Bid Automation has played a vital role in the rapid rise of commerce media over the last several years, enabling brands to achieve their performance goals, such as return on ad spend (ROAS) or impression share, without costly and error-prone manual intervention. Koddi Ads has offered bid automation features for advertisers since its inception.

However, as competition increases, bid automation alone is no longer sufficient to deliver consistent performance. Achieving a great ROAS increasingly requires precise targeting and bidding: How much should I bid for a user shopping on mobile at 12pm on a Wednesday? What about a user in Houston, TX, shopping on Friday at 12am? Now, imagine making those decisions for hundreds of thousands of unique traffic slices and updating them continuously to account for subtle changes in user purchasing behavior.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds nearly impossible.

 

Navigating Complexity

Enter Koddi’s targeting automation: a feature that uses machine learning to make these micro-decisions on behalf of our advertisers. For example, given a user from Houston, TX shopping on a Friday at 12am, our models will predict ROAS for that slice of traffic and adjust your bid up or down accordingly.

Targeting automation makes these predictions across hundreds of thousands of traffic slices, ensuring advertisers’ bids consistently reflect the underlying value of each audience and signal. Our ultimate goal is to help advertisers exceed their performance targets without the complexity, effort, and probability of error inherent in setting things manually.

 

Unlocking Precise Bidding with Targeting Automation

Targeting automation is available to call Koddi Ads publishers today! Publishers can easily enable this feature for their advertisers, who can, in turn, select it during the campaign creation process alongside bid automation.

Targeting automation and bid automation combine to create a more powerful overall bidding strategy. By integrating these tools, advertisers can precisely bid in every auction, tailoring their bids to exceed their performance targets.

With Targeting automation, advertisers can navigate the intricacies of multiple targeting dimensions seamlessly, resulting in a bidding strategy that is tuned to each segment, offering advertisers both granular control and efficiency.

 

Empowering All Advertisers

Targeting automation is designed to help advertisers of all capabilities; however, it proves particularly beneficial for advertisers who are new to an ads program or who operate in an ‘always on’ mode.

Advertisers just starting with a program may not fully understand their bidding inputs or performance outputs. Targeting automation ensures that these new advertisers can optimize their campaigns without a deep understanding of the intricate details of the ad auction.

Moreover, advertisers who use an ‘always on’ approach for their campaigns can leverage targeting automation to ensure that their baseline participation remains effective, regardless of the fluctuations in targeting dynamics and the ad auction landscape.

 

Boosting ROAS with Targeting Automation

Just one month after implementing targeting automation across a large commerce media publisher, that publisher’s program has seen increases in both ROAS and cost-per-click (CPC) — an outcome that, while seemingly paradoxical, actually reflects better results for both the publisher (i.e, increased yield) and the advertisers (increased performance).

Advertisers have experienced a nearly 30% increase in ROAS, a significant boost indicating substantial improvement in the efficiency and effectiveness of their ad campaigns. This increase both enhances the return on investment for advertisers and underscores the strategic advantage of leveraging targeting automation.

For publishers, the modest rise in CPC shows that advertisers are correctly valuing each slice of inventory. Given the outsize gains in ROAS, we expect advertisers to increase their base bids to lean into the gains targeting automation has uncovered, which would push CPC steadily higher for a period before reaching a new efficient frontier.

These tangible results solidify real-time targeting automation as a game-changer, offering advertisers of all capabilities a powerful tool to navigate the evolving dynamics of the commerce media landscape.

Targeting automation is a key tool in resolving the paradox of granularity, seamlessly integrating with bid automation to usher in a new era of precision, control, and efficiency in commerce media campaigns.

The experts at Koddi would love to talk through any questions or considerations you might have. Contact our team today!