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

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All of us here at Digital hope you'll enjoy your Digital Training Academy, but we also hope you'll instantly be able to achieve more in your firm.

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Try to include the title of the Academy Lesson that your question relates to (if there is one). Putting this at the start will help other participants find the topics they are interested in.

The classroom is open for one month following your Academy and materials will stay here as a reference point for you for a further year.

Download_Traffic_Management_Exercise

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.

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.

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.
]]> http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/adtraffic/inventory_forecasting_hints_an/ http://www.digitaltrainingacademy.com/adtraffic/inventory_forecasting_hints_an/ Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:11:39 +0000 Designed for newcomers to the world of online ad trafficking, getting you up to speed with ad traffic processes and giving you a framework you can apply to future campaigns. This hands-on session for advertising operations teams teaches the basics of advertising trafficking and scheduling. It’s an orientation to the principles and theory, and a roadmap for applying them to your workflow. You’ll see how popular toolkits work them and get a clear picture of how trafficking fits into the bigger picture.