Where Does Programmatic Display Sit in the Purchase Funnel
In this month’s article, we’re going to explore where Programmatic Display sits in the journey to purchase and some fallacies around this.
Programmatic Display is one of the 3 vital channels for all businesses. Regardless of your size, Display is your way of generating awareness for your business.
“Display is an upper funnel tactic only”
Many times we are presented with the above statement from business owners/marketing professionals. Often this is because they have either worked with Display elsewhere where it was being employed as an upper funnel tool or because they have been approached by a media owner that has told them this is what its primary function is.
Display is definitely one of if not the most powerful tools for filling your purchase funnel with prospects. With the ability to use a multitude of different ad sizes and formats all at once across all manner of devices and mediums, it really is a commanding machine for generating awareness of your business in the places that your potential customers exist day to day.
However, it is much more flexible than that.
We take the approach that Display can be used throughout the purchase journey to great effect. A prime example of this is retargeting. Once you have gotten prospects to your site but they haven’t completed the action you hoped they would, Display can be used to improve this conversion rate by retargeting these site visitors to re-engage them with your brand, get them back on site where they hopefully complete the action you want them to.
Similarly, if you have a repeat purchase business, using Display to retarget purchasers with a cross-sell product is also a highly successful tactic, used by many businesses to grow their bottom lines profitably.
“It’s about how, not where”
Ultimately, it is far more accurate to describe Programmatic Display as the most versatile channel because it can be used throughout the purchase journey for success. This is due to being able to track the events of the purchase journey and the ability to deploy methods to overcome any challenges that appear. Couple this with the ability to show a multitude of different formats in different places across different environments and you start to see quite how versatile Display is.
The most important element to success is measurement. Wherever you do decide to deploy paid media (and in this case specifically, Display) ensuring that the measurement for success is achievable, trackable and clear is of the highest priority. It is ok to have different goals throughout your purchase journey for your paid media channels to back into!
The key then is having the right tool and the right expertise to apply the tool to overcome a business challenge, regardless of where this sits in the purchase journey. Ensuring that goals are clear and achievable for that expertise to apply the tool to attain.