The digital era is moving towards the next level with the immense amount of technological advancement and therefore this can be the best time to step up into advance reporting features. Programmatic advertising has evolved at a rapid pace but the reporting ecosystem hasn’t grown at the same pace. The lack of standardizations in operations has fuelled too many challenges, challenges which has led each partner in the programmatic ad delivery chain to adopt their own conventions, naming standards and levels of transparency and quality.
Most of the Adtech organizations commit a common mistake when tracking programmatic advertisisng is that they fail to form a plan for how data and reporting will be handled. Handling data and reporting with improper strategy can lead to multiple copies of different versions of the “same data” throughout the company. It will lead to duplicate efforts and decisions being made based on different data points. Following are some of the imperative steps to manage programmatic data.
Define the data process
The process of obtaining, aggregating and organizing data must be pre-defined and the responsible team or individual for development and ongoing maintenance must be clearly defined before initiating the process. This a crucial part of the process, obtaining and analyzing the same data must be ensured that someone will manage the setup if anything changes. There are three particular options for a publisher, namely:
- Obtain reports manually from numerous partners after which data can be organized and analyzed.
- Build APIs to transform the pull from various partners.
- A reporting and analytics solution to handle data collection, aggregation, and transformation
When comes to data management and handling, it is not a single time set-it-up –and-forgot –its process. They will be constant changes in vendor APIs and UIs, changes to fields offered and columns are an often occurring process.
Programmatic objective
Most organizations are out there with a broad goal of maximizing their revenue, and there are many paths towards optimizations. A more actionable strategy that is recommended is to narrow the scope. If you are running programmatic yield management for a publisher, the objective could be as simple as measuring revenue, eCPM, and fill rate across your demand partners.
Measure and track by identifying data
There are a couple of vital questions to be answered before proceeding with measuring and tracking.
- What are the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to be tracked to reach the target?
- What will be the total ad requests, paid impressions, monthly revenue, and eCPM?
By answering these questions we can create perfect reporting windows. The prevailing practice in the industry is to have an operational view to track revenue per-demand source. Establish a reporting window that can have operational view to track revenue per demand source. Additionally, a longer-term window to analyze performance can assist in deciding what the trends to adopt are. The metrics may differ with every partner and therefore data available from each source must be considered.
Implement and validate strategy with stakeholders
To ensure data presented is complete and accurate with each stakeholder objective, review reports and dashboards regularly. If there are any issues in the process then the review must get to it and normalize advertiser names across vendor systems and must be checked if it is precisely mapped across the columns. With quality solutions, these issues will be addressed and the alternative is to maintain a mapping file across each of your vendors and update it periodically because new advertisers are continuously coming on board.
Handling data and reports in programmatic advertising in a proper method will make a huge difference in the days to come. With efficient reports the ability to reach the right audience increases by fold thereby improving operational performance.