Don't know where to start when you've decided it's time to look for a new ad management solution? Underscore's president shows you the way.
Whether you're an agency, network or publisher, you need ad serving, and while the reasons an agency might pick a particular partner for ad serving might be completely different from the reasons a publisher picks a partner, there are a number of commonalities in the process for picking that partner.
Conduct your needs assessment
This is the first critical step. There's nothing worse than engaging an ad serving partner only to find out later that you've inadvertently given a distinct advantage to a competitor who can provide features that you can't. The needs assessment sets your expectations from your ad serving partner in a number of critical categories.
They are:
- Serving: Can your potential partner serve the types of ads your clients want to run?
- Tracking: Can the partner tally the metrics that are important to your clients?
- Reporting: Can the partner provide reporting that displays the important metrics and carves up the performance data in the ways you and your clients need to see it?
- Service: What service options can the potential partner bring to the table in order to support your efforts?
Fortunately, the nature of competition in the ad serving business is such that few features exist in the first three categories that would give one vendor a significant advantage over another.
Of course, this assumes that you're comparing apples to apples by looking at publishing-side vendors as they compare to one another, and not how an agency server might compare to a network server.
You'll tend to find that vendors distinguish themselves largely through the service they're able to provide. Pay attention to all these factors, but pay particular attention to the levels of service you might need. Are you expecting your partner to traffic all ads for you? Do you know how quickly they can respond when something goes wrong?
Formulate an RFP
Once you've determined what you need, the worst thing you can do is begin dialogue with potential partners in a piecemeal fashion. What you want to do is let each vendor know they have a shot at your business based on how well they can address the needs you communicate at a cost that makes sense.
The best way to do that is to issue a Request for Proposal. You need to ask questions about the four critical categories I've outlined above. In particular, here are some of the things in my experience that tend to be overlooked:
- What are the limits on ad file types and sizes? Are there rich media ad types that require an external vendor? How big can an ad be before it incurs an additional bandwidth cost?
- What types of actions can be tracked and how difficult is it to implement tracking of advanced metrics?
- Can custom reports be created? If a client requires reporting in a specific format, can the vendor provide this? If so, is there an additional cost?
- Should something go wrong with a campaign, can the vendor bring resources to bear on a problem to get it fixed quickly? If the ad-ops queue gets backed up significantly, can the vendor step in to handle an overflow of traffic requests? What are the pricing structures for these support scenarios?
Of course, an ad-serving RFP also needs to cover the finer points of cost structure.
You'll find that sometimes advanced tracking, rich media and custom reporting may incur additional fees. You need to understand what these fees are before proposing any of these things to a client.
References are key
Ad-serving failures can literally bring your operation to a halt, costing you not only hard dollars, but also opportunity.
They do happen. It's very important to understand what happens when they do. I've found that the best way to do this is to have each potential partner submit three references. Those references should reflect clients who have had unique problems or service outages dealt with in a timely manner.
What you need to look for is responsiveness and effectiveness. A good ad serving partner will give you multiple points of contact that can receive phone calls, emails or other types of communication 24/7-- so that they are made aware of problems immediately and can begin working on them.
Every minute your ad serving is down costs you money, so you need to be reassured that help will be on its way promptly when problems come up. They will.
So is flexibility
As ad servers and the companies behind them grow larger, they can realize certain economies of scale. For instance, some ad serving companies are beginning to offer "all you can eat" plans.
The important thing to remember is that bandwidth gets cheaper over time, so locking in a favorable CPM might not be as important as the flexibility to change the model six months or a year down the road.
Conclusions
Keep all these things in mind when selecting your partner. Others in the business might tell you that ad serving is a commodity business, but you will find significant differences among ad serving companies, particularly in the areas of service and pricing models.
So don't be fooled.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com. Read full bio.