You’ve figured out Meta. 

Whether you run broad campaigns or feed in first-party data, Meta makes it work – because its algorithm knows your customers better than you do. Why? 

Because it has access to virtually everything about user behavior: every purchase, every follow, comment, like, scroll pattern, ad view, and on-site event. 

Meta’s ad platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) reach billions of users – Facebook alone counts over 3.07 billion monthly active users – and each interaction feeds its AI. It’s not blindly targeting “Women 25-44 interested in health.” It’s targeting Jenna, who’s 32, recently bought Olaplex, clicked on a Sephora ad, and follows five supplement brands. 

In other words, Meta’s AI can pinpoint high-intent individuals with uncanny precision inside its walled garden. 

This is why you can often go broad on Meta and still hit performance goals: the platform’s algorithm self-optimizes your targeting in real time, fueled by oceans of first-party data.

But when brands scale into programmatic channels – whether it’s open-web display, CTV, or retail media networks – they expect the same performance engine. And it usually flops. 

Programmatic exchanges don’t have a built-in social graph or unified profile for Jenna.

Instead, you’re often dealing with a patchwork of cookies and device IDs with a few vague interest tags. 

Without Meta’s rich user profile, the tactics that worked on Meta can fall flat in the open web. As a result, many first-time programmatic advertisers see poor returns and conclude the channel “doesn’t work.” In reality, programmatic can drive tremendous ROI (indeed, it now accounts for nearly 90% of global digital display ad spend), but only if you approach it differently than you approached Meta. 

Here are the top mistakes Meta-centric advertisers make when moving into programmatic – and how to fix them.

Mistake 1: Running Broad and Hoping the Platform Figures it Out

On Meta, broad targeting can succeed because the platform’s AI is that smart. 

Meta knows who Jenna is; a DSP (demand-side platform) only sees “Cookie #81623791” or a device ID. 

Programmatic platforms like The Trade Desk or Yahoo DSP are sophisticated, but they’re not Meta-smart. 

They don’t automatically know your ideal customer, and privacy shifts are making that harder. (In fact, the long-awaited demise of third-party cookies means programmatic traders can’t rely on the old tricks – Google’s own ad business is bracing for seismic shifts in identity and audience data) 

When you run broad targeting on a DSP with no additional data, you’re effectively spraying impressions across the open web with minimal precision and no powerful algorithm to auto-optimize toward converters. 

While Meta’s algorithm thrives on ingesting your conversion data and finding lookalikes, most DSPs simply don’t have that luxury out-of-the-box. They need you to be far more intentional with targeting upfront.

The result? A broad programmatic campaign often burns budget on low-intent audiences. 

Every time you bid blind, a savvy competitor armed with better data can win the same impressions at a smarter eCPM, siphoning those conversions away from you. 

Evidence of the Gap

Brands that activate deterministic purchase data (actual transaction-derived audiences) see 8X higher ROI and 25% lower CPA than peers relying on generic probabilistic segments. 

Similarly, campaigns that layer retail shopping data onto CTV have driven up to 67% higher ROAS and 2× sales revenue year-over-year. 

In other words, if you rely on broad targeting without data enrichment, you’re leaving serious performance on the table.

What’s Going Wrong? 

Meta advertisers moving into programmatic often underestimate how much signal loss occurs outside the walled gardens. 

On Meta, the platform’s first-party data does the heavy lifting; on an open exchange, you have to bring the data. 

This is where AI-modeled audiences and third-party data segments come in – to add back precision when the native DSP can’t do it for you. The best programmatic buyers are already shifting toward data-rich targeting: more than 80% of U.S. programmatic display ad spend now flows through programmatic direct deals and private marketplaces (often leveraging curated data or premium publisher first-party data). 

The writing is on the wall: if you don’t feed your DSP high-quality audience intel, it will stumble around in the dark. 

Broad, unassisted targeting on programmatic = wasted impressions and weak optimization feedback loops.

Mistake 2: Repurposing creative without adapting it to context

Creative that crushes on Meta won’t automatically translate off-platform. Each channel has a different user context and mindset, and ignoring those differences tanks results. 

Consider how your audience experiences ads on various platforms:

On Meta (or any social feed)

You’re interrupting an endless scroll. 

