Role of Data Science in Programmatic Advertising

The ability to capture the attention of consumers in the online ecosystem has become ever more daunting. Millions of websites, digital properties, and web applications are being viewed daily and this is where the need to select the best platform to show the right advertisement and content to the correct cohort of users becomes challenging, with the diversity. This is where programmatic advertising comes into play, to be able to solve these problems. Programmatic advertising is the buying and selling of online advertising and this piece of technology makes the automation seamless for transactions. Numerous programmatic platforms have made it convenient to access any format and channel programmatically, which includes mobile, desktop, laptop, audio, and connected TV. Moreover, segmentation and targeting techniques are implemented which makes sending the correct ad to the right cohort of users more efficient making the ad buying and selling experience more economical than ever. Algorithms and programs make the process of buying and placing ads very optimal, thereby removing the manual processes within these steps. With Data Science coming into the ad-space domain, how companies can control their advertising costs has become unparalleled with the traditional methods. Real-time bidding, dynamic budget allocation, and contextual targeting are to name a few when it comes to the applications of data science in the programmatic advertising domain. This chapter would primarily focus on the digital advertising domain and the role of data science in solving some of the complex problems in the same. Through this chapter, we would try to understand the basics of Digital Advertising along with the data science’s association with the same, and then deep dive into some of the popular terminologies and techniques in the advertising world. Data science has a lot to offer in the programmatic advertising world and we want to showcase some of those examples here, which helps our readers understand the applications perspective of Data Science in the modern world. Certain factors and advantages come into play when data science comes into the advertising area along with its applications. We will also discuss some of these advantages in depth as to how advertisers and brands benefit from these out-of-the-box solutions available to them. The availability of Petabytes of advertising data made accessible to programmatic media partners has allowed them to leverage data for these advertising decisions through supervised learning techniques, allowing them even more optimized advertising strategies for their clients. The modern era is a transition toward programmatic and data science for the advertising world. It has become imperative to understand these nuances and applications to help netizens and other researchers stay updated with these technological progressions.