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“Can we spend $30,000 by the end of June? $40,000? 100,000?!”
“How many impressions can we get with $75,000 for a campaign that’s targeting one zip code in North Dakota?!”
Media buyers and planners field these types of questions regularly, whether they’re managing ads for someone else or for their own brand.
As stressful as these questions can be, determining a campaign’s potential reach and scale doesn’t have to be a guessing game! Forecasting tools equip media buyers with the data they need to plan campaigns with confidence.
What is Forecasting?
Forecasting is a strategic media buying tool that analyzes data to generate predictions based on how a campaign is set-up. It provides information about projected spend and insight into how many impressions can be won, based on how a tactic has been set up.
Why Use Forecasting?
With forecasting, users are empowered to:
Forecasting with Basis
Powered by a proprietary algorithm, Basis’ forecasting technology generates predictions based on how each individual campaign is set-up. Our feature analyzes billions of impressions each day, allowing users to determine how many impressions are available, as well as how much they can spend, with confidence and speed.
As media buyers know, no two campaigns are identical. Market conditions shift constantly with inventory fluctuations and price changes, and audience sizes change daily as new web visitors are added to and removed from groups. Basis accounts for these and many other variations, informing users how to improve a campaign’s delivery in real-time.
Basis’ forecasting tool arms you with the necessary data to answer to any campaign question that comes your way. And it doesn’t stop there—Basis accompanies users through every step of the media buying journey, from planning to payment.
Questions? Connect with us to learn more.
Data from media buying doesn’t always translate easily to financial systems—with dynamic CPMs and fluctuating contracts, campaign data typically has to be pulled from multiple siloed systems, making monthly and quarterly reconciliation a major pain point for agencies. Finance teams are under even more scrutiny to perform with accuracy and speed.
Basis Technologies and FreeWheel partnered to build a robust API-level integration between their platforms, Basis and Strata, which connects digital media planning and execution with client billing and vendor payments. Together, the platforms present an automated solution to reduce financial risk, streamline billing and reconciliation, and generate trustworthy data.
Basis and Strata offload additional pressure by reducing manual labor - which decreases errors and accelerates processes that have undermined the capacity of accounts payable teams for decades. Review the benefits of this exciting partnership below!
Our two-way API connection protects margins by routinely sharing information between platforms, with accelerated billing and reconciliation processes to help improve cash flow. Collect payments faster by getting accurate invoices out on time and pay vendors right away.
Once an estimate ID is entered in Basis, information flows between the two platforms daily, liberating employees from manual-entry duties and allowing them to focus on more strategic assignments.
This integration eliminates the anxiety of a missed, revised, or updated media plan. The ongoing dialogue between Basis and Strata is designed to provide a single source of truth, so users can feel confident about the data in front of them.
It's as easy as...
Link—enable Strata Buying Management Software (SBMS) in Basis.
Plan—create campaigns in Basis and match them to estimates in SBMS.
Buy—execute omni-channel digital media buys in Basis.
Bill—data flows automatically from Basis to SBMS.
Are you ready to redefine your digital media business from planning to payment? Increase your operational efficiencies today! Basis’ integration with SBMS makes automated billing and financial reconciliation easy. For more information on Basis Technologies' partnership with FreeWheel, read the full press release.
If you’ve ever participated in a race of any kind, you know that most people typically don’t wake up the day of the event and start running (or at least you know that it's usually not optimal to do so). Instead, it's crucial to strategize, obtain the right gear, and prepare accordingly for the journey to come. A similar strategy can also apply to campaign optimization.
Make a Plan
Similar to training for a race—it helps to break-out optimal timeframes and set milestones that indicate future campaign achievements and ramp-up time. Plan thoroughly beforehand so that you're as agile as possible once the campaign begins.
For example, establish campaign checkpoints - and what constitutes success for each checkpoint, ahead of time.
There are multiple parameters within a campaign that contains valuable information—trying to analyze all of them at once can become overwhelming. Assign just a few of these parameters to each checkpoint to highlight them more effectively.
Use Available Resources
Have you ever tried tracking your speed, distance, and heart rate using an analog watch? It’s complicated! That's why apps and smartwatches were created—to measure those things automatically, so you can focus on the task at hand.
In the same way—leverage technology whenever possible throughout campaign execution. For example, Centro's comprehensive digital media platform, Basis, has three optimization engines that can help achieve KPIs. Basis' Optimizations Suite includes:
Stay Flexible
We all know that even the best-laid plans can go awry. Whether it's inclement weather at a race or an unexpected situation popping up during a campaign—a realistic planner should identify what conditions they have control over ahead of time, including a set protocol for how to handle or escalate any issues that may arise during a campaign. Keep communication lines open, and have open conversations amongst your team, in order to reassess, evolve, and improve your optimization strategy on a regular basis.
