4.4.3 Check Availability for Exclusive Products

Why use Check Availability for Exclusive Products?

Not all your Inventory is connected to an AdServer or an external system which manages the availability of products. For print products, for example, you still want to watch how many items you're selling, as you have only a limited number of pages to offer or let's say you selling your coverage/back cover, which is only available once per issue. You can also use this to manage your digital products. If you're selling a takeover of a certain site (only one item will be sold per day) you can use the ADvendio logic to see if there are any other Campaign Items already booked in your desired time frame, instead of receiving the number of available Impressions from your AdServer.

This is where Check Availability for Exclusive Products can support you. At the click of a button you can see:

  • Is the item you're currently planning still available & how many units are left

  • If not, what is blocking your booking?

You can use this feature in addition to the 4.9 Booking Calendar or without it

How to configure your Inventory for this feature?

To use this feature, you will need to do some configuration on your inventory. You will need to set, how many units are available for sale, how long a typical booking goes (per day, per week, per month) and also which further fields are relevant for calculation. These settings will be done on the Ad Price object.

To get an overview of the different settings and how to meet your use cases, take a look at our wiki pages about the Inventory Forecast and Booking Calendar setup:

https://advendio.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SO/pages/3282173955

https://advendio.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SO/pages/3356688385

To make sure your Campaign Items will use the check availability for exclusive products feature, the checkbox Exclusive is set to true. This is especially important if you want to use this for digital products, which normally would use the Check Availability from the AdServer, without these settings. For all other cases, we prepared a Workflow Rule in ADvendio, to set the required fields. You can of course also deactivate this rule and apply your own logic, if needed for specific use cases.

Check Availability for your Campaign Items

Similar to using the Booking Calendar you can now check whether your item is available for that period, Publication Date or Content you have selected in your Media Campaign or Media Configuration.

Media Configuration Availability Check

  1. Open the Media Configuration for the Media Campaign you need the availability for.

  2. Select the "Check Availability button".

  3. A modal window opens that shows you the Availability check as described below.

The information will be saved to your Campaign Item once you save it from the Media Configuration.

Media Campaign Availability Check

Please take note that the results from the Exclusivity Check will not be saved to your Campaign Items when starting the job from the Campaign Item Related List.

  1. Navigate to the Media Campaigns Related List of all Campaign Items.

  2. Select the items you would like to test the availability for.

  3. Click on the Check Availability Button. 

A new window shows up, which shows your selected items and the current status of the process.

Once the process is done, you'll see for each item, if they are available or not. You can also click on the Item name, to expand the view and see more details, like an exact number of available units or contending items.

 
Hit the Back button to return to the campaign. If you also have digital items selected the process proceeds as described in 4.4.1 Check AdServer Availabilities

No Maximum Applicability Unit

If your inventory does not have a Maximum Applicability Unit entered the Exclusivity Check will take the unit Day as default.

Contending Items

As soon as the Availability Check starts the system checks for contending items.

Content

When you are using Contents the Availability Check helps you to check if the selected contents are still available.

Please check out our Wiki page about Contents to understand the workflow of Content selection in preparation for the Availability Check.

After submitting the Availability request you see the value Requested Contents which was filled by you and you see the Available Contents shown due to the highest availability possible.


Availability scenarios:

Availability checking in ADvendio generally supports two types of modes:

The system is checking if Campaign Items:

  • availability is exclusive OR

  • availability is connected to an external system (external Adserver)

In cases of Exception:

Campaign Item Exclusive check box is overriding other availability settings, even if it is different to the data in Ad Price check box. For example, if both Adserver availability and exclusive availability are presented, the system will perform an exclusive check, not an AdServer check. Campaign Item exclusive checkbox is set by Campaign builder and media configuration to the exclusive checkbox value from the Ad Price.

 

Possible scenarios of Campaign Item values:

Is Ad Price Exclusive?

Is Campaign Item Exclusive?

Is Ad Type connected? (Connection linked)

Expected values taken account/check started

Is Ad Price Exclusive?

Is Campaign Item Exclusive?

Is Ad Type connected? (Connection linked)

Expected values taken account/check started

yes

yes

yes

check exclusive availability

yes

no

yes

check adserver availability

no

yes

yes

check exclusive availability

no

no

yes

check adserver availability

yes

yes

no

check exclusive availability

yes

no

no

not forecastable

no

yes

no

check exclusive availability

no

no

no

not forecastable