The viewer is inches from their phone, likely with sound off, thumbing past content at high speed. Winning creatives here tend to use captions, UGC-style hooks, bold visuals in the first 1–2 seconds, and fast pacing to stop the thumb. 

In fact, Facebook says people spend on average only 1.7 seconds on a piece of mobile content (2.5 seconds on desktop). Blink and you miss it. 

You have to grab attention immediately on social.

On YouTube

Users may be in lean-back mode watching longer videos. 

You get ~5 seconds before that “Skip Ad” button beckons. 

The viewer is likely full-screen with audio on. 

Here, you need instant context and a compelling hook to convince them not to skip. It’s not just about jumping on a trending sound or flashy thumbnail; it’s about establishing relevance or intrigue in those first few seconds (e.g. a quick problem statement or stunning visual) so they stick around. 

If your ad doesn’t earn continued viewership, it’s skipped – and you’ve wasted the impression.

On Open Web Display or Native Placements

Your banner or native ad is competing with a sea of content and other ads on a page. 

The user might be in research or reading mode. A generic product shot with “Shop Now” slapped on it will blend into the background. 

You need creatives that stand out and match the mindset – think bold, benefit-driven headlines or interactive elements for display, and informative or story-driven content for native units. 

The goal is to catch the eye and quickly communicate value, amidst a lot of noise.

On CTV (Connected TV)

The audience is ten feet away on the couch, watching a big screen. They can’t click; they may not even be able to skip. And they’re accustomed to TV-quality production. 

Cheap, repurposed social video might feel jarringly out of place here. Instead, you need storytelling that fits a lean-back, audio-on experience – visuals and messaging that can captivate without immediate action, and a clear brand impression since the viewer can’t click through. 

CTV ads that feel like low-budget Instagram stories won’t leave a mark on a viewer who’s in “TV mode.”

***

Each placement requires a different creative formula. If you treat creative as channel-agnostic, simply copy-pasting your best Facebook ad to every new platform, performance will suffer no matter how good your targeting is. 

The equation is message (creative) × audience × medium.

Miss any one of those three, and your results drop off fast. 

It’s often said that creative is the single biggest driver of campaign success, and industry research backs that up: Nielsen attributes roughly 65% of digital ad sales lift to the quality of the creative (some studies put it even higher). 

Great creative that’s optimized to its environment can elevate a mediocre targeting strategy – but even the best audience data can’t save a poorly adapted ad.

The Takeaway

Don’t assume your winning social ad will automatically win on CTV or native. 

Adapt your ads to each channel’s realities. 

For example, CTV might require a narrative approach or higher production value to feel “at home” on the big screen, whereas social demands a hook in the first frame (since 65% of people skip online video ads as soon as they can, by some industry estimates). And in programmatic display, test creatives with different value propositions or designs – something that pops in a static web environment. 

The extra effort in creative tailoring pays off. 

Advertisers who invest in multichannel creative optimization see significantly higher engagement and conversion rates, because they’re delivering the right message in the right medium.

In short: programmatic success = right audience + right message + right medium. You need all three working together.

Mistake 3: Expecting instant scale or clear attribution

On Meta, you can launch a campaign at breakfast, see results by lunch, and scale by dinner. 

The platform’s feedback loop is fast and (usually) reliable. You get early signals (CPMs, CTRs, CPA events) and the algorithm quickly finds pockets of efficiency. 

Programmatic is a different animal for two key reasons:

Attribution is Messier and Slower

You’re often dealing with multi-touch conversion paths, view-through conversions, and longer consideration windows, especially on channels like CTV or display. There’s a reason 47% of brand and agency marketers say attribution and measurement is a top investment priority in 2025. Once you step outside the walled gardens, proving performance gets more complex.

If you test a new DSP by running one campaign for a week and then pull the plug because “ROAS wasn’t clear”, you’re leaving money (and insights) on the table. 

Programmatic campaigns frequently require a longer runway to gather data (remember, the DSP isn’t magically finding your buyers on day 1 like Meta might). Moreover, the impact might not show up in your standard last-click analytics at all. 

