Ad Serving Backend Question (Development/code-related)

Published by: Laura McKay , 247sports.com, us
Published on: August 22, 2012

Hi Monsters,
The development team is working on a project to streamline the way our ads are served on the backend. They showed me a prototype yesterday that really shocked me so I wanted to see if anyone else was working this way. I’ll use a simplified newspaper model as an example for their approach.
Basically, we would create ads and placements only as they were needed and delete them as we were finished. Our inventory would be blind until it was sold. So when we sell the Sports Section Photo Galleries we would go into the site admin/CMS and create those ads tags, create them in the ad server, and then create the campaign in the ad server and traffic the ad. Then when the campaign is over, we’re supposed to delete that “ad path” from the CMS only keeping paths live as they were what the developers see as relevant because they are actively sold. So unless we had an ad sold to the Lifestyle or Business sections, those impressions would fall to bulk network tags.
Are any of you manually manipulating the inventory on your sites like this? I guess I should say that we’re doing about 120M impressions per month to a 50-site network. My level of visibility for forecasting would be whatever was gathered in Google Analytics.
Is this as ludacris as it sounds or do I need to shift my thinking?
Thanks for the reality check,
Laura

Comments

#1 Rainey Smith - August 31, 2012

Hey Laura,

I fully agree with Nath...you really need that visibility and in order to get it, those tags have to be on site. With the new DFP Premium, he's right...there don't have to be ads running but there DO have to be tags on the page...I think this is one of the few servers that is pulling data for forecasting without running ads. I know the DART Legacy product did not.

I love the idea...because it would clean up the code and I can totally see why your dev team wants to do it...but sadly, dev and ads don't always see eye to eye. :-)

Google Analytics is not a good method of forecasting...it's like using the weather report to predict stock prices.

Rainey
www.oncalladops.com

#2 Nathan Farrugia - August 30, 2012

Hi Laura,

It does seem rather ludacris, Depends on how frequent the sections get sold plus what is the benefit of deleting the tags on the site if the campaign was finished? It may save on some small ad serving costs, that's all I can think of.

The benefit of leaving your tags live are so you can drill down in forecasting to those categories Lifestyle or Business. One of the only good things with the new DFP is, you don't need to be serving an ad to that particular category in order to forecast against it. Google analytics reports very differently to DFP. In my experience nearly 50% less than DFP does. That could be 50% extra revenue you could of sold.

In my opinion they should stay on so you have much greater visibility in forecasting and what options you have to sell

Hope that helps.

Cheers,

Nath
www.designalicious.com.au