We all know programmatic advertising is much more targeted than direct buying. With programmatic advertising, you only pay for the audience that you want, and can negotiate much better deals than with direct buying because of real-time bidding. So, you get:

• Better targeting
• Cheaper costs

Programmatic advertising a no-brainer…or is it?

Invalid traffic (IVT) has been a problem for years in display advertising, and the problem is getting worse. What is most interesting, though, is that based on new data from comScore, IVT is worse for programmatic advertising – especially for video ads – and getting worse.

Based on these numbers, direct buys get more views than programmatic. Thus, to get the same views with programmatic that you do with direct buying, you will need to get 22% more impressions with your programmatic ads than your direct buys.

The problem is even worse with video ads. Your programmatic video ads would need a whopping 63% more impressions than your direct buys to achieve the same number of views.

Now, I’m not recommending a move back to direct buying. As we all know, we should be measuring results based on bottom-line impact. However, if our ads are not being seen by real people, the top of the funnel gets that much smaller, which decreases our overall opportunity.

In addition, IVT is a problem that – just like programmatic advertising – is getting more and more sophisticated. A rising amount of IVT requires advanced analytics to even detect it.

So, we, as marketers, need to be more diligent than ever when it comes to media buying and the sites and partners we work with to make sure our ads are actually being seen by the audiences that we are paying for.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

About the author

Robert Knop is a strategy, digital marketing and social selling guru, a passionate helper of people, and Founder of Assist You Today, a company focusing on helping companies add value, build trust and drive sales by harnessing the power of social media.