With programmatic ad buying, there’s less transparency over how and when you’ll successfully bid for an ad placement online. While some agencies can tell you how the process works in general, they’re ultimately a party in the middle – only the platforms themselves (Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.) know the details of their specific software.

If this wasn’t enough, the relationship between campaign spend and outcome can be unpredictable. Programmatic campaigns can incur unexpected costs when poorly optimised or your ad receives unexpected engagement due to things like ad or click fraud. Click fraud is where automated bots click on your adverts repeatedly until it depletes your budget and causes your advert to be pulled prematurely.

Instead, with site direct advertising, the process is clear: you’re dealing with people. You pay for an ad placement of your choice and you receive it. This means that if you want pride of place and have the budget to match or a slightly less conspicuous banner ad for less money, you get it, every time. 

Another issue with programmatic ads is that you can never be sure that a competitor isn’t using a more effective advertising partner and out-performing you at every turn. Unfortunately, such highly-skilled agencies can be expensive to work with. 

Moreover, for programmatic ads to be effective, you need a detailed database of consumer data. Yet with the recent constraints on data collection (and targeting soon to follow), this data is slowly becoming less relevant, meaning the advertising campaigns that rely on it are becoming less effective, too.

Using a site direct advertising approach means you can get ahead of the changes within consumer privacy and receive guaranteed attention online. By working with a select number of sites directly, you can still advertise to your target audience and build brand awareness effectively.

Working directly with websites themselves means you can run higher-quality advertising campaigns. For example, you can share marketing assets that are optimised for the handful of websites you’re advertising on, rather than settling for middling campaign materials for banner ads across the web via programmatic ad buying.

This creative flexibility means you can run truly novel, eye-catching marketing campaigns that fit into the wider design of your site partner. If this wasn’t enough, you can even deploy immersive, full-screen ads for maximal consumer impact and wow audiences with stunning visuals.

Read our most recent case study to learn how we assisted a global cloud security provider (Datadog) in increasing brand awareness and generating leads – (link)