Do not rely on a single source of traffic, because that will only grow your campaign so far. You will find your creative will wear out its welcome, your brand will saturate the marketplace and dilute itself, and the strength of your campaigns will decrease.

Instead, utilize a buy-side platform to deliver highly targeted traffic from a wider range of sites. This expanded inventory typically offers lower bids, targeted traffic and the chance to increase conversion rates.

Targeting Basics

If you’re looking to target by more than just interest, a buy-side platform can offer you the ability to micro-target base on almost any characteristic of your audience. If you want to bid on mobile traffic, you bid on service provider or device. Desktop ads can be shown to people using a specific browser. You can even target by location, sometimes getting hyper-local by city or town.

If you manage your campaigns and take advantage of this precision targeting, you will see greater profit margins and higher volumes of traffic.

Why Real-Time Matters

When you bid on a buy-side platform, you’re bidding on real-time traffic. This means that your campaign goes live and begins collecting data the moment everything is finalized. Check your analytics to be sure the campaign is receiving traffic, and then monitor bids to be sure you’re not getting outbid and losing traffic. You can also begin to make some guesses at what people might be doing upon viewing your landing page by looking at bounce rate and the time spent on a particular page.

This is also excellent for experimentation because you can see if your changes are improving performance within a few hours instead of a few days.

Conclusions and Takeaways

When you have control over your campaigns, you’re able to run tests and scale campaigns according to your own strategy. Market research will teach you which bids are most important, and you’ll learn more about targeting as you begin to collect data about your market, but you can deploy changes and see results quickly.

If you are in a market susceptible to changing trends, working in real-time is essential. If there is a delay in reporting, you may think you’re bidding on great placements only to discover the fad has passed. Buy-side platforms offer greater control over your campaigns and immediate data.

Bio: Ted Dhanik is a digital marketing expert with roots in the industry that trace back to the early 2000s. Ted Dhanik is the co-founder and CEO of engage:BDR. Learn more about Ted Dhanik when you visit engage:BDR.