How marketers benefit from our new platform «goTom Marketer»

2020 was a crazy year! We acquired new clients, doubled our team, rented new office space – which we didn’t need after all thanks to Covid – and faced a pandemic for the first time. From the home office, we worked diligently toward a goal: The launch of our new «Marketer» platform , which I would like to introduce to you in this post.

goTom was originally built from the perspective of a publisher selling its own website inventory. When we launched as an independent company in 2015, it was clear to us that the trend in the industry would continue to move towards third-party marketing. High reach is ultimately attractive to advertisers and with the appropriate products, a marketing company can optimize its revenues.

However, the marketing of third-party inventory also increases the demands on a commercial processing system. As a marketer, you not only serve the advertising clients, but also the inventory providers (publishers). We have continuously developed goTom in this direction over the last few years – but we have taken the biggest step in the last few months.

With our new «Marketer» features, goTom has been designed to meet the complex needs of large marketers. It allows to define contractual relationships with hundreds of website publishers and to run campaigns across the entire network. goTom communicates with the ad server and monitors the delivery on placement level per website. Subsequently, credits are calculated and automatically generated for each publisher in the network. Receipts are sent directly from goTom and financial data is transferred to an ERP or accounting system. In the following sections I will introduce you to our new features without going into every detail.

Publisher Contract Management

The fact that goTom is able to map specific and complex product structures as well as price lists for digital advertising products has long been appreciated by our customers. Now, complex contract rules can also be managed for different clients. These define which placements from the connected ad servers belong to which publisher and how exactly they are to be billed. For example, fixed conditions (CPMs, CPcV, etc.) or rev shares can be defined. In addition, specific conditions for certain customers, agencies or products can be defined within the contract. Minimum margins can also be set in the contract, which are then checked in the booking process. In this way, goTom ensures that placements that would fall short of the defined contract conditions are excluded during delivery.

Block lists

Marketers sell network products in which hundreds of different websites are bundled. Advertisers sometimes have requirements for delivery within the network. For example, it may be that the advertising of advertiser “Y” should never run on website “X”, even though the website is part of the network. Conversely, it is also possible that the operator of the website does not want the advertising of specific advertisers to be delivered on his site. goTom solves these requirements via so-called “block lists”. With each booking, these placements are then automatically excluded by goTom.

Planning and delivery of IO campaigns

In goTom, offers can be easily created for advertisers based on predefined products and the customer conditions. For marketers, these offers usually include the network products mentioned (e.g. Halfpage Ad, Run of Network). Within the network, the campaign is then delivered to various publishers. Different contract conditions and minimum revenue guarantees are agreed with these publishers. In addition, different placements within the network offer a more relevant environment or better performance, which contribute to the success of the advertising campaign. The product management team of a marketer can take these factors into account and configure the traffic weighting within this network product.

Such complex settings can be defined within our «Marketer» platform. When planning a campaign, factors such as minimum margin, blacklists, and the weighting of delivery within the network are taken into account and transmitted to the ad server. Various line items are created in the ad server for this purpose. The delivery data is then tracked and made available in monitoring.

Programmatic

While programmatic advertising offers advertisers many new ways to reach customers, it also makes things much more complex for marketers. This is because they also offer their products via the programmatic channel – often involving several supply side platforms (SSPs). The complexity is that revenue from open auctions and private deals must also be factored into publisher credits. For this, goTom pulls the relevant revenue data via the SSPs’ APIs and uses it, along with the IO revenue, to calculate the correct credit for the client. For SSPs or other revenue sources that are not yet connected via an API, we now provide a practical import tool.

Publisher billing

At the beginning of each new month, the payments to various publishers are due. goTom automatically calculates the credit to be paid to the publisher based on the delivery of the campaigns and the various contract settings. For this purpose, as mentioned before, the programmatic sales are also taken into account.

The credit note and detailed reporting can be generated at the push of a button and automatically sent to the publisher by e-mail. Subsequently, the financial information including the necessary revenue accounts is transferred to the connected ERP system.