Buying reach, one impression at a time.

Media buying driven by data, not by a media plan

Programmatic advertising is the automated, real-time buying of ad space. Instead of booking packages with individual sales houses, a demand-side platform (DSP) evaluates every single impression in milliseconds and only bids where audience, environment and price fit together. Dometrics runs this buying through Display & Video 360 (DV360), part of the Google Marketing Platform, and ties every impression to a clean measurement foundation.

How a programmatic auction works

When someone opens a website or app, the publisher offers the available ad slot to an auction through a supply-side platform (SSP). The DSP receives information about the environment, format, device and region, matches it against the campaign’s audiences and rules, and places a bid. The highest eligible bid wins and the ad is served. The entire process is complete before the page has finished loading.

For executives, the consequence is what matters: budget no longer flows into a package as a lump sum, but impression by impression. Every impression is an individual buying decision that can be measured, evaluated and corrected.

The channels at a glance

DV360 brings together formats that used to run through separate sales houses and contracts. Each channel plays its own role in the funnel and follows its own measurement logic. Which channels a campaign uses depends on the objective and on the inventory available in each market.

CTV and DOOH: reach with clear measurement limits

Connected TV and programmatic out-of-home reach people where conventional online advertising cannot: in the living room and in public spaces. Both channels suit brand building but are weak on direct attribution, because nobody clicks on a television or a screen at a train station. Dometrics therefore only uses CTV and DOOH with a measurement design agreed in advance, such as a geo experiment with test and control regions or a brand lift study. That way the impact can be demonstrated later rather than assumed.

How Dometrics delivers programmatic

Private marketplaces and preferred deals in DV360

The open auction is cheap but opaque. A relevant share of its inventory comes from sites built purely to earn ad revenue, with high ad density, short dwell times and few real readers. Dometrics therefore uses the DV360 Marketplace, where publishers and sales houses offer their inventory as private marketplace (PMP) or preferred deals. These deals are accepted directly in DV360 and managed like any other campaign. The open auction runs as a supplement, restricted to inclusion lists of vetted domains and apps.

Supply path and placement transparency

There are often several intermediaries between advertiser and publisher. DV360 respects ads.txt and app-ads.txt and by default only buys from authorized sellers. The reporting shows every domain and every app an ad was served on, including cost and conversions. Exclusion lists are maintained weekly and reused across the account.

Brand safety and viewability with DV360’s own controls

An impression only has value if it is seen and appears in a suitable environment. DV360 provides its own controls for this: exclusions of sensitive content categories, digital content labels by audience maturity, keyword and app category exclusions, and filters against invalid traffic. Viewability is measured by Active View, Google’s viewability measurement, and campaigns bid specifically on impressions with a high predicted viewability. The benchmark is the MRC standard: for display, at least 50 percent of the ad’s pixels must be in view for one second; for video, two seconds. Keyword exclusions are kept deliberately precise so that reputable news environments are not blocked across the board.

First-party data before third-party segments

Purchased data segments are often imprecise and their origin is hard to trace. Dometrics builds audiences from first-party signals instead: hashed CRM lists via Customer Match, website visitors from server-side tracking and contextual targeting by topic and environment. These signals also work in browsers that block third-party cookies.

Creatives that fit the channel

Programmatic is only as good as the ads it delivers. Dometrics produces and traffics HTML5 banners in the common IAB formats, short video cuts for YouTube and CTV and feed-based variants via dynamic ads. Before launch, every asset is checked in Campaign Manager 360 for click tracking, file weight and rendering.

How programmatic is measured

Display and video exposure rarely leads straight to a purchase. Its effect comes earlier in the customer journey. Judge programmatic on last click alone and the channel is undervalued; credit every view-through conversion and it is overvalued. Dometrics therefore measures on three levels.

First, delivery quality: viewability according to Active View, share of deal inventory, frequency per person and the effective cost per thousand viewable impressions. Second, direct impact: Floodlight activities in Campaign Manager 360, complemented by server-side conversions, attribute enquiries and purchases to campaigns. Third, incrementality: conversion lift and brand lift studies in DV360 and YouTube, plus geo experiments with control regions analysed in BigQuery, show how many conversions would not have happened without the campaign.

• Viewable CPM: cost per thousand impressions actually seen, not merely served.
• Frequency: contacts per person and period, capped across all channels in DV360.
• Completion rate: share of videos watched in full on YouTube and CTV.
• CPA and contribution margin: cost per conversion, assessed with real revenue and margin data.
• Incremental conversions: the additional effect from lift studies and geo experiments.

All metrics come together in a custom dashboard alongside search, social and shop data. The technical foundation is described under Tracking & Data Analytics, and the background on server-side measurement in the guide to server-side tracking.

Common mistakes in practice

Click-through rate as the measure of success

A high click-through rate on display is often a warning sign. Accidental taps on mobile devices and bot traffic inflate it without generating revenue. Dometrics evaluates placements by conversions and contribution margin, not by clicks.

An uncontrolled open auction

Campaigns without inclusion lists quickly end up on low-quality sites. The cost per impression looks cheap; the cost per result is not.

No frequency control

Without a frequency cap, a small part of the audience sees the same ad very often. That wastes budget and harms how the brand is perceived.

Missing cost transparency

If media costs, data costs and fees are not shown separately, no metric can be assessed properly. Dometrics discloses media costs at placement level so that every figure in the reporting stays verifiable.

How it fits into the Growth Engine

Programmatic creates demand among audiences that are not yet actively searching. That demand is captured through paid advertising on Google and Meta, carried forward via retargeting and converted on landing pages. Within the Growth Engine, programmatic takes on the role of scalable reach, connected to every other channel through a shared tracking model.

Dometrics does not recommend programmatic as an entry point. Only once tracking is in place and search and social are profitable does programmatic amplify a working system. If Dometrics sees no measurable lever, it advises against it. How management fees and media budget relate is explained on the pricing page.