Managing your digital and non-broadcast media campaigns can be a time-consuming and tedious process. Without an automated and flexible media management system, you’ll be faced with manually actualizing and updating your campaigns, leaving your agency or media buying shop open to every kind of human error. 

Enter the Digital & Media Campaign Manager module from Advantage to make the whole process faster and easier than ever. It’s no surprise that this module is one of the most popular features with our media buying and planning clients. The Digital & Media Campaign Manager module helps you manage digital media campaigns and other non-broadcast media campaigns based on the plan-estimate details compared to actual Account Payable (AP) invoice details. This module offers you a real-time view of your plan-to-actual results and lets you easily actualize plans and roll forward the balances for any period within the plan. 

Let’s look at how Actualizing and Reporting in the Media Campaign Manager module can make tracking, analyzing and updating your campaigns easier. 

Actualizing

Actualizing mid-flight can be essential to understanding how your campaign is performing, what your spend is looking like and if you need to make any adjustments or updates to your orders. Without the right media management software, manually actualizing your campaigns line-by-line can be a laborious and error-prone process. 

In Advantage’s Digital & Media Campaign Manager module, Advantage provides an array of automated and convenient actualization options, including the ability to:

• Instantly update plans for your digital, newspaper, magazine and out-of-home (OOH) campaigns
  • View your Media Plan details compared to your AP invoice details
• Manually adjust planned impressions and spending when you need to
• Automatically roll forward remaining balances to next month, all months or by weighted spending percent
• Lock the budget and enforce load-balancing without changing the financial outcome of the campaign
• Create revised orders after actualizing to finalize the reconciliation and trigger updated billing as needed
• Examine the data on your campaign full-flight or drill down into specific periods, allowing you to see the progression of your campaign in segments or as a whole

While actualizing and rolling-forward balances is typically only needed for digital campaigns, the actualization features in Advantage are available for all non-broadcast media types. This makes it easy to manage all of your non-broadcast media campaigns in one place. 

Let’s look at an example of how this feature can help you run your media campaign more effectively: 

You have an internet campaign that goes from January to July. When you get your invoice in for February, you discover your actual spending came in short of your planned spending: what are you going to do with the remaining budget? In Advantage’s Digital & Media Campaign Manager module, you have a few options. You can simply actualize without rolling anything forward or affecting subsequent spend plans, but you can also roll that budgeted spend over to the next period, disperse it over each of the remaining periods evenly or break it up and distribute it by weighted percent (based on the planned spend for each subsequent period). Whatever you choose, once you actualize and save, your media plan will be updated with the new planned spend, saving you time and manual entry (and possibly calculation) that could lead to mistakes.

You can also use these same roll-over features for your planned impressions. If you’re shy of your planned impressions for one period, you can roll the remaining impressions over however you need to. Once actualized, your orders will be automatically updated in the system. 

Reporting

Once you have the details of your campaigns, you’re probably going to want that information synthesized and put into a clean report with charts and graphs that clearly present the data so that you can then deliver this to your clients. Building these reports and developing accompanying charts and graphs can also be a time-consuming, Excel-heavy process if you don’t have the right software to automatically create these reports for you.

Fortunately, the Advantage Digital & Media Campaign Manager enables you to create detailed, client-facing reports customized to your reporting needs. These reports include data like:

• Plan details against AP details based on a single or multiple estimates
• Campaign details like impressions (or other unit types), spending, revenue, remaining days/weeks/months
• Invoice indicators
• Full-flight summary or period details

With the Digital & Media Campaign Manager module, you can easily export the data grid as an Excel file and easy-to-understand charts and graphs as images. Create your charts based on the data that you need. 

Let’s say you’re using three vendors for your digital campaigns. You only want to see how your planned impressions are performing against the AP for one of those vendors. You can do that! Advantage makes it easy to build the chart or graph illustrating the data that’s relevant to your reporting needs. Plus, the data grid is fully user-definable. You can add in details that help you understand the performance of your campaign, and take away any unnecessary fields. 

Reporting is simple when you have the right software to consolidate your data and build your client-facing charts and graphs. 

The Advantage Digital & Media Campaign Manager module is built to be intuitive, with time-saving automated features that help you avoid human errors in the actualization process. If you already have Advantage Media but want to learn more about the powerful Digital & Media Campaign Manager module, feel free to contact support at 877-443-3311 or at softwaresupport@gotoadvantage.com. 

Interested in the Advantage Media platform? Schedule a demo and see it in action! Contact Sales@GoToAdvantage.com today. We’d love to help you find ways to manage your media campaigns more effectively.