Programmatic in the United Arab Emirates
- Author: Lizaveta Zhuk
The United Arab Emirates is a modern country that combines a multifaceted culture and a perspective base for the foundation and development of digital marketing, and Programmatic Advertising has not been left behind. Being one of the fastest technologically developed countries, the United Arab Emirates faces significant digital advertising market growth that boosts many sectors: banking, automotive, online, airlines, textile, luxury, FMCG, and many more.
In its turn, programmatic advertising, meaning the automatic process of selling and buying ad impressions for a target audience, is changing the game of digital ads in the UAE and elevating digital advertising to a new level of efficiency.
In this article, we will dive deeper into the world of advertising in the United Arab Emirates.
Digital Advertising Market in the UAE
In the world of digital technologies, the most effective way to promote any business is through digital advertising. And the United Arab Emirates is not an exception; digital marketing is the fastest growing industry in the UAE. Driven by high internet proliferation and smartphone usage, it’s expected that ad spending in the Digital Advertising market will reach $1,134.0 million in 2024 as well as the advertising market is projected to reach several billion dollars by 2025, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of around 15%.
Source: Statista
Programmatic advertising market in the UAE
Programmatic advertising in the UAE is expanding rapidly. It leverages data and automation to buy ad space in real time, making the advertising process more efficient and effective. Therefore, it is no wonder that programmatic advertising buying will generate 76% of the digital advertising revenue by 2028.
Source: Statista
Why is Programmatic Advertising Important?
Programmatic technology allows brands to optimize the bidding process and only pay for the best user, meaning that a brand’s advertisement would be shown only to a high-intent target audience. By using behavior data and AI & ML algorithms, programmatic media buying enables marketers to find users at the right time and at the right cost. However, when it comes to programmatic, advertisers can find even more benefits, including:
- Real-time optimization. Due to AI & ML algorithms at the core of programmatic demand-side platforms, programmatic determines tools (e.g., ad channels, ad formats, audience segments, and so on) with greater results and redistributes budget to them for decreasing useless ad spending.
- Real-time data & analytics. With programmatic campaigns, marketers can track the performance of promotions in real time and, more importantly, in one place—a team of a programmatic platform will set necessary metrics to demonstrate the performance of each ad channel in the personal account of the DSP.
- Supporting different ad channels and formats. With programmatic DSP, brands can interact with their target audiences across the internet in different ad channels from display, video, CTV, native, and social to DOOH, and so on. DSP will show the right ad formats depending on the ad channels where users are now.
- Broad opportunities for personalization. As the programmatic interacts with users based on their behavior and interests at the current moment of time, the technology chooses the most relevant advertisement for a particular user to show that allows brands to resonate with their audiences strongly.
- The best cost and quality of marketing efforts. The programmatic technology works based on AI & ML algorithms that allow to determine high-intent users for the current ad campaigns and the current goal of media campaigns, so brands pay only for contact with these users and grow conversions in the fastest and the cheapest way.
Available Audience & Consumer Behavior in the UAE
There were 9.46 million internet users in the United Arab Emirates at the beginning of 2024 that accounted for 99% of the total population. Moreover, the number of internet users is constantly growing—Data Reportal’s report indicates a rise in internet users by 75 thousand.
Source: Data Reportal
More users from the United Arab Emirates are surfing through the Internet via their smartphones. It’s no surprise, as mobile phones provide users with flexibility and accessibility to being online everywhere they want to. There’s a good point for brands to consider mobile users in their ad campaigns and prepare brands’ landing pages for visiting mobile audiences—make sure all lead forms are working, prototypes of pages are adapted for mobile devices, and so on. Remember that users are looking for easy-to-use solutions and personal features and prefer seamless experiences across devices.
Source: Data Reportal
The Emirates are active social media users — there are 10.74 million users of social media networks, equal to 112% of the total population. The most popular social media platforms are WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram.
