Introduction:
One of YuktaMedia’s US-based Customer is a large Publisher Network with over 1,500 Publishers (mostly local TV stations and news publications). They are responsible for monetizing inventory for these Publishers in their network using their proprietary CMS and inventory monetization services. This Customer uses Google Ad Manager (GAM) and more than twenty-three other DSPs, Ad Networks to monetize their traffic.
Before this Publisher Network became YuktaMedia customer, it was facing all of the issues mentioned below, despite using a market leading data aggregation and reporting tool for almost 3-4 years. Even though they wanted to find an alternative to their current vendor, they were tied up in a long-term contract and would have to pay huge penalties for breaking the existing contract.
Problems and Impact:
- Delayed and Inaccurate Billing and Reconciliation: The month-end billing and invoicing process involved compiling reports from various ad servers with different reporting metrics and checking for any discrepancies. Finalizing billing and reconciliation used to take between 60 – 90 days. It was also prone to errors and adjustments were needed frequently. This created a negative customer experience and also created legal and financial liability for the Customer. Publishers in the network would call repeatedly to find out the status of their payments. Once the payments were processed, they would call back again to discrepancies and other issues with their payouts.
- No Revenue Visibility to Publishers in network: Customer’s Publishers would get monthly reports that showed their revenue and other details. They did not have a separate Dashboard for themselves to track revenue, revenue share, etc. Due to this lack of visibility Network Publishers were unable to do any dynamic revenue yield optimization which was a big point of frustration and potential revenue loss for them.
- Rudimentary Yield Optimization: The Customer did not have any Ad Hoc Yield Optimization tool which could readily tell if a campaign is underperforming and if programmatic floor values set in ad sever needed to be changed for maximizing yield. The key question was how could one optimize revenue of 1,500 + ad units across 25+ Demand Partners? The scale was so huge that it was humanely impossible to really manage it. Tracking lost opportunities was a time-consuming task as data was not readily available. Underperforming campaigns or discrepancies were found at a later stage resulting in loss of revenue.
- No visibility to Executives: There was no way for Customer’s Executive team to get overview of the entire business on a single dashboard. They were dependent excel reports which were created after compiling many different reports. Reports coming from different teams like Ad Ops, Revenue Ops and Sales show different numbers for the same KPIs. This made the Executives skeptical inspite of various teams spending around a day or more each creating these reports, taking their time away from their actual work resulting in a negative impact on the business. Executives had a hard time tracking their goals and telling a larger story to their boards and investors based on true data.
- Big Data Mess: As the Customer’s teams were dependent on reports from various Ad Servers, there was no centralized place to keep the data. Few of the Ad Servers archived data which was more than 90 days old. Thus, there was no way for the team to retrieve that data if needed for ad ops, yield management, billing and reconciliation purposes. The data size of the files was so large, that opening xls / csv files was a struggle. This would take countless hours just to put the reports together and get any meaningful analysis from it. Till then the opportunity was lost and issues become critical with large impact.
Solution and Impact:
This Customer decided to deploy with YuktaOne Media ERP after doing a small PoC (proof of concept) in which they were able to view their own data in YuktaOne Media ERP. Here’s how YuktaOne Media ERP helped them automate and run their Ad Ops and Revenue Ops aspects of their business efficiently and unlock additional revenue opportunities:
- Using the Billing app in YuktaOne, Customer’s Finance team was able to generate Invoices and Payouts to both Publisher directly from the App. Reconciliation was done on a daily basis and didn’t have to wait until end of the month. To ensure data accuracy, over 50+ validation checks were implemented at each data processing stage. As a result, the billing process and monthly accounting period closing was reduced to 15 days after the end of the month and manual errors were completely removed. This was an 83% improvement in accounting period close time. In addition to that approval process was put in place for SOX compliance.
- YuktaOne Dashboard provided a holistic view (programmatic, non-programmatic, mobile, video, display, etc.) of the entire business on a single dashboard. Infact multiple role-specific dashboard were created as per the needs of the team so that they could track KPIs that were relevant to them. The Management was able to customize the view and the data they needed to make strategic decisions by tracking KPIs such as revenue and profitability. This helped them in making strategic decisions on the fly. Not only that, teams were able to set up alerts for tracking critical events so that YuktaOne was able to tell when the events occurred, and teams were able to take timely data-driven actions.
- The Customer was able to provide secure and role-based access to its Network Publisher via YuktaOne. This made Publisher extremely happy as they were able to now see their revenue data in real-time and use it for improving their yield. They were also able to collaborate with the Customer’s support team via YuktaOne itself which improve Customer satisfaction and internal support auditing capabilities. Publishers would get email every time monthly payment was processed. Customer’s support team saw 60% drop in the support calls coming from Publishers in the network as the data was now readily available via the Publisher portal in YuktaOne.
- The Customer’s sales team was able to identify high value pockets of inventories and use that information to create pricing and packing of their display, mobile and web inventory. Sales team could look at sell through rate, fill rate, eCPM trends and Demand Partner buying patterns to as per their need. Something that would take hours and days to model was now readily available so that the team could focus on advance analysis as opposed to data gathering.
- Data management which was earlier a nightmare was completely automated and the Customer’s team didn’t have to spend any time on it. Every time there was a new Publisher or Demand Partner that needed to be onboarded, team YuktaMedia and YuktaOne Media ERP took care of it. The Customer didn’t have to keep team of engineers to manage this. On top of this, all business data was available since the start of the partnership and kept for historical data analysis and trend plotting.
All in all, this Customer has been happily working with YutkaMedia for 3 years now. YuktaOne is used by more than 1,500 Publishers in this Customer’s network every day and revenue for more than 2 billion monthly impressions is optimized by a team of no more than 2 people.