For example, CTV ads often drive view-through conversions (a user sees your TV ad and later Googles your brand or buys on another device). Those conversions won’t be credited if you’re only looking for direct clicks or same-session sales.

It takes more sophisticated measurement – e.g. holdout tests or incrementality experiments – to capture the true lift. Many savvy advertisers are embracing these methods: nearly two-thirds of U.S. marketers are working to improve marketing mix modeling and other holistic measurement approaches to evaluate cross-channel impact. 

In a privacy-constrained world, incrementality is the name of the game. (Even Criteo, a major ad tech firm, noted that brands must adopt innovative measurement like geo-holdouts to confidently invest in media without obvious direct attribution).

Scalability Expectations

It’s unrealistic to expect a brand new programmatic campaign to immediately spend, optimize, and scale at the levels you might be used to on Meta. 

Programmatic often requires tinkering: dividing audiences, trying different inventory sources, adjusting frequency caps, etc. We see the “spray and pray” approach fail repeatedly. Dumping budget broadly (Mistake #1) and then killing campaigns in a week because they didn’t immediately print. 

In contrast, brands that treat programmatic as a systems problem, one that needs methodical testing and optimization, end up discovering new growth pockets and efficient spends. 

For instance, many DTC brands have begun systematically expanding to emerging channels like retail media and in-app networks. A recent analysis showed 75% of Northbeam’s top 100 DTC advertisers are now active on AppLovin (a popular in-app programmatic channel)– not because it worked overnight, but because they planned for incremental scale by testing and iterating. 

These brands budget for learning, run A/B tests on audience and creative, and use incrementality lifts or media mix models to decide when a channel is truly working.

Bottom Line

Programmatic rewards the patient, data-driven marketer who’s willing to experiment and optimize. 

You may not get instant gratification or a clear CPA on day 3. That doesn’t mean the channel won’t deliver; it means you might need a better measurement game and a longer view. 

Set up proper attribution (or partner with tools that can do unified measurement), run for a statistically significant period, and look at metrics like new customer reach, view-through revenue, and lift against holdouts – not just last-click ROAS. 

When you crack the code, programmatic can unlock entirely new pools of demand beyond what Meta can reach. 

But getting there requires a mindset shift: from “set it and forget it” to “test, learn, and iterate.” In fact, many of the brands winning on programmatic today have dedicated growth teams treating it like an ongoing experiment – exactly the kind of systems thinking that turns a middling campaign into a second growth engine.

So How Do You Make Programmatic Work?

By now, it’s clear that succeeding in programmatic isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. So, how do you make programmatic work if you’re coming from the Meta advertising world? Here’s what high-performance brands are doing:

Tip #1: Start with Better Audience Data

Don’t rely on generic demographics or stale third-party interest clusters. 

To overcome the signal gap, you need to feed your programmatic buys with smarter fuel – data built on real transactions and rich shopping behavior, not broad guesses. 

In practice, this means using AI-modeled or deterministic audiences derived from actual purchase data and high-intent behaviors. 

By starting with a sharper audience, you give the DSP a fighting chance to find the right people. 

That’s precisely what we do at Proxima. 

We aggregate billions of verified e-commerce purchases and behavioral signals across the DTC ecosystem (brands in beauty, wellness, home, fashion, pet, and more) to create constantly-updated audience segments. 

In other words, we know who the high-value shoppers are – and we can drop those segments directly into your programmatic campaigns. 

This kind of data advantage is a game-changer. It gives programmatic advertisers access to something they’ve never had before: precise shopper intelligence at scale, activated on platforms like The Trade Desk, Yahoo DSP, and beyond.

If you’re a CPG or retail brand trying to reach high-intent buyers, why guess... when we already know where they are? 

Imagine being able to target “people who bought premium skincare in the last 30 days” instead of “Women 25-54, beauty interest” – it’s a completely different ballgame. 

The performance impact is dramatic: as noted, deterministic purchase data can boost ROI by 8x and cut acquisition cost by a quarter. It’s like giving your campaigns Meta-grade signal outside of Meta. 

In a world of shrinking cookies and sketchy lookalikes, better audience data is your #1 lever to carry over that Meta magic into programmatic.

Tip #2: Tailor Creative to the Channel

One-size-fits-all creative doesn’t cut it once you venture off Meta. 

