A Guide to Prospecting with Programmatic Advertising

ADVERTISE 

A Guide to 

Prospecting with 

Programmatic 

Advertising 

How to take advantage of 

programmatic-powered prospecting

ADVERTISE 

What’s Inside 

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6 

10 

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THE MODERN 

MARKETER’S 

FUNNEL 

PROGRAMMATIC 

BUYING 

HOW TO 

MEASURE 

PERFORMANCE 

CONCLUSION

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Introduction 

The challenge for marketers over the past hundred years hasn’t changed: to find new customers 

to fill the funnel through various advertising channels. It’s now much easier to do that in today’s 

real-time advertising ecosystem, as marketers are armed with new technology and innovation to 

help automate this process. 

The introduction of the ad exchange and programmatic buying—the automation of buying and 

selling online ads—has revolutionized the way marketers scale their companies for growth. Keep 

reading to understand how to take advantage of programmatic-powered prospecting.

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THE MODERN 

MARKETER’S 

FUNNEL 

Marketers have 

to incorporate 

prospecting to 

scale their 

businesses online.

ADVERTISE 

THE MODERN 

MARKETER’S 

FUNNEL 

From the onset of traditional advertising, 

companies have been following a similar 

marketing funnel to grow a successful 

business. It goes like this: drive awareness 

of your business, convince someone to 

consider purchasing and eventually get 

them to take that action. We call these 

phases awareness, consideration and 

purchase (or conversion). 

In the big picture of direct response display 

advertising, however, we often simplify the 

marketing funnel to focus on upper funnel 

and lower funnel efforts or, technically 

speaking, prospecting and retargeting. 

Both prospecting and retargeting are 

important to fuel the funnel. Retargeting 

is effective since a site visit is one of 

the strongest signals to show intent of 

converting, but it can be limited if no one is 

filling the top of the funnel. 

The fact is, marketers have to 

incorporate prospecting to scale their 

businesses online. 

© 2016 Quantcast 

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PROGRAMMATIC 

BUYING 

The way we 

measure and model 

data allows us to 

understand not only 

who the audiences 

are online, but who’s 

actually buying.

ADVERTISE 

PROGRAMMATIC 

BUYING 

Prospecting is clearly not a new tactic, 

but how we prospect has changed as the 

industry has evolved. Originally, marketers 

used more broad, segment-based 

tactics, leveraging endemic sites, broad 

demographics and/or behavioral signals 

to find prospective customers where they 

thought they lived. These efforts work well 

for brand awareness but resulted in wasted 

dollars and impressions for direct response 

campaigns, where marketers are looking to 

drive a certain number of conversions. 

The way we measure and model data 

allows us to understand not only who the 

audiences are online, but who’s actually 

buying—who’s in-market and when. 

Many media partners in the space, like 

Quantcast, do this by observing the signals 

coming from anonymous cookies. And with 

machine learning, they can detect patterns 

above and beyond what a single person 

could observe and make very educated 

guesses, without factoring in any personally 

identifiable information. 

Fast-forward to today and advertisers have 

much more working in their favor. As an 

industry we have an unprecedented ability 

to directly measure individual touchpoints 

in marketing and optimize in real time to 

what’s working the best as the campaign is 

still running. 

We also have an unprecedented number of 

touchpoints to get in front of people and 

have an impact on potential prospects. 

Whether you’re talking about an individual 

content publisher or social media platforms, 

there are many, many places for marketers 

to reach their audiences online. 


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PROGRAMMATIC 

BUYING 

The Rise of Real-time Bidding 

With the rise of big data and real-time 

bidding (RTB), prospecting is more targeted 

and scalable than ever before. RTB, the 

method of programmatic buying done in a 

real-time auction, lets advertisers buy ads 

in the milliseconds from the time someone 

enters a site’s web address in a browser 

to the moment the page loads. It’s a fastmoving 

marketplace that’s changing the 

face of our industry. 

PROGRAMMATIC DIGITAL DISPLAY 

AD SPENDING 2016/2017 

$21.55 

BILLION 

67% 

In 2016, US programmatic digital display ad 

spending will reach $21.55 billion, accounting for 

67% of total display ad spend. 

With programmatic buying, targeting is 

based on the actual path to purchase of an 

advertiser’s converters and accounts for 

seemingly minute and nonlinear behavior. 

It also provides a real-time feedback loop to 

optimize media across the purchase cycle. 

$26.78 

BILLION 

By 2017, it will account for $26.78 billion, or 72%. 

Source: eMarketer, 2016 

72% 


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PROGRAMMATIC 

BUYING 

Ingredients for Prospecting 

with Programmatic 

To prospect with RTB you’ll need data—a 

lot of it. There are countless data sources 

that advertisers can use for targeting 

consumers, but not all data sources are 

created equal. Few data sources are large 

enough on their own to provide meaningful 

targeting insights, so they are often 

combined in order to reach scale. 

