Marketers with a campaign they want to display need quality placements to host their content. One could go site by site, asking for advertising space, but this is far more time-consuming than working with what is known as a buy-side platform. A buy-side platform can deliver high quality traffic, segmented by multiple demographics. It’s the most effective way for a marketer to test campaigns, receive traffic that is inspired to make a purchase and gain meaningful data to help build a campaign.
Sell and Buy-Side Platforms
A sell-side platform offers inventory from a wide range of sites that can vary in appeal by demographics like income level, home ownership, marital status, age and other categories. Marketers buy this inventory from a buy-side platform, which offers them this traffic at pennies per view. The duty of a buy-side platform is to provide access to this traffic, and to allow segmentation by interest or other demographic.
Targeting
Buy-side platforms segment their traffic based on demographics marketers use to identify their target market and ideal customer. Marketers can use any data they accumulate through interactions on their site, such as form data or bounce rates, to learn more about how their target audience reacts to a particular offer. Buy-side platforms may also provide targeting for a certain platform or Web browser. These choices all factor into a user’s decision to buy, each fitting into what should be your ideal market segment.
Using a buy-side platform, which offers nearly limitless amounts of highly targeted traffic, marketers can use that data to narrow down their targets. That means less wasted spend showing ads to those least interested in receiving their message, and ultimately a higher conversion rate.
Bio: Ted Dhanik has been in the digital advertising industry since the early 2000s, where he began his career working with established Internet brands such as MySpace.com. Ted Dhanik writes for AdAge and Venture Beat, and Ted Dhanik is the CEO of engage:BDR.
