Yield Forecast

Yield Forecast is the way your teams can visually see your future inventory and its fill rate and yield. It gives them a list of your standard Ad Products with the corresponding availability forecast so they can always understand how much is still possible to sell and what will be the effective eCPMs for those Ad Products according to the currently booked campaigns.

The Yield Forecast is divided into two sections:

1. Yield forecast overview: this is your ad sales and business users interface. They can pick date ranges and see both the overall inventory as well as the breakdown by the Ad Products pre-built for them, no configuration or custom reporting required.
2. Yield forecast settings: this is your ad operation managers settings area, where existing Ad Products can be edited and new ones created, and overall settings configured, such as how each Ad Product will be broken down by or what is your defined Paid priority for each channel.

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Initial setup

In order to first use the Yield forecast the "Paid Inventory Priorities" must be set via the Forecast Settings page. This is what lets you decide which Priorities should be considered unsold, for example any House-level ad priority. Here you define which is the lowest of the paid Priorities you have, for each of the channels you have in the network

Yield forecast overview

All inventory

The Yield forecast overview section lets you quickly and visually see your future inventory and how it breaks down between sold and free per time period. The default time period is per Day, but you can adjust that along (to Week or Month) with the overall time window using the settings at the top. You can also adjust the sample level used, if you'd want to increase the quality of the forecast while being able to wait a little longer for the results to come through.

The Yield forecast overview also provides a summary of KPIs for that time period:

Total: Your entire inventory
Available Total: Total unsold inventory
Booked: Total sold inventory

Sell-through: Percentage of impressions that are sold (booked). This is impressions booked / total impressions
Booked revenue: Total monetary revenue from the booked impressions, as set in the Flight's fields (CPC, CPA, CPM)
eCPM all traffic: Average effective revenue per thousand impressions across all traffic
eCPM booked ads: Average effective revenue per thousand impressions of the sold (booked) impressions

Ad Product breakdown

Just below All inventory you'll find a list of all your Active Ad Products, group by pre-configured dimensions, along with their forecasted metrics for Impressions, Clicks and Yield. Hover on any of the metrics to see their definition and use the table to quickly spot highest revenue areas, average eCPMs your inventory is being monetised at, the lowest sell-through and with these the areas your team could be focusing on to improve the overall Yield.

Yield forecast settings

The Yield forecast settings is where you can manage Ad Products and overall settings that shape the way the Yield forecast behaves and how each Ad Product is broken down by in the overview.

Ad Product manager

The Ad Product manager is where you can list, create, update and delete Ad Products and select which ones will be visible for everyone in your team in the Yield forecast overview.

An Ad Product typically represents one of these two purposes:

1. The business-driven products, packages or bundles that your sales team or self-serve interface show to your advertisers. Common examples include: Hero banner on home page, Sponsored search results, Premium takeover, Sponsored Brand units on product category pages, In-app video unit, Audience targeted Checkout recommended product.
2. Inventory views, or divisions, that your business wants to see forecast metrics for. Common examples include:
   1. By medium, e.g.: Web, In-app, In-store
   2. By business unit, e.g. Retail, Marketplace (for Retailers with a Marketplace business line)
   3. By ad type, e.g.: Search, Display, Video
   4. By Region/Market, e.g.: EU, US, UK

When you first open the forecast settings you start by seeing the list of Ad Products already defined:

From here you can Activate which ones will be visible for everyone seeing the Yield forecast overview as well as edit any existing Ad Product or create a new one.

Creating a new Ad Product

Start by clicking on the Create an ad product button and you'll be asked for a name, which will be visible as part of the listing on the Yield forecast overview once the Ad product is Active, and an optional description:

You'll then be immediately sent to edit the first Targeting set for that Ad Product. An Ad Product can have one or more Targeting Sets, each one representing a different set of price and priority. If an Ad Product has a single price and priority, its likely you'll only need one Targeting Set. Targeting Sets are akin to Flights in the Kevel campaign structure

You'll start by setting the Priority, Rate type and Price for the Targeting Set. For business ad products, these should match to how the corresponding campaign will eventually run when booked. For inventory views, e.g. "Web" the priority should be set at your lowest, so that you can see all campaigns running at any priority as booked, exception being if you want to see by "Web - premium" in which case you would select your Premium priority. Rate type and price influence the split between booked and available when used alongside Auction-style priorities.

Afterwards you'll fill in all targeting criteria that applies to the Ad Product, in the same way you would for a Kevel Flight, with the difference that there are no ads, instead you define which Ad Types are allowed to run as part of the Targeting Set. This effectively enables you to have a forecast for multiple Ad Types.

By default All ad types are selected, but you can restrict to a subset.

Once saved, you'll get back to the list of Targeting Sets for the Ad Product, and you'll be able to navigate back to the list of Ad Products, where you can choose which to make Active in the Yield forecast overview:

Network settings

Next to the Ad Product manager, you'll find a list of network-wide settings that apply to the Yield forecast.

Multi-winner ratio: this lets you experiment with alternative approaches Forecast takes on how you handle the responses Kevel provides in each Ad Decision Request (ADR). There is a network default and when experimenting with different settings you will see a warning that you're using a non-default setting. When using a non-default setting all your Yield forecast reports will take significantly longer to run, so it is advisable to only change this setting temporarily and if you want to change the default you can request it from Kevel Customer Support. You can find additional details about multi-winner ratios in the Kevel forecast overview section

Group by: lets you choose the dimensions by which to display each of the Ad Products as in the Yield forecast overview. Typically these would be dimensions such as Site Id, Zone and/or Ad Type, but you can choose your own and in which order to have them.

Filter Group by: lets you decide which rows in the group by results you want to hide, by their resulting values. For example, you could elect to hide any results under 1000 impressions when grouping by $keyword using the expressions impressions >= 1000 in this field.

Sampling: Sets the default sample level used when opening the Yield forecast overview. The quality of the forecast increases at the expense of results taking a little longer for the results to come through. The level of sampling varies between 0 and 3, with 3 providing the quickest response and 0 the highest accuracy. By default this is set to 3.

Default Date Range: The default look-ahead time span to show in the Yield forecast overview.

Default Date Aggregation: The default aggregation to use in the Yield forecast overview, choices are Day, Week and Month

Inventory Priorities: This is what lets you decide which Priorities should be considered unsold, for example any House-level ad priority. Here you define which is the lowest of the paid Priorities you have, for each of the channels you have in the network.