This article outlines some best practices for ad operations teams (AdOps) who use TAP from Triton Digital.
Campaign Preparation and Building
Set Campaign Goals
Understand what the client (advertiser/agency) is looking to achieve. Communicate with your sales rep to determine the client’s objective. Once you have a good grasp of the client’s goals, you will be in a better position to make optimization recommendations later.
Use Consistent Naming
Make sure you have a consistent naming convention for advertisers, campaign names, flight names, creative names, etc. This will make searching and reporting much easier and consistent.
Know your Network
Know all the stations you are responsible for. Sometimes an advertiser does not specify any targeting criteria. In that case you can use your knowledge of their objectives along with your understanding of how your network is composed to help them achieve success. For example, by restricting delivery to the advertiser’s country to prevent "lost" impressions. Understanding when traffic peaks and drops (day of the week as well as time of the day) is also essential to helping your client achieve their goals.
Campaign Execution
Assignments
Make sure to assign both a sales rep (account executive) AND a trafficker to all of your campaigns. This helps with:
Chasing down creative
Identifying where the Ad Ops might need help (e.g., flights OTI per team member helps you have the conversation with them and see if they need training or help in understanding how to optimize their flights)
Helps the Sales executives with Sales reports.
QA
Be detail-oriented and do not shy away from doing a round of QA once you have completed the campaign entry. Make sure all the advertiser’s requirements are met, and all boxes are checked. Ideally this should not be done by the same person who created the campaign, but rather by a colleague.
Also see: AdOps Quality Assurance Checklist
Communication
Once campaign creation is completed, confirm everything is in order with both your sales rep and advertiser.
Campaign Management
Creative
Make sure you have detailed technical requirements and that they are shared with your clients. (This is often appended to the contract.)
Check regularly which flights are missing creative so you can remind your advertiser ahead of time that you are still expecting creative for their campaign.
How to find campaigns with missing creative:
In the TAP Homepage, the quick filter is set to show Missing creative by default.
Change how many flights are exposed to the maximum items per page.
Sort the table by Start Date.
Export the table. Note: Only the displayed page will export; repeat for subsequent pages if needed (you only need missing creative flights with start date up to a week from now).
Late Creative
Despite your reminders to your client, they might still be late when sending the creative. Here are some recommendations:
Re-check avails, using the day of received creative to end of campaign. if impressions are no longer available make sure to communicate with the Sales Rep. The advertiser might be open to extending the end date or to reducing the impression goal.
Change the start date of the flight to the date the creative was received, to insure your OTI is always on point. (On Track Indicator is calculated based on the flight duration, the impression goal, remaining days for completion, as well as remaining impressions to deliver.) Make sure your clients are aware of this policy.
When creative is received:
Check that it matches your requirements/specs.
Test all trackers (find links to helpful tools in this article about Third-Party Trackers).
If a VAST tag was provided, check that it contains at least an audio file. Also check for banners and trackers as you will want to test them as well. (For more information, see this article about Third-Party Trackers.)
Once creative is entered, confirm it is in place with both the Sales rep and the advertiser.
Monitor
Throughout the lifetime of your campaign, check the health of the flights (OTI). Get this information via TAP and the flight table.
How to get OTI information:
In the TAP Flights list, set the filter to:
Status: active
End Date: On or Before a month from now
Change the number of items showing to the maximum items per page
Export all pages of results to Excel files.
In Excel, create a master report by copying each exported report into one report
Using Custom Sort:
Sort by the OTI column (Smallest to Largest)
Then by Flight End Date (Oldest to Newest)
Optimize
If you need to do more than change the priority level or pacing to optimize a flight, make sure you get your client’s approval. Knowing your client’s campaign objective and your network composition, combined with different scenario analysis, should help you in your optimization recommendations to your client.
Analysis and Report
Run detailed reports, as they will provide insights and trends such as which day of the week generates the most impression delivery, and which creative performed better. You will need to understand what you are looking for and which of the TAP reports will help you achieve your analysis.
TAP Explore: Robust query tool which allows you to create customized reports.
Affidavits: Static advertiser or campaign reports. Displays daily impression delivery per campaign, per flight, and per station/podcast.
Campaign Creative report: Provides insight on creative performance for a given campaign.
Documentation
All your documentation should be shared with all new employees in Ad Operations and stored in an easily accessible shared space. Make sure all documentation is maintained and updated regularly.
This includes:
Best practises, which reflects your company and your team’s mission.
Step-by-step procedures, screenshots, and examples of different type of campaign scenarios you encounter.
Detailed technical specifications and requirements.
Descriptions of each of your stations/podcasts (content, genre, demographics, traffic trends, release calendars, schedules).