Inventory Forecasting

This is a pretty broad request and is complicated by many factors. To start with, how are you selling ads now and how do you estimate how many impressions are available for selling? Do you server a remnant ad now to track 'unused' inventory?

Patrick, 

DoubleClick for Small Business does this and I think it might be what April is looking for.  It's really hard on Adsys (or whatever it's called now days) to be able to tell if you have impressions available to sell unless you keep this gigantic spreadsheet.  

So on DoubleClick you can do a "Check Inventory" and input position type (300x250) what section (front, news etc) and run dates and see how many impressions are available.  Additionally it will show you what ads are running during that time.  The end result would say "there are 100,000 impressions available out of 200,000 impressions"

Christian

How does DoubleClick know how many impressions are available? BLOX Ad Manager can be queried how many ads have been served in a time period - but it has no idea how much inventory is available or how much has been sold.

Conversations in the past have talked about delivering a 'blank' ad when all ads on a position no longer meet the requirements. These blank ad serves can be tracked and serve as a basis for estimating inventory. The problem with this approach is that it will likely mean that inheritance can't be used in ad manager for a site that wants to track inventory this way.

Patrick, If I remember correctly it was based on an average of impressions that page had received in the past.  example...    Home Page has an average of 70k for the last 3 months. You currently have 63k impressions (based on limits) scheduled it would give you a notices you have 7k left... I think a time or two we got a red bar graph or red message because we 'over-scheduled'  

But I remember it being slot based... but after 2 years my memory may be a little faulty.

Patrick,
Since Double Click is a Google product it learns the history of the site over several months and can deliver at least "historical" estimations of impressions remaining.

One issues I've had while helping our sister paper that uses it with their BLOX site is that there are issues in tracking when you try to section target currently. But the ROS positions seem to be working fine.

This is one of the biggest shortcomings I see and have with the BLOX advertising admin as we use it.

The only forecasting report in BLOX right now is the monthly forecast report which is based on historical delivery and is estimate of remaining inventory for the current month. That report is available in the Statistics > Ad Manager > Monthly Forecast report. The report is based on the remaining number of days in the current month and gives a break down by postiion, ad, and ad/position combinations.

We could modify this report to allow you to specify a date range and perform our estimation on this supplied date range. For that report to be effective, an ad would always have to be served which could either be a house ad or a remnant ad. Another search criteria items could be position and section tag. If we made some of these changes, would this be helpful for some of the reporting needs you have?