Programmatic has a mixed reputation in lead generation, and some of it is deserved. Plenty of brands have tried a DSP, watched the click-through rate look healthy and then found the leads were worthless. A few concluded that programmatic simply doesn’t work for leads.
We think that’s the wrong conclusion. Programmatic is a poor first channel for most lead programmes. It can be a very good third one.
What programmatic actually is
A demand-side platform lets you buy ad space across thousands of websites and apps at once, in real time, based on who’s likely to be looking at the page. Instead of buying from one platform like Meta, you’re buying from the open web: news sites, specialist publishers, apps, streaming services.
That reach is the appeal. It’s also the risk, because the open web contains a lot of inventory you’d never knowingly pay for.
Why it often disappoints for direct lead generation
Cold prospecting on the open web tends to produce weak leads for a few reasons. A lot of cheap inventory sits on sites built mainly to show ads, where nobody is really reading. Small mobile placements attract accidental taps. And many DSP campaigns are optimised towards clicks, which are easy to get and say very little about intent.
If you point a DSP at a broad audience, optimise for cost per click and send the traffic to a long form, you’ll probably end up joining the sceptics.
Where it earns its place
Retargeting beyond the social platforms
Someone visits your landing page, reads half of it and leaves. Meta can show them an ad again, but only while they’re on Meta. A DSP can reach them on the news site they read over lunch and the recipe app they open in the evening. For considered purchases, that second and third touch often does the work.
Contextual placements
Placing ads next to relevant content is old-fashioned and still effective. An ad for a home energy assessment beside an article about rising bills reaches someone already thinking about the problem. Contextual targeting has also become more important as cookie-based targeting has weakened.
Native ads on quality publishers
Native formats sit inside the editorial feed and look like recommendations rather than banners. On good publishers they can send readers who arrive curious instead of distracted. This is close to how our own publications work, and it’s no coincidence that it performs.
Inventory quality is everything
The difference between a good programmatic campaign and a bad one is mostly where the ads run. A few rules we stick to:
- Buy through curated deals or private marketplaces where you can, rather than the open auction alone.
- Keep an allowlist of sites you’re happy to appear on and review the placement reports every week.
- Exclude sites that exist mainly to carry ads. They’re cheap for a reason.
- Optimise towards a conversion event, not clicks, as soon as there’s enough data.
Be careful with the credit it claims
DSPs are generous at taking credit. View-through attribution can count a conversion because someone saw a banner they never noticed and later converted via Meta. Add that to Meta’s own reporting and you’ll count the same lead twice.
The fair way to judge programmatic is to hold out a portion of your audience and compare. If the group that saw DSP ads converts better than the group that didn’t, the channel is adding something. If not, it’s taking credit for work done elsewhere.
How we fit it together
In our lead generation programmes, Meta and TikTok usually do the heavy lifting on prospecting. Programmatic comes in to retarget, to reach people in the right context and to extend campaigns onto publishers we trust. Used that way it rarely produces the cheapest leads on its own. It often lowers the cost of leads across the whole mix.
That’s a harder story to tell in a weekly report, but it’s usually the true one.