Build for context from the start. 

That means developing CTV-specific ads that feel like compelling mini-TV commercials, not repurposed TikToks. It means crafting scroll-stopping headlines and visuals for native placements, where your ad sits among news or article content. And it means choosing intent-driven imagery for display banners – for example, showing the product in use or highlighting an offer, rather than a bland catalog shot. 

The key is to embrace the strengths and limitations of each channel’s format. On social, short and punchy wins; on CTV, you have a bit more time to tell a story (but it better be a good story).

Keep in mind that, when it comes to performance, creative is only half the battle. 

Studies show it can be responsible for the majority of an ad’s sales impact. 

But that’s only true if your creative is format-aware. A brilliantly edited 15-second vertical video might dominate on Instagram Stories, yet flop on a 30-inch TV screen. Conversely, a beautiful cinematic ad might wow TV viewers but feel slow and irrelevant in a fast-scrolling feed. 

High-performance advertisers treat each new channel as a fresh creative challenge – they often test new ad concepts in programmatic channels rather than simply porting over the social ads. 

The extra upfront effort is rewarded with higher CTRs, lower CPAs, and stronger engagement in each environment. So when moving into programmatic, budget time and resources for creative adaptation. 

If you don’t have the capability in-house, consider working with creative specialists or your agency to resize, re-edit, or even wholly redesign creative for your new placements. The difference in results will be night and day.

Tip #3:  Plan to Test, Measure, and Iterate

This isn’t Meta – you won’t always hit a home-run on day one. 

The brands that win in programmatic approach it with a testing mindset and a robust measurement plan. 

Build a roadmap for your first 90 days: which audiences will you trial first? Which creatives? What budgets and timeframes will you allow before judging performance? 

Set up structured experiments (A/B tests or multivariate tests) to learn what works. 

For example, you might test one campaign using a third-party data segment against another using your first-party data, to see which drives better engagement. Or run a geographic split test where one region sees your CTV ads and another doesn’t, to measure lift in site traffic or sales. These kinds of tests provide the insight you need to optimize and scale.

Importantly, layer your audiences and tactics: don’t put all your spend into one broad bucket. 

You might start with a high-intent segment (say, past purchasers of products in your category) alongside a contextual placement (ads on specific relevant websites) and see how each performs, then combine them. 

Over time, you’ll refine a portfolio of tactics that together deliver a solid ROAS. And when it comes to measurement, embrace the new tools at your disposal. 

Look beyond the platform’s dashboard and consider lift studies or third-party attribution partners. Brands that make measurement holistic – using everything from incrementality tests to marketing mix models – get the clearest picture of what programmatic is truly contributing. They can then confidently increase budgets to the winners and cut the losers. 

This systematic approach is how programmatic stops being a shot in the dark and starts becoming a second growth engine alongside Meta. It might take a few cycles to dial in, but once you do, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without that extra channel scaling your customer acquisition.

Final Thoughts

Programmatic won’t save a bad strategy. If you simply dump your social campaign into a DSP unchanged, you’re likely to be disappointed. 

However, when you combine rich audience intelligence, format-specific creative, and a real testing plan, programmatic advertising can unlock serious scale and efficiency for e-commerce marketers. 

In fact, many brands find that with the right approach, programmatic becomes as strong a growth driver as their Meta campaigns – effectively giving them two engines to power their marketing. 

And at the end of the day, that’s what every advertiser wants: more profitable growth channels.

That’s exactly what Proxima delivers to modern e-commerce advertisers venturing beyond Meta. Our platform was built to bring Meta-level targeting to the open web and beyond, delivering:

✅ AI Audiences – data-enriched audience segments modeled on real DTC purchase behavior

✅ Cookieless, privacy-safe targeting that isn’t reliant on third-party cookies (future-proof)

✅ Third-party verified accuracy – our data is rigorously validated for quality

✅ Powered by deterministic transaction data, not guesses or click signals

If you're expanding into programmatic and want Meta-level targeting – but for the open web – let’s talk.

We can help you turn the lessons above into action, and make your programmatic move a rousing success.

Ready to see what Proxima’s data intelligence can do for your business? 

Click here to book a free demo call with us.