Media Cost Center Datorama:
Linking Media Plan Data with Delivery

A typical Media Plan contains planning IDs, flight periods, cost types, rates per inventory, and other custom fields, relevant to the plan. Media Cost Center previously called, Datorama Media Cost Center uses these details to calculate the final costs for the delivered inventory from DSPs and Ad Serving platforms.

The below table is an example of a typical Media Plan. At the planning ID level, they still share the same overall budget of that plan even if multiple Placement IDs are associated with the same Planning Id. The table below can be uploaded in a “Buy data” stream of Total Connect that stores this Media Plan on a workspace level. It can be accessed from the Media Cost Center tab.

Note: Planning ID is mapped to “IO key” and Placement ID is mapped to the ‘Media Buy Key’ within the data stream.

Since the trafficked Placement ID is already present in the Media Plan, the same placements are captured from delivery streams within the workspace. Actualized costs and pacing are automatically calculated via Media Cost Center and can be used in dashboards.

Below is the DSP/Ad Server delivered data with trafficked Placement IDs, which Datorama’s Media Cost Center unifies with the Media Plan.

Due to Datorama’s robust data model, Placement IDs from both data streams are synced on the back end. Media Cost Center-related calculations are created automatically. The corresponding metric is selected and the final cost is calculated based on the “Cost Type” and “Rate” assigned to each Placement ID within the Media Plan.

For example, for the Placement IDs 111 and 222, because the Cost Type is CPC, Clicks delivered for these Placements are multiplied with the “Rate” to arrive at the final cost. Similarly, for Placement ID 333, Impressions are taken because it is a CPM cost type.

Note: Deliveries outside the Media Plan flights dates are ignored.

The table above shows the output for costs calculated by Media Cost Center after the union of Planning and Delivery data.

Media Cost Center Scenario: What if my Media Plan has no trafficked Placement IDs? How can I link my Planning and Delivery Data?

This is a common issue because not all Media Plan processes are robust enough to capture trafficked IDs in them. In this scenario, data must be studied, and a common link must be created based on the end user requirements. Let’s investigate one of the widely used solutions to this situation.

The Media Plan without the Trafficked IDs is illustrated below. Even though it doesn’t have placement IDs, this data is mapped in a “Buy Data” TotalConnect stream but, because Media Buy keys are not available, Planning IDs are not mapped. The remaining process is still the same.

The delivery team can create a link between the Media Plan and the Delivery Data by linking the “Planning ID”. This can be done by embedding the Planning ID into the Placement Name of the Campaign that’s being trafficked. Here, a defined taxonomy for Placement Name is followed that involves the inclusion of Planning IDs in the trafficked Placement Names.

For example, below is an example of Placement Names that have embedded Planning IDs.

The Planning IDs is obtained and stored in a new Media Buy Attribute dimension called “Extracted Planning Id” using a simple extract function within the data stream mapping. This way, we have created a table that has both Trafficked Placement ID (Media Buy Key) and the Extracted Planning ID. An exclusive report is created to get these two columns in a file as shown below:

This report is used to create another Buy data stream in addition to the one created from the previous file. In the new mapping, “Extracted Planning ID” is mapped to IO Key, while “Placement ID” is mapped to Media Buy Key. As discussed earlier, Buy data streams store data at the Workspace level, not the Data Stream level. As a result, the Placement IDs from the re-immersed Buy Data is automatically sync with the backend Media Cost Center Media Plan table, as shown below:

As you recall, this table is like the Planning Data one if it had trafficked Placement IDs from the beginning. By embedding the Planning ID in the taxonomy of a trafficked Placement name, we solve the linking issue between Media Plan and the delivery data and allow Media Cost Center to function optimally.

About Decision Foundry

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