The ‘Golden Quarter’ between October and December regularly flushes profits into retailers’ tills. The bonanza also extends to programmatic advertising, writes David Marrinan-Hayes (pictured below), chief operations officer, Ve, on the back of Ve’s first global Golden Quarter report, which includes insights from 15 territories and publishes in full tomorrow (24 January).

Despite it still being considered a new technology in many circles, the uptick in programmatic advertising has been persistent among UK retailers. And this faith looks to have been rewarded with the publication of industry reports detailing average returns of an enormous 500% from programmatic campaigns over the Black Friday weekend (Forrester).

Ve’s analysis supports this, with our performance data demonstrating the phenomenal potency of programmatic campaigns, in addition to significant financial return. Conversion rates (the percentage of placed adverts that resulted in a sale) increased by 70%, compared to the average day, while the volume of sales successfully attributed to programmatic campaigns grew by 139% on Black Friday.

David Marrinan-Hayes, COO, Ve

Programmatic is not only helping marketers get more from campaigns, but also to make better decisions on how and where they spend their budgets in future. This is a trend set to continue as the technology develops, delivering more and more value for retailers.

In terms of the most profitable times of day, the two commuting periods dominated the action. The highest volume of conversions occurred in the morning, as savvy shoppers got their business done early resulting in retailers clocking up an average of 277% more sales via programmatic campaigns than the same time segment on a normal day.

Interestingly, conversion rates peaked in the evening at 96% above average during the hours of 5pm-7pm. This is further evidence of programmatic advertising and the value it can bring to merchants. The introduction of video programmatic into the mix has undoubtedly given display advertising a boost. It’s telling that during the crucial Black Friday period, campaigns incorporating both video and display media delivered five times better results than those using just one.

Programmatic display is not just for the high periods off the year. Campaigns can be preloaded to target those leads at every stage of the purchasing decision-making process; but what these results tell us is if retailers can pre-empt buying behaviour, and set up campaigns accordingly, then the rewards can be truly exceptional.

We anticipate that investment in programmatic advertising will continue to rise as continued high performance, compared to manual ad buying, will push the technology from the early adopters to the early majority segment on the traditional diffusion of innovation scale.