12 March 2024

Custom alerts for programmatic bidding

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In summary

  • Programmatic campaign alerts are used to monitor and notify you about the set up and performance of your marketing campaigns
  • Campaigns that aren’t monitored can result in significant costs to the business if there are set up errors or if poor performing campaigns are left running
  • Out of the box alerts are limited, and developing your own custom alerts can be complex and expensive
  • The team at Louder have been building a custom alerts tool that does all the heavy lifting for you

What are custom programmatic alerts?

Programmatic alerts are automatic notifications on the setup or performance of your programmatic campaigns. They empower you to react promptly, proactively detecting incorrect setup or poor performance so you can resolve issues before they cause too much damage. Custom programmatic alerts go beyond the basic platform alerts, allowing you to define schedules, triggers, and logic that are unique to your business goals.

Why do you need custom programmatic alerts?

We all love programmatic advertising, it has become a cornerstone of modern digital marketing, empowering us to reach highly targeted audiences at scale, with exceptional efficiency and control.

That said, it does not come without risks that need to managed. Incorrectly configured or unoptimised bids can lead to paying inflated prices for low-quality impressions, or missing valuable audiences due to underbidding. Brand safety can also be compromised if targeting isn’t precise, potentially placing ads alongside harmful content.

This is where alerts come in, acting as automated sentries, keeping a watchful eye on your campaigns and notifying you of potential issues or opportunities. Imagine being promptly alerted as soon as a campaign starts haemorrhaging budget due to inflated bids or receiving helpful callouts that a campaign may potentially be reaching the wrong audience. With early intervention, you can make adjustments, optimise bids, or even pause the campaign before it burns through your budget.

What options are available for programmatic alerts?

Unfortunately alerting options for SA360 and DV360 are quite limited, while there are some options, what’s currently available out of the box is extremely limiting.

To truly protect yourself you’ll need to setup your own custom alerts. Unfortunately this is no small feat and will require working with APIs, processing complex data and automating delivery to desired channels all of which will require highly technical and specialist skillsets.

Sounds suboptimal or way too hard? It probably is. That’s why Louder are developing a service that automates it all and delivers alerts promptly direct to your inbox.

The Louder solution

At Louder, we’re experts at deploying reliable services at scale to Google Cloud. We’re also pretty well versed at working with the GMP APIs, in fact we use an in-house built code base for interacting with it. So it just made sense to help our clients by developing a service that delivers custom alerts and handles all the heavy lifting. While its still early days, the results are promising:

Louder solution

Pretty cool right? Well, I’ll also call out:

  • It’s fully automated. No manual data manipulation is required, with extraction, analysis and alert generation all happen automatically.
  • It scales. Its all built on Google’s powerful cloud infrastructure, so the service reliable handles thousands of campaigns.
  • Its highly customisable. Custom alerts need to be just that, custom. So we have designed the service to handle basically just about anything you can get a data point for. You can configure your individual alert thresholds down to the dollar, and schedule them as hourly, daily, weekly or monthly.

The sky’s the limit from here. We’re looking at adding features like:

  • Additional channels such as SMS and chat
  • Alert silencing, line item level drill downs
  • Meta checks

Next steps

Would you like to hear more? Get in touch to learn more about our custom programmatic alerts service and check out our blog for other articles. To get notified of new articles right in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter which also includes industry news and platform updates.

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About Mick Hua

Mick is a data engineer at Louder that loves all things python. When he's not coding, he typically enjoys playing boardgames and walking around the shops with his significant other.