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Programmatic Ads: An Overview

What programmatic advertising is, how campaigns work, and what you can expect from your results.

Overview

Programmatic Ads let you run paid advertising campaigns that reach your audience across the open web and connected TV, automatically and at scale. Instead of negotiating ad placements by hand, your campaign buys ad space through real-time auctions and serves your ads to the specific people you want to reach. You define who you're after and how much you want to spend, and the platform handles the rest.

If you've never run programmatic advertising before, don't worry. This article walks through the basics so the rest of the campaign experience makes sense.

What programmatic advertising is

"Programmatic" just means the buying happens automatically. Every time a web page or streaming app has ad space to fill, an instant auction decides which ad gets shown. Your campaign takes part in those auctions on your behalf, bidding to put your ad in front of the people who match your target audience. All of this happens in fractions of a second, millions of times over, while your campaign runs.

The result is that your ad budget goes toward reaching people who actually look like your customers, rather than being spread thin across a generic audience.

Where your ads can run

Campaigns can serve ads in two main environments:

  • The open web, where your ads appear as display (image) or video ads across websites and apps.
  • Connected TV (CTV), which covers streaming and smart-TV placements. CTV ads usually can't be clicked, so their impact is measured a little differently. More on that below.

You choose which of these fit your campaign when you set it up, along with the ad format you want to use.

How a campaign works, start to finish

Every campaign follows the same simple loop, no matter how big or small:

  1. Decide who you want to reach. You build your audience using targeting options like location, device, and audience attributes.
  2. Set your schedule and budget. You pick the dates your campaign runs and how much you want to spend per day.
  3. Add your creative. This is the actual ad people will see.
  4. Launch. Once your campaign is live, it serves your ads into those real-time auctions automatically.
  5. Measure what came back. As the campaign runs, you can track how it's performing and what your spend is returning.

  6. For the full click-by-click walkthrough, see How to Create a Campaign.

How your audience is built

You reach people using segment targeting, which is just a way of describing your audience by their attributes. You can target by things like:

  • Location, from nationwide down to specific states or zip codes.
  • Devices, such as desktop, mobile, tablet, and connected TV.
  • Audience attributes like age, interests, household income, and lifestyle.

You can stack these together to narrow in on exactly who you want. For example, you might target homeowners aged 35 to 54 with an interest in home improvement. Just keep in mind that the tighter you target, the more relevant your audience becomes, but the smaller the pool of people your campaign can reach. It's a balance, and the right mix depends on your goal.

For a closer look at each option, see Targeting Your Audience.

How performance is measured

Every campaign connects your ad exposure to what people actually do afterward, so you see real outcomes rather than just delivery numbers. Conversions are credited two ways:

  • Click-through: someone clicks your ad and later takes an action, like signing up or making a purchase.
  • View-through: someone sees your ad without clicking, then converts later. This matters most for connected TV, where there's usually nothing to click.

This is an important one to understand up front: for CTV campaigns, looking at clicks alone will make your results look far worse than they really are, because most of the impact shows up as view-through. Framing your expectations around view-through from the start gives you a truer picture.

To understand the specific numbers you'll see, like impressions, CPM, and CPA, see Understanding Your Metrics.

Good to know

  • Your campaign won't go live the instant you launch it. Campaigns are scheduled, and they start serving on your chosen start date.
  • Performance numbers update on a regular basis rather than in real time, so a short lag between activity and reporting is completely normal.
  • Custom audiences built from your own customer lists aren't available yet, but they're on the way. For now, targeting uses the segment attributes described above.

That's the big picture. When you're ready to build one, How to Create a Campaign takes you through every step.