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Date Ranges and Shared Tags - Reporting Discrepancies of Third Party Served Advertising and Terms

Time:2010-01-21 19:41:12 Source:Ezinearticles Author:Daniel Dowling

While there are many challenges with third party reporting, when it comes time to prepare proper billing, some can be more problematic than others. One that I've been spending a lot of time with lately has to do with agencies wanting to report their own numbers, but not getting it right.

The single most common error I see with agency prepared numbers is that they often pull the entire monthly delivery for the tag. So, let's say the line item ran from the 15th to the 25th of any given month. It is most accurate to report on only 11 days of delivery, the 15th through the 25th. Often however, I get challenges from the agencies that our numbers are low. After a little investigation, I find that I can recreate the agency numbers exactly if I include every day of the month. However, as noted above, the line didn't run from the 1st to the 14th, nor did it run from the 26th to the last day.

The agency is taking the easy way out and creating work for the publisher by challenging our numbers without doing the reporting properly. I encourage challenges and generally like the process of investigating issues, but the challenger needs to both believe they are right and believe their process is sound. The final decision should go to accuracy, not expediency. When an agency doesn't understand the numbers well enough to understand that a 1 day flight needs to be billed for delivery numbers from that day and that day only, they should know that they aren't managing the delivery, only the purchase of it. Bringing in the testing and setup impressions by including dates before the line item went live, is neither accurate nor proper. Similarly, including impressions resulting from cached delivery, inactive users, and other technical delays that occurred after the line item ended is not entirely correct. I say entirely because there are time zone issues that, depending on the specifics of the setup and reporting, can cause issues.

The next issue that continues to crop up, is the sharing and grouping of tags. This occurs when there is not a 1 to 1 relationship between the publisher's line items and the 3ps vendor's line items and the publisher has to try to discern where they went. A quick example, the agency sends you a single creative with single tracking for 3 placements. The 3 placements are a homepage roadblock running on the 12th, An index page banner running only in Dallas and only on Wednesdays for the entire Month, and lastly a content page in some site section somewhere. To make it interesting, let's say the CPMs for them are $25 for the homepage, $20 for the geo targeted ad and $10 for the content page.

Remember that all these placements are being served on a single tracking tag from whatever vendor they are hosted by. So we do the math and bill it. A month or three later the agency comes back and challenges. Good, we like challenges. But, we will look at our math first and check all the handling indicators and re-run the report before looking at anything from them, this prevents us from potentially defending an obvious error and will help get a clear and fresh understanding of the nuances of the report itself.

If, during the investigation, we see flags that there was tag sharing in the report a pretty good assumption can be made about the agency challenge. We can be about 80% sure that when we open the report we will see one of two very common errors. The agency has no way of knowing how many impressions were served to each placement without the publisher's numbers since the sharing of the tag obscured them on the vendor side into a single bucket.

What we will see is that the agency has either assigned all the delivery for the tag to only one of the placements OR the agency has assigned all of the delivery to all of the placements.

Here's how the math works. So let's say that their vendor reported 90,000 impressions total and the publisher reported 100,000, for a variance of -10%. But the publisher knows that they served 50,000 to the homepage, 40,000 to the Wednesday Dallas placement and 10,000 to the content page.

The agency has either put all 90,000 impressions against one of the placements and left the other 2 blank, or they have put 90,000 impressions on each of the placements, reporting a total 3 times actual delivery for those line items. Obviously, neither of these assertions is correct. In fact, there is no way for the agency to determine exactly where the impressions went.

The publisher, who knows where they served the impressions, can make a reasonable estimate using the proportional math method. In this case the publisher would calculate that given a total -10% variance between the vendor's numbers and their own, that the vendor's numbers for each placement should be 90% of the publisher's. They can assign delivery of 90% of their numbers to each placement. What we are saying is that the variance is fairly stable across the 3 placements, so we will arbitrarily assign the delivery based on the publisher's proportions, but the vendor's total delivery.

In this case the assumed third party numbers would be 45,000 for the homepage, 36,000 for the Dallas Wednesday and 9,000 for the content page, coming to a total of 90,000, exactly the number reported by the vendor.

The ironic part is that the agencies are often requesting billing revisions that will actually result in their client's bill going up. If I were an advertiser, I would have trouble with that stance by someone I am paying to be my agent.

Among the possible solutions are that agencies bring their technical capabilities up to par, or at the least understand their own limitations. It can take years to build a system that can reconcile complicated contracts and delivery; you can't simply pull raw data from dozens of vendors and expect it to be usable without normalization. Agencies need to determine if they are up to that challenge and if not, admit it.

Most agencies will find that it is a challenge that they don't even want to rise to, since there is really no incentive for them to absorb the costs. As it stands now, most large publishers carry this burden for the agencies and thus for the advertiser. The publisher has to reconcile vendor numbers from all the various media vendors large and small, from Atlas to Zedo. But at least they only have to reconcile them against their own numbers. If the agencies tried to do it, they would need to reconcile against all the vendors and all the publishers. That would be a challenge that no one should want.

Daniel Dowling is a Senior Analyst with a top 10 online publisher. With a primary focus on reporting and analyzing third party serving and tracking data

Mr. Dowling has a deep understanding of the reporting issues publishers face. Additional material can be located at Mr. Dowling's website located at http://thirdpartyadvertising.lostmyring.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Daniel_Dowling

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