 20-25 percent of their ad budgets on programmatic, which has a fraud rate of almost 40%. This means that if a marketer is investing around $100,000 on programmatic, it is very likely that they will lose $40,000 to ad fraud without getting any return on that investment.

And how do fraudsters manage to defraud companies so consistently? They do it through various methods like spoofing a website’s domain, where they will create a duplicate site of a popular website, and cheat advertisers who will pay a premium to get their ads on the fraud website, thinking of it as the original. Ad stacking, pixel stuffing, and click frauds are other popular means to defraud unsuspecting brands of their investments. As `programmatic ads are becoming one of the crucial digital marketing strategies for brands and advertisers, it is attracting much spending, creating many more opportunities for fraudsters.

Viewability

The other problem with programmatic advertising is that there is no clarity on whether the intended recipients have viewed the ads or not. This means that even if the impressions recorded are genuine and not tampered with, they can still show a misleading picture to the brand marketers because often, the user has not even gone through the ad for which the impression is recorded. For example, through programmatic advertisement, a brand’s ad is displayed on the most relevant news article that the potential customer frequents, and the user reads the article as well, but then also it is not guaranteed if the person bothered to check the ad or can recall it. The same issue arises with many websites that add no significant value to the displayed ads other than hosting them.

Brand Safety

Another headache brands face with their programmatic advertisement strategy is the risk of breaching the brand safety guidelines. Brands try hard to ensure that their advertisements are not displayed alongside controversial or harmful content that can potentially damage their reputation. There are times when brands have to fight the platforms to get their display ad removed from the negative pages. The whole brand safety has spiraled to an altogether new level during the Covid-19 pandemic, where brands struggled to contain the damage caused by the wrong placements of the ads. AdFalcon, the programmatic advertising platform by ArabyAds, ensures that brands completely control their campaigns by setting brand guidelines to protect their reputations from untoward placements.

As brands and marketers take a more data-driven approach to their campaigns, the relevance of programmatic advertising has grown multifold, and organizations of varied sizes are queuing up to reap its benefits. AdFalcon, the programmatic media-buying platform, built for performance at hyperlocal levels, helps brands reach their potential audience in the MENA region with precision. Furthermore, the platform’s integration with Oracle’s contextual targeting platform makes AdFalcon the platform of choice for top brands in the region.