A lack of freshness or data integrity can 

lead to data gaps, data inconsistencies 

and flawed targeting models. And finally, 

you’ll need an integrated technology that 

processes, analyzes and takes action on the 

data in real time—or machine learning—to 

feed the real-time bidding process. 

You also want freshness, since data can 

be out of date even before it reaches an 

advertiser. Fresh data gives you an accurate 

picture of where your customers are in the 

purchase cycle. If your average customer 

takes four days to make a purchase on 

your website and your cookies are a week 

old, you miss the entire purchase cycle 

for that customer and, as a result, the real 

opportunity to influence their path 

to purchase. 


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HOW TO 

MEASURE 

PERFORMANCE 

Once you know 

how your upper 

funnel advertising 

is performing, it can 

help you inform your 

full-funnel strategy.

ADVERTISE 

HOW TO 

MEASURE 

PERFORMANCE 

The Consumer’s 

Path to Conversion 

No individual path is the same, but there is 

a clear point of delineation to separate the 

data from the upper and lower phase—the 

first website visit. 

By incorporating the first site visit as a point 

of measurement, marketers have the ability 

to definitively distinguish between ads that 

were served as prospecting or retargeting. 

We also know how many ads were being 

delivered in each phase by every vendor 

on a marketing plan and how effective 

each partner is at prospecting new visitors 

to the site that eventually convert. This 

measurement methodology not only 

gives insight into the true prospecting 

and retargeting, but it also shifts your 

partners from a competitive relationship 

to a collaborative partnership between 

the two efforts. 

This is how you properly balance your funnel 

and create an inclusive partnership between 

the two distinct marketing tactics. 


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HOW TO 

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PERFORMANCE 

Checklist for 

Effective Prospecting 

Along with the first site visit, there are other 

metrics or questions that will help you finetune 

campaigns for success. Here are four 

important questions to ask when evaluating 

your prospecting campaigns: 

Are you factoring in site visits? This provides critical insights on how your 

customers engage along the path to conversion. You’ll want to take a look at the 

entire customer journey from the initial site visit to the conversion event. 

Are you reaching new targets? Expanding your audience is important for driving 

incremental conversions to ultimately grow your business. You can get this by 

measuring the percentage of new people reached. 

Are you reaching the right prospects? Measuring how many of the new prospects 

reached your site will show you how effective your targeting is. 

Are you prospecting qualified leads, or did they actually convert? With the 

conversion rate of visitors to converters, you’ll be able to measure if your partners 

are adequately qualifying your prospects. 


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HOW TO 

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Prospecting Case Study: 

KQED Uses Prospecting to 

Generate New Donors 

KQED is one of the largest public media 

organizations in the United States, providing 

television, radio, interactive and education 

services to Northern California. 

In order to attract new members and 

increase online donations, reducing its 

dependence on costly radio and on-air 

pledge drives, KQED made a strategic 

move into display advertising as a lowcost, 

year-round marketing initiative. After 

creating a unique audience profile of KQED’s 

ideal donor matched against Quantcast’s 

real-time view of the web, its targeted ad 

delivery yielded impressive results. 

Results 

• 50% of display donors were new members 

to KQED’s database, a much higher rate 

than any other tactic had driven before. 

• Improved response rates from traditional 

and radio advertising when supplemented 

with real-time display. 

• 7:1 return on ad spend. 


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CONCLUSION 

Prospecting through programmatic buying and real-time bidding can have a huge impact on 

scaling your marketing efforts and filling the top of the funnel. Reaching the right people isn’t 

enough in today’s media landscape since consumer behaviors shift so quickly; advertisers need 

to find and target their audience at exactly the right time. 

The challenge is in accurately measuring prospecting separately from retargeting and making 

educated decisions to allocate budget to each tactic. Recognizing and understanding the 

value of the site visit to optimize media tactics is an important step in this process. Quantcast 

incorporates the site visit into our comprehensive Prospecting Insights report, which includes 

several key metrics around the value of the customer journey.

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About Quantcast 

Quantcast processes real-time data at the intersection of commerce and culture, providing useful, 

actionable insights for brands and publishers. Through Quantcast Measure, we have unlocked the 

data generated by millions of digital destinations, helping publishers and creators understand and 

grow their businesses in ways never before possible. With Quantcast Advertise, adaptive modeling 

and intelligent machines are utilized to help thousands of marketers around the world find and 

interact with customers anywhere they connect to the digital world. Our more than 600 employees 

are driven by the potential for big data to radically improve everyone’s connected experiences and 

transform the way we all make sense of the world. 

To learn more about Quantcast’s display 

advertising solutions, contact us at 

inquiries@quantcast.com.

A Guide to Prospecting with Programmatic Advertising

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