Crossing the finish line is a joyous experience—optimizing campaigns and achieving advertising goals should be too! Connect with us to learn more about how Basis can help campaign performance, here.
It’s Wednesday and while you enjoy that dark-roast coffee, you read the morning news from your tablet. An hour later, you are listening to your favorite songs from your phone as you ride the commuter train to work. When you arrive at the office, you fire up your laptop, and continue working on a research project you started earlier in the week. You look back at your phone to check the time, and do a quick scan of your social media accounts. Back to work! 11:40 am has arrived and you’ve been switching devices back and forth since you woke up. At the end of the day, once home, you buy tickets for a show on the weekend – you can’t recall how you know about the show, just that you want to go.
While you’ve been focused on information of interest all day, you’ve also been seeing ads and engaging with products along the way. And doing so from your phone, tablet, laptop, and sometimes from more than one device at the same time. As advertisers, it’s imperative to understand how to properly maximize the amount of exposure consumers have with our brands.
Cross-device targeting and tracking gives advertisers the ability to reach individuals on multiple touch points, providing a seamless experience across all devices. Centro has teamed up with Tapad to facilitate this in Basis. With the assistance of machine learning algorithms, Tapad’s technology uses probabilistic and deterministic data such as proximity, IP addresses, and app logins to help classify different devices as belonging to the same person. It collects over 250 billion data points per month to create these models so it can be as precise as possible!
By powering on this feature you can experience four key benefits:
In a world where users are constantly switching between devices, it’s imperative to be able to show them the right message in the right screen at the right time. Experience the benefits of cross-device targeting now in Basis!
If an ad appears on a website but users don’t have the opportunity to see it, was the ad really shown?
Every year billions of dollars are spent in display ads. Advertisers are consistently developing more creative units to attract and engage customers, while publishers continue to improve their sites so ad placements can be seen by visitors. However, not all ads have the chance to be looked at by humans, resulting in an unfortunate waste of ad dollars.
One of the mechanisms that has surfaced to address this problem is the introduction and standardization of viewability. The Media Rating Council (MRC) deems viewable an ad for which at least 50% of the pixels are in view for at least one continues second, to ensure that they can be seen by the human eye. Media-tech and mar-tech companies have developed two strategies to achieve this goal in the form of pre- and post-viewability solutions, both available in Basis.
Pre-bid viewability uses historical observations and measurements about an ad placement before making a bid on it. If the technology determines it meets the criteria chosen by the client, it will bid on the placement, otherwise it won’t. These are available as segments provided by some of our partners including: comScore, Double Verify and Peer 39.
Post-bid viewability is the true measurement of an impression, informing you if an ad was viewable or not. To introduce this in Basis, Centro has partnered with Pixalate – the first and only data platform with a comprehensive suite of products specifically built to bring transparency to programmatic advertising. They are a MRC accredited vendor for display ad viewability, and Sophisticated Invalid Traffic (SIVT) detection and filtration for desktop and mobile web traffic. Unlike other vendors, they provide a higher degree of transparency, supplying Basis users with information on viewability down to the placement level. Tracking viewability results can be done by enabling the feature in the campaign editor.
So which one should you use? The good news is you can implement both technologies at the same time to evaluate if you are achieving the goals you desire!
Applying a pre-bid segment with a viewability rate greater than 70% means that your ads will only bid on placements that have been categorized to have a high viewability rating, however you may want to know what these inventory sources are and what their exact rating is. Enabling post-bid viewability measurement will let you know exactly how many impressions purchased were measured, and viewable. Having this insight allows you to optimize inventory accordingly, or make changes to your campaign’s settings. Is a particular ad size or creative type having a better response than others? Is a placement in a site relevant to your product not performing the way you expect it to? Is web traffic on certain days higher, thus creating too many distractions for customers to see your ads? You can use all these data points to make the improvements in the way your campaign is set up to attain your end goal!
If you want to see our post-bid viewability in action, contact us today.
Digital advertising and campaign management is fast-paced. From a digital media team's perspective, strategists, planners, and buyers need to be able make quick updates and modifications. But the amount of manual effort required to plan campaigns means it's often hard to find time to continuously evaluate campaign performance and optimize towards success. With one of the busiest seasons right around the corner for marketers, finding ways to create efficiencies, improve the digital media workflow, and utilize the right tools and techniques are crucial building blocks for campaign success.
Basis DSP's new productivity tool, Bulk Editor, lets you make multiple changes simultaneously, so you spend less time modifying campaign settings and spend more time focusing on campaign strategies. Instead of going into individual campaigns to adjust settings, Bulk Editor allows you to make changes at once, which helps to speed up campaign set-up and free up time for strategic thinking and optimizations:
To learn more about Basis DSP, visit our website or email us at info@centro.net.