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Building your programmatic budget: What to take into account when launching a campaign.

How to approach your programmatic budget and best practices when planning campaigns? Hint: It’s less than you think. 

The range you’re going to hear is somewhere between $5,000 and $50,000. And no, nobody is lying when they preface their answer with “it depends.”

When approaching your campaign, there are two very important questions to understand: who the target audience is, and what the goal of the creative is.

  • Target Audience: Is this for everyone? The broader your audience is, the cheaper CPMs you can get, but a broad audience with a small budget is an easy way to get lost at sea.
  • Goal of the creative: Are you driving awareness for a new feature release, a new product, or trying to get new leads for a SaaS company? This will impact the placements, bidding strategies, and more when outlining a campaign.

HOW PROGRAMMATIC CAN MAXIMIZE YOUR BUDGET

Programmatic’s superpower is its flexibility. There are levers that traders and strategists pull once a campaign is spending that aren’t available when buying in other formats. Some favorites include:

  • Cycling fresh creative
  • Expanding / Shrinking the audience list
  • Bidding / Budget optimizations

There is ample science that goes into campaign setup. However, at the other end of the screen there are real humans making real purchase decisions which means impulse and irrational behavior come into play. Every campaign will have specifics that cause it to perform in the market differently. While each campaign is unique, after doing this enough times the trick is finding which parts rhyme. 

That is why we call the early innings of a programmatic campaign The Learning Phase. During this phase we see what aspects are performing and what aren’t, and optimize accordingly.

WHAT DOES THE LEARNING PHASE HAVE TO DO WITH BUDGET?

In short, data. To make informed decisions, we need to reach some form of statistical significance within our campaigns to confidently make optimizations. The smaller the budget, typically the smaller the data set we have. This impacts our ability to make educated guesses on what aspects of the campaign we need to change. As budgets grow and data sets get larger, the more confidence traders have in making the changes necessary to improve performance.

COMPARING INDUSTRY AND CAMPAIGN TYPES 

But the learning phase is different for each campaign.

For lower funnel campaigns and lower AOV (Average Order Value) products, it's common to see results sooner rather than later. This means we can begin to test and optimize with smaller budgets. 

For industries like auto and tech, with longer sales cycles, it’s going to require a larger investment to match the weight of the purchase decision on the other end of the computer. For these types of products, the feedback loop takes longer to inform our decisions, which is why you often need larger budgets and patience before you see meaningful results.

KLEVER’S POINT OF VIEW

We recommend approaching campaigns with $5,000 a month. By using Klever, this gives you access to all the best tools and most premium inventory in the market with a team dedicated to set up, optimization, and maintenance of your campaigns. While our recommended budget can vary based on variables such as campaign goal, complexity of setup, and industry, it serves as a great starting point.

If you’re ready to launch your next programmatic campaign and want a Klever mind to help you do so, meet the team today and we’ll get you on your way.

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