An impressive new marketing tool can help put the right messages in front of the consumer at exactly the right time, writes Andrew Hennigan

It may sound like another marketing buzzword but programmatic advertising describes a real step forward in digital marketing. In essence it allows data from customer activity on an e-commerce site to be collected and analysed in real time and then to drive timely digital banner ads on other websites and apps. The result is the ability to close sales that might otherwise never have materialised.

This was one of the trends to emerge from this year’s Travel Distribution Summit Europe 2015 conference in London, where Greg Endean, Business Development Director at Sociomantic, a firm that has worked with companies like German last-minute online travel agent L’TUR, the Polish travel site Travelplanet.pl and British Airways.

According to Endean, their partners that have tried this approach have seen some impressive results. For example,  a year-on-year comparison case study applying a programmatic advertising technique at Travelplanet.pl delivered:

• 190% more transactions
• 40% reduction in average cost of customer acquisition;
• 54% increase in conversion rates

Conceptually programmatic advertising is simple enough to explain: detailed data from an e-commerce site is collected, immediately analysed and used to both select the most appropriate advertising message, location and timing to make the sale. Though the concept is simple enough the devil is in the detail, but by streaming customer relationship management technology Sociomantic is able to capture all the relevant data from all the customer’s actions on the site. This includes navigation, clicks, basket content, products viewed, dates, duration and so on. This data is fed continually analyzed to develop real-time profiles of users.

A typical scenario

In a typical programmatic scenario someone might be searching for a flight to Paris on an airline website. Sociomantic’s tags on the website note the flight they are viewing, the departure date, the duration of the trip and so on.

Perhaps the customer then abandons the search and goes to look at restaurant reviews in Paris, weather forecasts in the same destination and so on. All the time Sociomantic is analysing the customer data, deciding which ad might be the most effective to convince them to go back and book the flight, when it would be the best moment to display it and where it should be displayed.

In parallel, Sociomantic is determining how much it would cost to bid for the advertising space and how much the airline should invest. Finally it all comes together and a banner appears on the site the customer is viewing, offering a flight to Paris at the best possible price for the exact dates the customer is looking for.

But it is not just the destination and the dates they are looking at. “Analysing the data we look at recency, frequency and monetisation of customers to understand which have the highest potential customer lifetime value,” says Endean. 

It is the analysis of real-time data that delivers the ability to identify and convert potential purchasers from much further up the sales funnel and also to identify and convert those prospective purchasers who will have the biggest impact on sales revenue in the long term.

Insights when they are needed

Another area where programmatic is also proving effective is in the upsell because it helps provide insights into customer intent at exactly the moment it is needed. For example, delivering a precisely targeted banner ad at exactly the moment the customer is making their purchase decision truly is the optimal way to use the advertising budget. In also has an added advantage of limiting any annoyance to customers. Though few people enjoy banners on websites and apps, most are not disturbed by ads that are relevant, appropriate and not too insistent – all results that a well-designed programmatic campaign can provide.

In today’s competitive markets anything that delivers a measurable return-on-investment is appealing to marketers, so we can expect to see growing use of programmatic advertising. 

According to Endean, all connected touch points are moving towards programmatic advertising.

“It is much more than just real-time bidding for display advertising. You have programmatic direct details that sell premium inventory to the highest bidder and you can address a wide range of channels with more on the way.” 

This article appears as part of EyeforTravel’s sponsored content programme