Stop giving money back!
No one sets out with a business model that requires giving money back for delivering valuable products. Yet, that’s effectively what most publishers are doing with Makegoods and over-delivery. Some have acknowledged the seriousness of the issue and have developed a patchwork of tools in Excel to do a better job of campaign management. However, these are rarely forward looking or timely to respond in business real-time to a poorly performing campaign.
There are many reasons for campaigns to under perform: the product was oversold, the forecast was wrong, trafficking errors were not caught, and, everyone’s favorite, ad serving delivery discrepancies. How serious is this issue? How about at least $400m annually in the US! That’s assuming just 5% of IAB’s estimate for display ad revenue ($3.8B for 1H09) is disputed. Our anecdotal discussions with publishers indicate that the number may be even higher.
The good news is that much of the loss can be mitigated by actively managing campaigns, early and frequently. Automation can easily replace the manual routine that most publishers find themselves in: log into third party ad server, export report, pull it into Excel, reconcile with primary ad server data; repeat for every third party ad server; repeat as many times a month as you can – realistically, just once. Oh by the way, account for changed passwords, misaligned data and just try to get the data right, forget about analysis.
For those of you stuck in this resource-sucking treadmill, we have good news.
Today we are announcing Operative.One Campaign360, a product that makes it easy for publishers to centrally manage and proactively monitor campaigns. It improves virtually every step of the campaign management process:
- “lights out” integration and collection of data from primary and third-party ad server
- Automatic reconciliation of primary and third party line items
- A simple, grid-based UI for manual reconciliation and overrides
- Robust analysis with pre-built graphs and reports for common tasks such as delivery discrepancy, pacing, top 10/bottom 10 campaigns
All the information that you need to do campaign management and billing is in one place, keeping you from having to do hours of leg work to collect the data, reconcile it, and create reports.
In other words, the product does all the heavy lifting and you focus on making sure that you get all the revenue that your sales team worked hard to book.
Based on our experience of 10 years working with publishers, we are really excited about the potential this product has in improving publisher operations. Learn more about the campaign management and discrepencies in our white paper, Making Peace with Discrepancies: Six Steps You Can Take to Proactively Manage Them, learn more about the product and contact us .