When you’re putting together an ad campaign, your goal is to achieve as much return on investment as possible. You want clicks. You want engagement. So what ad strategy will help you achieve these goals?
Some marketers spend time (too much time, unfortunately) choosing between an endemic and a programmatic approach. But, in fact, it’s not an either/or question. In an earlier blog post, we weighed the advantages of programmatic and endemic advertising and discussed how they can work together.
To briefly review, endemic ads are placed in media that is relevant to the content. Your ag-related ad, for example, appears on ag-related sites, like drovers.com, that your ag-centric audience is most likely to visit. Programmatic ads, on the other hand, are bought and placed in real-time on brand-safe sites your audience visits, whether or not the sites are related to agriculture. Endemic advertising reaches your audience by residing where they’re most likely to go. Programmatic advertising meets them where they are.
Pairing Is Better
Our recent studies show that it’s more effective to pair the approaches, using both types of ads, than to rely on only one. By using both endemic and programmatic ads, you reach your audience when they visit contextually relevant sites and also when they visit unrelated sites and social media outlets.
Using both seems logical, right? But we wanted proof. We wanted to measure how each approach worked by itself and how that result compared to using both types of ad.
Programmatic vs. Both. We looked at the CTR (click-through rate) of campaigns that ran in Q4 of 2022 using only programmatic ads, and we looked at the CTR of programmatic campaigns that ran both a programmatic ad and an endemic ad. Our study showed that the latter approach — using both types — had a percentage of increase in CTR by 8.6%. Using both programmatic and endemic ads was obviously more effective and delivered greater ROI.
Endemic vs. Both. We then did the same study on endemic campaigns that ran in Q4 2022. We compared the CTRs of campaigns that only ran endemic ads with endemic campaigns that ran both an endemic ad and a programmatic ad. Using both types of ads had a percentage of increase in CTR by 9.5%.
Numbers in Action
Let’s say you’re trying to reach an audience of corn/soybean growers who are farming 250+ acres in the 12 north-central states. You could run endemic display ads on AgWeb.com to reach them when they’re consuming ag news. At the same time, you could run programmatic CTV and social media ads to reach them when they’re consuming media for entertainment.
By using this strategy, you’re reaching them when they’re focused on farm topics, and you’re also reaching them even when they’re not. In short, you’re reaching them whenever and wherever they go online, which is a very effective way to ensure your brand message is delivered to the right people at the right time.
So, when you’re creating your next media plan, don’t waste time trying to choose between focusing on endemic or on programmatic ads. Instead, look for ways to effectively use both. When you see increased CTR and ROI, you’ll know you’ve made the right choice.