What is Real-Time Bidding (RTB)?
In both paid search, display and mobile advertising, there’s plenty of inventory to purchase impressions on. In order to acquire solid results, you should be testing the purchase of hundreds or even thousands of keyword combinations on paid search. If you’re doing display advertising or mobile advertising, the inventory may be spread amongst hundreds or thousands of sites or apps.
What is Real-Time Bidding?
To manually monitor and bid on the places you wish to advertise would be impossible. To remedy this, paid search and ad exchanges utilize real-time bidding (RTB). With real-time bidding, the marketer sets the constraints of their advertising and their budget, and the system negotiates for each placement in a real-time auction that happens almost instantaneously.
RTB can be both efficient and dangerous. If you’re not an experienced user, you may not set limitations on your ad purchases and lose your budget by advertising on ineffective keyword combinations or on irrelevant sites. Done well, though, RTB’s efficiency and effectiveness far outweigh any manual intervention.
How has Real-Time Bidding Advanced?
Big Data platforms that can extract and transform millions of records and real-time – including conversion data – are helping to advance RTB beyond just reducing bid costs and increasing click-through rates. By analyzing conversion data in real-time, visitor personas, and even cross-device behaviors, RTB platforms are even able to accurately predict the placement of the right ad, at the right time, in front of the right person, on the right device.
We spoke about real-time bidding capabilities in Programmatic Advertising on our recent podcast with Pete Kluge. Be sure to listen to the podcast – it was a great conversation.
Everything You Need to Know About Real-Time Bidding
Here’s a detailed overview of Real-Time Bidding in an infographic.
Video from MediaMath.
