Your Academy Director and lead tutor is Danny Meadows-Klue: Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com

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Neat and clean ad server administration is the key to efficiency, productivity and optimal campaign performance for every trafficker. It impacts every aspect of your day to day work; from inventory management, to trafficking, ad delivery and reporting.

Do you really need to target down to the 5th navigation level pages? Probably not! You know what the sales team really sells. Speak to the sales manager. Forget the “nice to have” and “maybe one day we will...”factors. The more general you can structure your site contents in the ad server, the better. Lesser contents mean easier (re-)targeting, more stabile inventory forecasting and campaign delivery, not to mention the tagging job. And you don’t have to print the content delivery report on A2 poster paper anymore.

Create set groupings of commonly used content selections

Creating content categories/targets/rotations which are commonly sold as a package, e.g. women related contents, will make your job easier. Again, this impact targeting, inventory forecasting and reporting. Try not to modify them too often. Stability means accuracy.

Use keyword targeting for temporary smaller contents

Best example are news articles. Tag them as generic as possible. If you need to deliver a campaign to that particular page use keyword=pageID. If you tag the page content specific you will soon end up with thousands of areas/zones/placements that clutter up your ad server. And you won’t ever need then again.

Try not to auto-generate ad server contents and tags too much

Prepare for a battle with your webmaster as they won’t like it. But experience has shown again and again that the more dynamic the ad tags are injected into the page HTML by the by the CMS/JavaScript/etc, the more erroneous zones/areas/placements end up in the ad server contents. We’ve all seen it! The content structure becomes messier by the day. Try to find a safe yet flexible solution with the webmaster.

Do regular maintenance and clean up your contents

Whether its legacy data or changes to your contents. Regular clean ups, maintenance work and check ups are important to keep your ad server, inventory and campaigns perform at an optimum.

1. Be cautious in your predictions
2. Learn about your site; build up your intuition as to what the traffic levels are in the different zones
3. Have a contingency; if one site is full can you use behavioural targeting to deliver the extra volume? Can run-of-site be used to deliver part of the volume?
4. Explore ways to extend the campaign duration, or upweighting the delivery rate within the ad server.
5. Look for how different creative executions could deliver greater response.
6. Consider further campaign optimisation techniques.

Here are a few tips that may help:

1. Set up a very long testing period, give yourself weeks rather than days
2. Get specific training from the tech vendor supplying the service
3. Schedule time and responsibility for one team member to really investigate new products; take them out of the operational role of campaign booking and management to work on development for X hours per month
4. Teaching the sales team about exactly what products can be sold, in what way, and what they deliver; make clear that all new products need to have an operational 'thumbs up' before they can be out in the market as an ad product. You might need to get a 'thumbs up' from the teams responsible for content (product/editorial teams), and another 'thumbs up' from the tech team - see who all the stakeholders are. If it's a completely new format does it need user testing (not just for the technology's stability, but for customer experience)

Here are a few ideas from your Academy:

1. Getting the sales team to communicate the deadlines
2. Putting the deadlines on the IO
3. Being more proactive about getting creative in on time
4. Keep a record of all your chasing emails; never delete those 'sent items'
5. Agreeing who will chase for late copy, when and how
6. Don't be shy of calling; email isn't the only route!
7. When copy arrives try checking straight away; if you spot a problem it gives everyone time to sort it out
8. The Friday @ 5 problem: Look for the signs of potential delay before you reach Friday
9. Adding links to a specs and deadlines page from email footers
10. Be cautious about start dates if there's a hint that the agency may decide to let them 'drift'; remember what's in the contract and have a mechanism for handling changes to contracts
11. Review your specs quarterly; are there some new things that should now be on them? Are there some common challenges your team all share?
12. Have a standard structure for copy-chasing emails; maybe 7 days and 2 days? Consider who has the control and responsibility for copy-chasing.

· Consider yourselves an part of the wider sales department. Without Sales, Adops can't function, without Adops, Sales can't function. Both teams are of equal importance. This reduces the "them and us" which can develop between sales and adops.

· Be commercially aware. Every booking that goes through your hands represents significant value to the sales person, agency, advertiser and business as a whole. Adops do have an influence over hitting the revenue targets, sales can sell the booking but adops deliver the booking.

· Customer Service, always provide a high level of customer service via email, phone, turnaround times etc.

· Be honest. If you make a mistake scheduling a campaign (and you will!) hold your hands up and say I made a mistake. Every one makes mistakes, it's human, we learn from them, put new processes in place to try and prevent the same error from occurring again. However if you make an excuse, Agencies will be irritated and see through it, if you are honest the wind is taken out of angry sales immediately. Honesty really is the best policy.

Since 2000 Geisla Turner has been exploring online advertising operations and now runs the ad ops team at CNET Networks in London. Geisla sits on our Academy Steering Board and when she dropped by at our last Academy, we asked her for a few extra hints and tips to share for how to approach inventory forecasting.

.    Build up your intuition about the website; you can't beat your instincts. Start by doing manual forecasting so you get a real sense of the data and how traffic behaves on your site
.    Remember that things are never 100%: you can't be perfect in forecasting, but you can be methodological and conservative. And always factor in that contingency so there's no danger you won't have the inventory that's been booked.
]]> .    Ask Sales to provide ALL targeting criteria at point of request, including frequency capping and Geo targeting.
.    Work with the technology vendors to understand what your existing adserver or data management tools can do
.    Think about buying an 'inventory manager' solution to help you get the numbers more accurate and to manage more complex forecasts. Push the vendors regarding testing and implementation to ensure the product you buy suits your business needs.
.    Longer term the development of reach and frequency currencies will create new types of challenges for ad ops teams
.    Automating your workflow process is the key to greater efficiency

Download 012_training_traffic_forecasting_inventory_2.pdf