The rapidly changing programmatic advertising landscape makes campaign reporting difficult for the vendors that marketers work with. For instance, over the past year, several supply-side platforms (SSPs) began frequently using first-price auctions, in which the highest bid determines the amount of money the auction winner will pay. Previously, programmatic auctions almost always ran on a second-price setup, where the second-highest bid determines the clearing price.
The changing price structure became problematic for marketers because their demand-side platforms (DSPs) didn’t always make it clear what type of auction they were bidding into. Until DSPs started including auction-type variables in their reports, marketers struggled to anticipate how much they’d pay for impressions that they won. Thankfully for marketers, DSPs began fixing this issue.
Another issue that makes campaign report management difficult is that the data for a single campaign can be scattered across a plethora of different vendors.
"In an ideal world, we would have a solution that allows us to track all of our brand metrics with a single partner," said Carrie Dino, associate media director at ad agency Mekanism. "Some agencies invest in proprietary tools to aggregate all of this information, but it is a long and expensive process that still forces them to rely on outside data that is provided by third parties."
Campaign reporting is further complicated by the fact that each time a new trend emerges in digital ad buying, marketers demand additional data from their vendors. As ads.txt—a text file on publishers’ sites that lists all the vendors that are authorized to sell their inventory—gained popularity, marketers suddenly wanted the ability to filter inventory by whether or not it was ads.txt-compliant. Several vendors built ads.txt tools in their dashboards, but it took a few months because updates had to be scheduled, tested and integrated into their products.
Another area where marketers would like to see more detailed insights is in attribution, as more complicated multitouch attribution models give advertisers a clearer picture of what's driving sales than do last-touch models, according to Evan Fjeld, associate director of programmatic strategy at ad agency AKQA. In a survey of US senior marketing professionals by Winterberry Group and Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), respondents indicated that the demand for better reporting, measurement and attribution will be one of the most popular developments in digital advertising this year.