Source: Data Reportal
In order to comprehensively understand the target audience, it’s worth considering the reason why they use one platform or another. It might help choose the right placement for advertising.
Source: Data Reportal
From the way the Emirates networks to the way they shop and run brand research, the Emirates are slowly but surely moving to digital. The thing is, knowing a brand’s target audience behavior is crucial to tailoring products, services, and marketing efforts to meet their needs where they are. One of the ways to better understand a target audience is to research how they look for and discover new brands and products. According to Data Reportal, 53.4% of users research brands before making an online purchase. The top channels for brand research are social media, search engines, and consumer reviews.
Source: Data Reportal
As for new brand discovery, consumers in the United Arab Emirates discover brands through search engines, social media ads, and retail websites.
Source: Data Reportal
Considering the Emirates’ consumer behavior in marketing strategies, brands with no circumstances will strongly resonate with their target audiences and achieve success.
Ad formats & Channels
The most popular ad format in the UAE digital market is display advertising. Being the largest market, banner advertising has a volume of $429.9 million in 2024.
Source: Statista
In turn of ad formats for performance ad campaigns, search advertising is the most popular among the UAE digital marketers, and the format takes the second place with a market volume of $326.5 million in 2024.
Source: Statista
As the third largest market segment, social media continues to grow and develop. According to forecast, it’s expected that ad spending on social media advertising will reach $435.4 million by 2028.
Source: Statista
In order to reach a target audience in social networks, brands should know what social media are the most popular among the target audience. For instance, Snapchat is more popular among users from 13 to 20 years old who don’t have an account on Instagram. You can find out more about each social media platform’s audience in our article.
Apart from knowing social media users, these platforms provide brands with good advertising potential depending on the platform. The potential of each social media platform depends on the number of audiences that might be reached.
Source: Data Reportal
One more tool that brands should consider in marketing campaigns in the UAE is in-app advertising. In-app advertising is a practice of serving advertising for users in mobile apps (for example, fullscreen banners in mobile games during the game). As users more often use smartphones for access to the Internet, brands invest in mobile advertising more year by year. Based on Statista’s report, this tendency is here to stay for a long time.
Source: Statista
Ad Inventory
The Emirates spends 8 hours 11 minutes surfing on the internet. The most popular browser for accessing the internet is Google Chrome in the UAE. Top visiting websites include google.com, youtube.com, facebook.com and more.
Source: Data Reportal
Top region-specific websites
- Google.ae
- Amazon.ae
- chatgpt.com
- wikipedia.org
- netflix.com
- linkedin.com
- msn.com
- reddit.com
- ntp.msn.com
- khaleejtimes.com
Top used SSP in the UAE
- ADxAD
- Google Ad Manager
- ExoClick
- AppLovin Max
- GaleForceMedia
- PX
- AdBook+
- Passendo
- Admixer
- Sharethrough
Top DSP used in the United Arab Emirates
- Google Marketing Platform
- Amazon Advertising
- Adobe Advertising Cloud
- NT DSP
- StackAdapt
- Scibids
- IgnitionOne
Market Peculiarities
It is important to note that in the UAE and Dubai, there are two languages: English and Arabic. What language you choose to use for business communication depends on who your audience is. For industries that depend heavily on foreign people, you will find that most of the search volume is in English. Therefore, if industries depend on nationals and other Arabs, you will find that the search volume is mostly in Arabic.
Of course, there are some cases where both Arabic search volume and high English search volume are used together for specific keywords. Depending on the specific product or service you are promoting in the region, it is important to thoroughly do your keyword research to utilize your online marketing budget and efforts most effectively.
What NT Technology can offer for your business?
NT Technology is one of the leading programmatic DSP platforms. With 10+ years of experience and mastering our own programmatic platform, we can power your success with audience data for precise targeting, a wide range of advertising formats (including custom creative solutions), full-funnel solutions, brand safety & fraud protection, and more. We create a team of experts focused on complete solutions for every project to ensure your business will succeed. Our team executes a full cycle of media buying from media strategy development, developing ad creatives, running and controlling ad campaigns to media optimization, and evaluating ad performance.
