Intelligent campaign management through alerts and recommendation framework
Programmatic ad space has become an essential part of the modern ad industry. By 2021, it has been projected that more than 88% of the display marketing through digital means would be done programmatically in the US[1]. Traders, who play a key role in the programmatic ad business model, ensure that the budget allocated for advertising in these ad-tech companies is well managed, at the same time ensuring that the success metrics set by the clients are met.
To make the trader’s lives easier for them to handle these intricacies that are attached to the campaign management life-cycle, we introduce alerts and recommendation frameworks.
Through this blog, we will try to understand some of the details of the alerts and recommendation framework which helps traders make near real-time changes and adjustments to optimize campaigns.
There are three components to the system in place currently; traders alerted on the campaign pace, budget caps as well as adherence to brand safety based on certain criteria.
Campaign Pacing
One of the key delivery metrics for campaigns is impressions in many cases. Most engagements that come to a programmatic advertiser are campaigns that are a function of flight, budget booked as well as the target secured. Pacing tells the trader if the campaign is over-delivering or under-delivering and if the campaign needs to be adjusted and by how much, for the remainder of the flight.
The above pacing chart, for the Month to Day Impressions Pacing, shows some of the most vital information that can help the trader manage the campaign. Percentage delivery of overall, Month Day delivered impressions, Month to Day Target, and Overall Pacing are to name a few.
This chart, in particular, is more representative of the campaign delivering more than the targeted amount, which alerts the traders to ‘go easy’ on the budget and lower down the daily budget allocation. On the other hand, we also have the daily (previous day) chart on the right to show what the pacing has been for the day-level delivery. In the above chart for Yesterday Client Impressions Pacing, we have the campaign under pace, i.e., under deliver as per the expected daily impressions delivery target, and these KPIs help traders plan accordingly, thereby increasing the delivery for the upcoming day.
We flag a campaign as Over or Under paced based on some calculations and thresholds. This is also followed by a recommendation to the trader for the increase or decrease in the number of impressions, which helps them from an actionability point of view.
Budget Cap
Another aspect of alerting traders is the Budget Allocation and Capping factor. For every campaign with multiple line items in action, it becomes tedious for traders to keep track of the percentage budget spent of the total allocated, and line items that are on the verge of capping out in terms of budget. This is where the alerting mechanism comes into play, they essentially alert the traders about the campaigns that hit budget cap (for a set threshold), which is when the traders can control the bidding amount, so as to avoid overspending any budget.
For example, if a campaign is allocated a daily budget of $100, the dollar amount needs to be distributed equally amongst all the hours of the day. It is anomalous if the campaign spends 100% of the daily budget in the first half or even the first few hours of the flight or if the budget is distributed unevenly. This leads to the other half of the day being idle for the campaign, which is when there might have been great opportunities that the campaign missed on bidding.
Hence, this is where the budget cap alerts notify traders if their daily budget caps out at x% and at what hour of the day so that they can optimize their bidding strategies.
It is crucial to track these metrics if there are hundreds of campaigns for the traders to monitor in a day, and the alerts and recommendation framework makes it easier for them to do so.
As shown in the table above, there are other metrics to keep in mind when monitoring the daily budget for the campaigns like CPM, Base Bid CPM, and Clearing to Base Bid CPM ratio. These metrics indicate the gap between clearing CPM and the Base Bid so that they are able to make decisions on which line items in the campaign can decrease the base bid to make more margins.
Brand Safety and Exclusion List Inventory Stats
Brand Safety is for campaign management is a key to successful campaign performance. Adherence to Inclusion List provided by the clients or prevent targeting on the Site Domain Exclusion List is very crucial. To protect the brand image of these clients, advertising partners need to ensure that the rules are followed thoroughly, as unmonitored delivery on restricted domains can put the client’s brand at risk.
Based on the properties of campaign management in the brand safety aspect, there are certain metrics that are key to the trader’s list. For example, out of a budget of 100 impressions set for the campaigns, what is the percentage that delivered outside of the seller inclusion list or on-site domain exclusion list. This is something that traders need to monitor closely, to ensure a healthy engagement with the client. There are certain targets that the traders need to ensure in this area of performance, i.e., maintaining x% adherence to regional inventory lists and this is what we help the traders, with the alerts and recommendation framework in place.
Impact of the alerts and recommendation framework
Campaign health monitoring is an essential component for the programmatic advertising partners in the market and this is where tools and technologies such as these can help the companies to improve on their performance KPIs. By alerting traders on some of the key components of the campaign, we can maintain a lot of the aspects of these campaigns out of a list of thousand campaigns running simultaneously, as the end goal is to ensure that all campaigns are optimized and in healthy state.
- The framework helps tackle some of the daily issues that campaigns face, like bringing down the percentage of campaigns that are over or under pace by more than x% on a daily basis
- Another aspect of budget spending is the percentage of campaigns that spend more than 30% of their budget in the last 7 days of the month. With the introduction of the framework, we have been able to bring that percentage of campaigns down
- To keep a control on the impressions delivered on restricted domains as well as delivering only on the Seller Inclusion lists, the alerts framework has helped to ensure brand safety to a greater degree
We are constantly working on improving the alerts and recommendation framework for our traders to provide them real-time signals related to these campaigns and even provide ‘one-click solution to optimizing all their campaigns with ‘red flags’. With the programmatic landscape rapidly evolving, there’s no stop to the level of granularity that we can provide these solutions.
