8 Essential Facts About Programmatic Guaranteed

Programmatic guaranteed (PG for short) is the tool for every programmatic buyer to manage ID or cookie-match an audience with a publisher.

It’s a pre-agreement to purchasing inventories at a fixed price, as long as the publisher correctly fills in the ID on a bid request, either via SSP or exchange. But there’s so much more for those who really want to get the most out of PG (here’s a detailed description of what Programmatic Guaranteed is by DigiDay).

We’ve run several programmatic guaranteed campaigns ourselves (both display and video) for different advertisers on AGORA’s websites. With this experience, our experts discovered 8 essential facts you need to know about PG.

These are 8 Programmatic Guaranteed facts you wish your colleagues told you about earlier:

1. Programmatic guaranteed brings together the best of both worlds: direct and programmatic buying.
   PG runs on an ad server level, which allows you to use the same targeting options as with direct campaigns. Yet it also benefits from a bunch of options typically available through the programmatic DSP.
   
2. In PG you are the king/queen of the castle.
   At least when it comes to the sale models, you can choose from – cost per mille (CPM) or cost per day (CPD). The buyer will only be charged when a specific number of impressions is delivered. Whereas, the seller can sell an entire inventory at a better price compared to preferred deals.  This often happens because the seller doesn’t have to worry about monetizing the remaining inventory. But what’s truly great about this guaranteed deal is the safety of the transaction for both sides. In the era of ad spoofing, it’s definitely a relief (to say the least).
   
3. A fixed price is served best with preferred deals and direct campaigns.  
   Which means buyers always know the number of impressions they’re able to buy in a CPM model. Because of this, budgeting is easier than ever.
   
4. Programmatic guaranteed deals help you reach the full potential of impressions.
   That’s because they have the highest priority, which means they can reach 100% of impressions on a specific ad slot/page/website. On the other hand, buyers are expected to buy 100% of the available impressions and cannot cherry-pick their ads to be shown to specific audiences. This creates a need to prepare several different ad creatives for different viewers, as in the case of retargeting-audience creatives.
   
5. Invoicing has never been easier.
   Programmatic guaranteed deals use the same invoicing as private deals or open auction purchases. There’s no need to exchange any documents (agreements/orders) between the buyer and the publisher.  This makes buying from different publishers a piece of cake.
   
6. The buy-side tools are at your service. 
   Buyers can use the buy-side tools which allow them to target specific audiences, upload numerous & various creatives, and optimize them as needed (without engaging the publisher’s account and traffic managers).
7. An entire PG campaign that engages different publishers runs on the same DSP account. 
   Back in the dark ages, you needed to send orders and then creatives to several publishers (not to mention that it was then processed until launch). In Programmatic Guaranteed, everything is in one place, including the reporting. Creative management uploads everything in the PG and saves a ton of time. No more sending requests to different people in various companies over e-mail.
8. Think Programmatic Guaranteed, forget Direct.
   Simply put, it makes no sense to buy in programmatic guaranteed using a single creative (as in direct purchases). Use different creatives for different audiences, otherwise, the buy sees no additional value and there are more costs to cover.