Wednesday, March 20, 2019

Programmatic Ad Buying Solves All Problems, Until It Creates New Ones


You weren’t the only one who was freaking out last week when Facebook’s servers were down; advertisers were also caught without access to their programmatic ad settings. For most advertisers, the servers being down for an extended period meant that there was dramatic decline in their daily spending. Other advertisers weren’t as lucky; as the servers came back online the programmatic bidding algorithms aggressively competed against each other for the scarce users as they attempted to hit their daily targets, paying up to 300x the normal price.

The problem was a result of an unusual supply shortage which caused the demand to skyrocket. Without access to disable the programmatic buying advertisers could only watch as ads were being served at a rate which was well beyond their ROI targets. This should be a cautionary tale to digital marketers as programmatic ad buying becomes more prevalent - in addition to setting a daily spend allowance it would also be wise to set a cap on how much can be spent on a single ad.

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