How Partnering With a DSP Is Driving Programmatic Success for Tuff Growth

StackAdapt sat down with Jesse Nasadowski, PPC Specialist at Tuff Growth, to learn why it’s important for Tuff to partner with a programmatic platform like StackAdapt. Jesse has several years of digital marketing and strategy experience, in scaling up small businesses.

Tuff is a plug-in growth marketing team. They team up with startups and established players alike to accelerate growth with high-impact marketing campaigns. The agency is designed to seamlessly integrate into businesses to help drive their growth.

What got you interested in programmatic advertising, and what was it about programmatic that made you decide it was time to leverage it? 

As a growth marketing agency we rely on performance based campaigns for many of our partners. From optimizing ads to reach conversion volume targets, driving return on ad spend (ROAS) or improving customer acquisition cost (CAC), we support our clients in reaching their goals.

Paid media is one of our main service offerings, but we also do search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, conversion rate optimization, and performance creative. We became curious about programmatic advertising because we were looking for ways to boost overall campaign performance, as well as brand awareness.

As we grew, so did our clients’ ad spend budgets. In many instances, especially for business-to-business (B2B) partners, we were maxing out our spend thresholds on the traditional performance channels like LinkedIn, Meta, and Google. To scale, we had to diversify our channel mix, and StackAdapt offered a unique opportunity to do just that.

We were interested in how a programmatic platform like StackAdapt could help us to bolster our success across all of the different channels our services overlap with, not just paid media. 

What led Tuff Growth to choose StackAdapt as a partner? 

We’re curious, and we’re nimble, which leads to testing everything under the sun to find success for our clients. As our agency grows, so does the size of our partners’ ad budgets—giving us more opportunities for testing. 

We wanted to test out programmatic channels, and were attracted to StackAdapt for a couple reasons. First, the StackAdapt team is incredibly supportive. It gave us confidence to know that the StackAdapt team would help to educate us on programmatic campaigns, suggest options to test, and make proactive recommendations to improve performance when campaigns went live. 

We also chose to go with StackAdapt because the platform offers unique and custom targeting options that aren’t available on other programmatic platforms. It’s incredibly easy to reach decision makers or business owners. We’ve heavily leaned into these 3rd-party audience options for our B2B partners for example. The vast network of audiences available make this a viable option for all of the partners that come to Tuff.

Why is programmatic advertising an important tactic for digital marketing? 

Programmatic has allowed us to expand our offerings and improve our testing, scaling, and performance capabilities along the way. Brand campaigns on StackAdapt are becoming a standard budget allocation when outlining paid media plans for both new and old partners. 

We’re finding that programmatic advertising has an effect on all marketing channels. It’s very easy to measure the lift in volume for direct, organic, or brand search traffic, while running programmatic ads.

We’re especially liking that we can geotarget in order to focus on low budgets in specific cities or states. This allows us to segment and measure the success of campaigns much easier when presenting to client stakeholders. 

What results have you driven thanks to your programmatic campaigns with StackAdapt?

We have a couple impressive campaign results to share! One of our clients offers online certificate programs. We have been able to lean on StackAdapt for niche audience targeting of B2B and B2C users. During our testing with display, we’ve driven over 1 million impressions and 1,500 clicks–all while achieving a higher time on site than social channels have delivered.

For a mental health awareness campaign we’re running for a client, we have been leveraging audio ads. We’ve seen 200,000 impressions, over 90% audio completion rate, and 200 leads. For countless others, we have been able to drive CPC and CPM 20% to 30% lower than what we have seen on other platforms.

Another client of ours has had StackAdapt running for roughly 3 months. Over this time, we have reached over 1 million impressions, resulting in a 2% increase in branded traffic. We suspect StackAdapt has played a big part in this improvement as CTR has increased by 5%, and impressions have increased by 1% over this same period. 

What has been your favourite part of working with the StackAdapt team so far? 

Everyone we have worked with so far has been insightful, helpful, and knowledgeable about all things programmatic. The StackAdapt team plugs into our agency perfectly, allowing for seamless communication, brainstorming sessions, and continued campaign performance evaluation and optimization. Outside of how user friendly the platform itself is, the team at StackAdapt has made diving into the world of programmatic much smoother. 

What are you most excited about for the future of Tuff Growth’s partnership with StackAdapt?

StackAdapt is enabling Tuff to be something more than a traditional growth marketing agency. Building this partnership is empowering us to own not just performance marketing, but brand marketing as well. 

Tuff has a top tier creative department, one that puts data at the forefront of decision making. StackAdapt has powerful reporting and multiple placement options. Couple this with our creative abilities and campaign management expertise, we are beyond excited about the future of this partnership!

What trend in programmatic advertising are you hoping to adopt in the coming year, and why?

This year, we’re planning to develop a stronger connected TV (CTV) presence. We know this channel has been increasingly influential in recent years, and it’s becoming an important part of any media mix. We love that it’s an approachable channel for smaller businesses, so we hope to tap into that potential. 

Want to start testing programmatic advertising? Request a demo to learn more about StackAdapt.