Jithin George started his Voiro journey in 2014 as Co-founder and Chief Product Officer. Having started his career as a software engineer at Oracle, he later moved to the US to work with Cisco. His experience in writing production-ready code and passion for building innovative products from the ground up gives Voiro its unique edge. His vision for Voiro is to build a creative product that helps solve unique challenges faced by organisations regarding content monetisation and revenue growth.
Any large organization dreams of having a single source of truth for revenue at their fingertips. Trusted, visible, and error-free. Sounds easy, but then, why do most large media organizations struggle with this? Many media organizations utilize advertising to monetise their content. Broadcast advertising tends to be spot-based and is relatively easier to manage when compared to digital. Digital ad inventory can be sold in a multitude of ways – CPM, CPC, CPD. Throw in different ad servers, multiple SSPs and things quickly get out of hand. Let’s dig a little deeper.
Different Revenue Models
Digital ad inventory can be sold as impressions (CPM), views (CPV), clicks (CPC), installs (CPI), or actions (CPA). For a publisher, it is no easy task to manually track ad campaigns and ensure revenue is calculated using the right metric for each campaign. Especially considering that larger media organizations probably run hundreds of campaigns simultaneously.
To complicate things further, not all these revenue models are supported by ad servers. For example, Google Ad Manager supports only CPM and CPC, but a sales team could well strike a deal based on views (CPV). Businesses handle this by using two separate metrics: a billable metric for their campaigns, and a goal metric for a line item. Juggling these metrics complicates revenue calculations even further, and doesn’t inspire much confidence in the veracity of revenue data.
Different Revenue Streams
Large media organizations rarely put all their eggs in one basket. They often split their inventory amongst multiple ad servers. For example, a business might use different ad servers for banners and videos. In addition, to get the most out of their inventory, they combine direct sales with programmatic sales. It is not uncommon for an organization to integrate with upwards of 10 programmatic partners (also known as supply-side partners, or SSPs).
No matter what their setup, at the end of the day these businesses want a single revenue figure. For a large media business, this would typically involve downloading a delivery report from each ad server, each SSP, and any other downstream systems. Combining this data means taking into account several different revenue models and metrics, and different currencies and exchange rates. It is an expensive, time-consuming, and highly error-prone adventure.
Over Delivery
Over-delivery happens when a campaign delivers more impressions than it is contracted to. Over-delivery is wasted inventory. While ad servers and ad operations folks generally keep a close eye on it, it does occur. An ad campaign might deliver 1.2 million impressions when the contracted deal allowed for just 1 million. The extra 200,000 impressions are lost and cannot count towards revenue.
Overrides
Now, imagine that you are responsible for reconciling revenue for your business at the end of the month. You have painstakingly downloaded reports from each revenue channel, used the correct revenue model, handled different currencies while applying up-to-date exchange rates, capped over delivery while double and triple checking all your work. And then an advertiser or agency disputes your delivery numbers because their third-party tracking says different!
This is a common occurrence and is usually handled by the two parties agreeing upon a revenue figure that overrides your own. You might also be in a situation where you offer an advertiser bonus impressions for an ad campaign which should not count towards revenue, again requiring an override.
Campaigns Spanning Multiple Billing Cycles
From a planning and execution point of view, businesses need to have a clear picture of the revenue delivered so far for the current billing cycle, and revenue booked for the current and upcoming billing cycles. When campaigns stretch across billing cycles, you have to carefully consider what was already delivered in previous billing cycles and what is still pending.
Since Revenue Reconciliation works in real time, clients can see their end of month billing cycles reduce by over 95%. Revenue Reconciliation handles campaign changes, multiple currencies, upsells, campaign truncations, disputes and a host of other revenue-impacting events thereby giving businesses a single source of revenue truth. With this product, companies can also get access and export standard reports, high level revenue reports, in-depth revenue breakdown reports for exploratory analysis, content, audience, demand analysis reports and revenue ledgers that can be imported directly into the accounting systems.