What is Programmatic Advertising & What Should My Strategy Be in 2026?

What is Programmatic Advertising?

For the uninitiated, programmatic advertising is automated buying and selling of digital advertising space in real time using algorithms and data. Basically, an algorithm makes sure the right people are seeing your ads at the right time based on all the data points that are attached to you as the buyer or user.

Programmatic advertising is exploding, passing $180.4 billion and accounting for nearly 92% of all digital display ad spend in 2025 with projections to hit $203 billion in 2026. This is to say that programmatic display advertising is here to say, but with the advent of AI and more concern around privacy policy, the landscape is fast changing.

How has Programmatic Advertising Changed?

AI is making programmatic advertising more targeted than ever on the buyer side. The bidding is getting smarter, the segmentation is better, personalization is more advanced, and predictive modeling is being incorporated in ways that were inconceivable a few years ago.

However, wider adoption of AI is also creating a race to the bottom known academically as “junkification” or platform decay, which is the process of automated content diluting the quality and authenticity of digital content. Essentially, lots of content made using the same unoriginal concepts is flooding the marketplace and obscuring true originality amongst advertising which ultimately erodes trust. If more advertisers are creating “good enough” content, the ones creating original content based on real insights and authority are harder to find through the noise.

Agentic AI is also creating fake signals that torpedo campaign effectiveness. The rise of bots that are better able to mimic human signals artificially inflate metrics and are driving up average CPC and CPL, especially in campaigns with lower spend.

The erosion of signals is also making the optimization and targeting of programmatic display advertising more difficult. Some research suggests that as little as 8% of users of AI summaries click on linked sources after their query. Couple this with more restrictive privacy policies; no-click marketing and AI summaries are changing traditional attribution pathways that make optimizing campaigns more difficult than past years.

It’s not all doom and gloom though. With subscription fatigue becoming a growing issue, CTV, or Connected TV, is exploding since users are switching from paid TV to free ad supported models. Businesses with clean conversion data and truly original content are better positioned to win programmatic display advertising than ever before.

What should I focus on to win a programmatic advertising strategy?

Own or build out first-party conversion data

• With intent signals eroding, conversion signals are becoming the new gold standard in programmatic display advertising strategy. Rather than relying on behavior signals that show interest in your product or solution, identify value audiences using conversion data and upload these audiences to ad platforms. This optimizes for the people who are going to buy instead of who might buy.

Utilize CTV Short-form video on social channels

• Social video accounted for more than 53% of programmatic display advertising in 2025 with Gen Z and younger generations in a trend that is going to continue to grow. Focus on creating original content with clear and organic CTAs to drive quicker conversions than banner and written ads.

Lean into Smaller PMP’s (Private Marketplaces) instead of larger open exchanges

• Over $701 million dollars of programmatic ad spend went to MFA website or “Made for Advertising” sites which have no value for advertisers looking to convert. The best way to combat this is to move away from open marketings to smaller private marketplaces. It may be more to manage, but you will have more control over your targeting.

How can I develop better first-party data?

The best way to build better data is to make sure you have clean data. But as we’ve already discussed, datasets can be filled with bad leads, fake conversions and fraudulent clicks that don’t convert. You can go back and manually see which of these signals lead to a purchase, or you can stop the bad data from entering your ecosystem at all. Tools that stop invalid traffic (IVT) can be the most effective tool for optimization for marketing campaigns.

With fraud detection tools like Anura, you can confidently scale knowing your impressions, clicks, and conversions are real.

Experience the power of Anura to discover just how much fraud you have with a free traffic quality audit.

How can I safeguard CTV on social channels from bad data?

Good exclusion audiences are the most efficient ways to optimize social ads for good prospects and ultimately higher-converting audiences. So how do you build a good exclusion audience? You can identify contacts and leads that click on your ads that either bounce, leave without converting or fraudulently purchase something and manually create lists to upload to social platforms so they can create exclusion audiences to hide ads from similar profiles. If you want a more automated process, Anura’s Search and Social Protect will automatically capture IVT on your social ads and add them to exclusion lists on all major platforms.

How can I most efficiently manage the effectiveness of curated ad buying from PMPs?

Manage the effectiveness of your sources by analyzing how much good traffic PMPs send you. Keep in mind, determining the quality of this traffic can be difficult, especially in an environment where only 36 cents of every dollar reach publishers. Tools like the Anura dashboard can help determine the quality of traffic against the volume of traffic by each source. This allows you to determine which PMP’s are bringing you qualified leads and which ones are wasting your ad spend.