Pace and Optimize Your Campaign Execution

Learning Objectives 

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe the challenge that marketers face in aligning their media plan with actual delivery.
  
• List the actions you need to take to set up the Media Transparency Center (MTC) for your organization.
  
• Outline the different procedures to take to associate IOs with delivery items.
  

The Media Plan

You learned about the two stages of media planning—the budget allocation plan and the media plan—in the first unit. Then you learned how the Media Planning Center (MPC) helps you create data-driven budget allocation plans that can increase your ROI.

During the second stage of media planning, advertisers like Isabelle and team create a media plan that breaks down the high-level budget allocation plan into specific advertising activities. A typical media plan includes details about each activity such as the asset, start and end dates, cost type, rate, maximum budget, and so on. This level of detail for each activity is sometimes referred to as an insertion order (or IO for short).  

Marketing Cloud Intelligence doesn’t have a dedicated tool for creating media plans at the IO (or IO-like) level. Marketers usually complete this stage of the process on other platforms dedicated to this purpose. However, after you create a media plan, the real challenge in fact begins during the pacing and optimization of its execution. Let’s see how Marketing Cloud Intelligence can help.

The Challenge and the Solution

Once their media plan is approved and executed, like all marketers, Isabelle and team face a profound challenge. Typically, each media plan is executed using multiple platforms, and each IO contains hundreds if not thousands of rows of daily activity. Reconciling an IO with its related delivery items is often extremely hard if not impossible to achieve in real time. Isabelle and team can’t see whether what was delivered is in line with what was supposed to have been delivered. 

This uncertainty prevents them from pacing and optimizing their campaigns in mid-flight because they can’t see how their media plan aligns with their delivery data. We designed the Media Transparency Center (or MTC) to address this very problem. It provides mechanisms to ingest planned data at the IO or IO-like level and align each IO with its related delivery items. In addition, it has a library of calculated measurements that allow you to manage, pace, and optimize your campaigns effectively and in mid-execution.  

Although the NTO use case that we describe here is from the advertiser’s perspective, publishers can also use the MTC in the ‘opposite direction.׳ Apart from the change in the direction of observance, the MTC functions exactly the same for them. Publishers can use the MTC to align their revenue plan (which details the revenue they expect to generate from website activity) with the actual delivery data that they ingest into Marketing Cloud Intelligence. This enables publishers to pace and optimize how they sell advertising space on their site to advertisers.  

Connecting IOs to delivery data is a unique Marketing Cloud Intelligence capability that allows you to keep your campaign pacing in check, as well as optimize or correct actions when required, all in mid-flight. 

Here are just a few questions that the MTC can help you answer about your campaign.

• What is the relationship between the progression of the campaign time frame and the consumption of the budget?
  
• Is it on track, under delivering, or over delivering?
  
• Has the budget been exceeded? And if so, on what date?
  
• Which placement used up most of the budget? Which used up the least?
  

Set Up the MTC

Let’s step back now and see how all this works. To get the MTC to do its magic, you need to accomplish two important set up tasks.   

• Translate the media plan data (or planned data) into MTC IOs
  
• Associate these IOs with their related delivery items
  

Create MTC IOs

To help you convert your planned data into IOs, Marketing Cloud Intelligence has developed a data stream type called ‘Buy Data.’ When you use the Buy Data data stream type, MTC ‘understands’ these IO entities and can automatically run functionalities and calculations based on these entity values. This makes life very easy for Isabelle because it means that she can upload a media plan as is and create IOs in the MTC at scale.  

Associate IOs with Delivery Items

Once you’ve created the IOs, you need to link them with their associated delivery items. This is in fact the heart and pulse of the MTC setup, and it’s what allows it to function in the way that it does. In order to create these associations at scale in an automated way, you must use carefully planned working procedures and naming conventions. The degree to which you plan and use these properly will determine the extent to which MTC can automate this association step.

Here’s a video that runs through the different methods you can use to associate IOs with delivery items.  

MTC Measurements

Once the MTC is set up, Isabelle has immediate access to an MTC library of calculated measurements. We developed these measurements based on real market use cases that we’ve seen during our years of experience in this space. The MTC generates these calculations through processing the IO entity values together with their associated delivery data. Trying to reproduce some of these sophisticated calculations outside of the MTC, without the built-in functionality and MTC infrastructure, is extremely challenging. 

So now that you know what problem the MTC solves and are aware of its setup requirements, in the next unit you learn about the Pacing app. You can think of this app as an extension of the MTC, and it’s in fact dependent on an MTC setup to function. Read on to find out how the Pacing app provides out-of-the-box pacing visualizations for the MTC.