Our AdOps specialists have already launched 15000+ programmatic ad campaigns for 5000+ clients from different business spheres.
Why is NT Programmatic Platform?
- Constant support. Regularly communicating and answering client’s questions and resolving issues arising in the work process with developers to make optimal decisions.
- Work for results: forecasting and guarantees of KPI. Through an advertising campaign, we are responsible for the quality and results of a campaign. The automation capabilities of RTB optimization allow us to avoid stagnation periods and achieve all the KPIs planned.
- Individual approach. We know everything about our platform, so we can customize it to meet each client’s needs in order to achieve more with AI-powered advertising.
- You can leave the complications to us. The NT team will achieve your business goals and report about them.
Contact us today to achieve your marketing goals tomorrow. We’d be glad to solve your unique ad challenge. In order to prove our expertise, we prepared the case study of a programmatic ad campaign below.
How to drive leads for auto dealers of electric car vehicles with programmatic advertising
Our client was one of the leading companies that offers sustainable and innovative electric vehicle charging solutions in the United Arab Emirates. With a complicated target audience and high-cost products, he needed to disrupt a crowded yet niche market and achieve measurable growth in his business. So, he partnered with us to do that with programmatic technology. The goal for campaigns was to build awareness of the client’s solutions, attract high-intent users to a site, and then boost qualified leads—in hopes these leads would turn into customers and increase the profit of the business.
We conducted upfront research to better understand the target audience, its online behavior, the electric vehicle customer journey, and which factors are likely to drive users to conversions. At this stage, we have determined that we have to work with both B2B and B2C consumers. It was one of the main challenges of the campaign, as we needed to reach a very niche and specific audience segment. Also, we needed to reach key decision-makers to achieve the goal. So, our advertising strategy was focused in two directions, using different tools to reach a comprehensive target audience.
For the first launch, our team used awareness-focused advertising channels and formats. The goal was to establish an emotional connection with potential customers and drive awareness of the client solution. At this stage of the campaign, we use banners and in-stream videos to grab the audience’s attention. The campaign included a mix of behavioral, interest, demographic, contextual, B2B, and other targeting options.
On the second and third launches, we focused on maintaining users’ interest and getting qualified leads. Across the target audience, we use promo posts on Facebook and LinkedIn and out-stream videos to keep the client’s solution at the top of customers’ minds and drive engagement more. In order to get conversions, we added lead generation forms and search ads to interact with users who already had the intent to start a more sustainable life. Leveraging retargeting, we re-engage with high-intent users who visited the site but didn’t complete target actions and who show a high rate of interest in the client’s products. For instance, retargeting advertisements were shown for users:
- who started filling out the contact form but didn’t send it;
- who spent on the site more than 2 minutes;
- who visited more than 2 pages of the site;
- who visited the “Our solution” page and so on.
During three ad campaigns, our AdOps and Data Analytics specialists were closely monitoring the process and the efficiency of the ad campaign to manually and automatically optimize it on time. The customer journey was intentionally built to create an omnipresence through using different media channels and formats and targeting frequency backed by automatic optimization for three campaigns. The measurement and testing also played a crucial role in boosting the efficiency. We tested different banners, combinations of targeting options, and audience segments to choose the most efficient one based on data and redistributed ad budgets.
Thus, we achieved the goal. We get the following results:
- 503 qualified leads
- 11.1% average CR
In conclusion
The digital ad market is constantly developing in the United Arab Emirates, so brands should pay more attention to digital tools for interacting with their target audience. The importance of that is rising year by year as the Emirates increases its presence on the internet. One of these tools might be programmatic advertising, which provides brands with many benefits. In order to achieve greater success in ad campaigns, you can rely on reliable ad partners. NT Technology would be glad to help you with ad campaigns. Contact us here.
Read also
Read also