Every single time the term algorithm shows up in a conversation these days, it seems that someone ends up mentioning how popular video streaming sites use them to recommend material for frequent users. The same goes for podcast sites and other similar services. There’s been a great deal of controversy surrounding the way that these systems work and whether or not they hide otherwise worthwhile content in favour of serving up material that’s less than relevant.
Small business owners who are concerned about this state of affairs are always invited to make programmatic advertising work for them. Rather than try to figure out where someone might go and purchase an ad there, companies that want to promote themselves in this way open an account with a marketing agency and send over a list of potential searches that they wouldn’t mind being promoted with.
Once they do, a programmatic advertising subroutine will monitor what individuals are looking for and only show recommendations of a specific ad if it seems to be related to what the customer might be interested in. This tends to drive costs down for advertisers since they don’t have to pay for large numbers of inbound clicks that don’t necessarily translate into actual sales.
Over time, a programmatic advertising system can get smarter as well. Self-learning database technology pays close attention to what people are looking at and what kinds of searches stand the highest chance of getting converted into actual sales. Business managers who stick with these campaigns tend to reap the biggest rewards as a result.
