Effective Guide To Ad Operations

Every organization is different in terms of the work process or maintaining clients. Imagine you run a team in an Ad Ops team. Every day you receive hundreds of tasks, instructing you ad trafficker, managing your clients, checking the available hours, setting priority etc. Doing all of this is your job responsibility but you need to ensure accuracy, proper communication, advance idea, proper direction, complete delivery, error less delivery etc. in this complicated life, you need to ensure one thing that you are following the right guide to ensure your goal and scale up multitasking ability.

Technology is changing. Clients requirements are also changing dynamically. Clients need to be kept happy all the time by providing an established and well-documented campaign process. I have tried here to compile some best practice to follow if you want an effective ad operations process.

Campaign Launch process starting with a request from the client. This request may come in different ways like mail, shared document, automated software, excel sheet or any other way. Once you received the task your first duty is to send a confirmation. A strong ad ops workflow is necessary to keep the relation good with the client. So, upon your confirmation client can be sure that you have seen the task. Your next step is to properly gather the tasks and track the request. Use your effective resources to track the new items and progress of the existing. The necessity of this step is to properly standardize and automate the process to ensure that no requests go unanswered and that all information is properly gathered from the outset.

Ticketing is another vital and most useful thing in Ad ops workflow. A specific predefined and well standard process will help to ensure the logical, fast, consistent and easy workflow. Plenty of reasons behind using proper ticketing system, among them some common reasons are to remove confusion, less error chances and avoid under-delivery etc. Sorting the complex and priority task effectively will help to meet up the accurate client expectations/SLA and the estimated turnaround time. Without ticketing system assigning task was an complex issue but a proprietary system made it easy whether task is assigning by client account or by system.

Resource Allocation and Inventory Check are next step for move forward to build the campaigns effectively. Always check the availability of your inventory is included here but make sure you have best resource to maintain the different quarter. Not every quarter is same. Your resource is your main weapon, so having experienced and trained resources is the biggest plus point for your ad ops workflow. some experienced are highly expert in different platform, who are helpful for new task. Assigning the particular person in particular task will speed up your short term goal but be sure that all the resources are well organized and well acknowledge about their job description. Quickly check the inventory related issue once you got the ticket. Be thorough – do the hard work now to avoid unwanted issues later.

Pre-QA is your responsibility and first duty when you are ready to start the work. without pre-qa, if you start the task you are definitely moving towards the haphazard situations which will later cause time waste, unnecessary work and obviously it will increase your unnecessary work time. By doing this make sure your concept is clear toward the task you are going to perform and clear the confusion points from client. Best process is to maintain a Pre-QA checklist.

Trafficking clients campaign is the most important goal in your whole process, but not all the clients are same so documentation will help in this step to ensure and show your efficiency. Proper documentation for individual clients need is also helpful. Accurate and deep knowledge about trafficking will build some easy step to move forward. Communication and highlighting roles, responsibilities and expectations should be predefined. Be careful about the team when they are creating or building the campaigns. try to check every hour if any team is overloaded with work volume. Maintain a responsible and proper pipe with the client so that you can describe whats going on here with your team. before starting the campaign ask yourself if you are completed the analysis process for every term you found in the Media plan, RFP template or task mail etc. before putting any new targeting ensure that you have knew the exact effect about this input although you are instructed to follow the clients instruction.

Post-QA, Now you have set up the campaign and this campaign is ready to go live! Wait, take some time to re check the whole set up or the important part(revenue impact part). Challenge your best person to check the set up and find the error. Post-QA is more important because its ensure to establish that nothing far has slipped through the cracks. Remember before setting a campaign live the real QA list has to be completely checked off. it's an obvious step in the Ad Ops workflow. you can make your own QA checklist with the help of your best resources. Once you done with our QA, you can push to live the campaign upon clients approval.

Screenshot is the satisfaction for client that their ads are live and looks like this. Screenshots is most important because this is only thing which will lead to the new contract. Ad ops is changing every day, so clients are now aware of many things like targeting, viewability etc. Screenshots become increasingly important to clients in order to maintain consistency and accountability.

Reporting & Reconciliation is the last part from your end regarding the set up. by later you have to optimize daily and check the status of the campaign according to the schedule report. different ad server act differently in terms of Reporting & Reconciliation. This is result part of you effort so make sure your effort goes in the right directions.

Happy Ad Ops :)