Itemized Advertising Costs

Track Advertising Fees Like Never Before

Bionic is the first media planning tool that properly tracks 100% of your advertising investments, including all those devious little ad technology and data fees. With its latest upgrade, Bionic gives you a level of advertising fee transparency that is unprecedented in media planning software.

With this new update, you can now:

• Itemize Your Advertising Fees – Bionic now enables you to establish a standard “chart of accounts” of advertising fees to be tracked in your media plans. You can use this to independently track every vendor in the supply chain. For example, DSP Platform Fee, Data Fee, Viewability Fee, Brand Safety Fee, etc. This serves as your foundation for consistent accounting of advertising fees.
• Establish Standard Pricing Structures – Bionic now enables you to establish default pricing structures for each advertising fee. This automates fee calculations based on your settings and eliminates errors and the rework needed to compute complex fee formulas.
• Apply Fees to Media Plans – This feature enables to you apply advertising fees where appropriate in your media plan on a line-by-line basis. You can also exclude line items where the fees don’t apply.
• Customize Your Costs – There will be cases when a line item does not follow the standard cost structure. Bionic enables you to override default pricing and fees when necessary. Every pricing customization is clearly marked on your media plan with a warning. It’s easy to reset to default.
• Report on Advertising Fees – You can now run reports on your advertising fees on a given campaign, for a given advertiser, and for your entire organization.
• Visualize Advertising Fees – Bionic enables you to see a visual breakdown of your advertising fees on an allocation chart that reveals both the money and the percentage being spent on each advertising fee. This enables you to clearly see how much of your investment is going into working media and to identify unnecessary or overpriced ancillary advertising fees.
• Every Fee Revealed in Your Media Plan – With Bionic, every advertising fee gets its own column in your media plan. This makes it easy for you to see where the fees are being applied and to see the total of each fee in your media plan. You can export all these fees to Excel along with your media plan.
• Standardization and Control – In this new update, only the Organization’s Administrator can add new fees or change the names of fees already in place. This prevents individual media planners from creating redundant costs, corrupting data in use, and making costs harder to track and analyze.

Organization Admin access is required for some of these controls. This access can be setup by Bionic Customer Support with approval from an authorized member of your team.

Manage Your Organizations Various Costs

Adding new costs, or modifying the name of existing costs is restricted to the Organization’s Administrator. This prevents version issues, redundant costs, and headaches later. Here’s an example of why this is important: if one media planner is calling a fee “Agency Compensation” and a second is calling it “Agency Comp”, those are two different names for the same cost. By giving the administrator control over creating new costs, we eliminate these errors.

The organization’s administrator can add new fees by:

1. Click on the organizations name in the top right side of the screen
2. Click on “Administration”
3. Click on the “Cost” tab
4. Click on “Add New Fee”

Adding a new cost is as simple as clicking the Add New Cost button and filling out the information in the modal.

 

Classifying Costs

Cost Type

In order to be able to correctly calculate numbers like “Net Media Cost,” “Total Media Cost,” and “Total Cost” Bionic needs to know when and where to apply the different fees.

• Production Cost is a cost associated with creating or producing media. This cost is applied after Net Media Cost (which is simply rate * quantity), and contributes to Total Media Cost.
• Agency Compensation is any cost charged to a client that goes directly to the agency. This also applies after Net Media Cost and contributes to the Total Media Cost.
• Delivery Cost is the fee for delivering media. This may include “Ad Serving” or “Ad Verification” fees. This applies after Total Media Cost, and contributes to the Total Cost.

 By selecting a “cost type” Bionic will be able to accurately calculate each of the costs listed above.

Cost Method

The cost method follows the industry standards for costing, and MUST be entered when entering a new cost. If you need a cost method that isn’t present, just contact us, and we’ll add it to the system, but we think we have all of them covered!

Rate and Overage Buffer

You have the option of leaving the Rate and Overage Buffer blank or entering a default. If you enter the default it will appear when media planners implement this cost into their plans, but it can be overridden, or excluded for specific advertiser clients, individual campaigns, or at the placement level.

Overage Buffer

The “Overage Buffer” field accommodates potential overspending from vendors such as Facebook and Google AdWords that build in buffers that results in them exceeding your set budgets by a designated percentage.

Adding a cost to an advertiser

Media planners (both users and admins) can add costs for advertisers. Essentially, if a cost is added to an advertiser, that fee will apply to all FUTURE campaigns, and will not be added to campaigns that are already built.

It’s easy to add Costs to your advertisers or campaigns. Just select an advertiser, and click on the Settings tab. From there you can select the existing Production Costs, Agency Compensation, and Delivery Costs that you want to include for that advertiser. Once included you can edit the rates and overage buffers to be applied for that advertiser.

Advertiser: https://bionicplanner.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/200675787 

Campaign: https://bionicplanner.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/sections/200688248

 

Setting Up Itemized Costs in Your Media Plan

Once you begin planning, the costs that you have added to the advertiser will automatically be applied to new campaigns—but campaigns already created will remain unchanged. You can edit the rate and overage buffer for the campaign if needed.

Just like you did for the advertiser you can add fees to a campaign (if they aren’t already there).

You can change the default value or overage buffer if required, however, you cannot change the “Cost Name” or “Cost Method.” Only an administrator can change the name, and the cost method cannot be changed once it is in use. Why? Because Bionic can’t do the math if the same cost is calculated differently in different campaigns. If you need to adjust the method, you will need to create a new cost.

Costs in plan: https://bionicplanner.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205091548

In Line Edit

Editing costs at the “line item level” is very easy in the new version, and there are various ways to accomplish these changes quickly.  When you click a fee, you’ll see the edit box, and you can see the equation used to get to the number within the box.  You can tab across a line.  To edit the contents of a cell you tabbed into, either press the down-arrow key, or use underlined hotkeys: “E” for edit, “X” for exclude, and “R” for reset.  

If you’re dealing with a flighted placement, you’ll have to either bulk edit the flight or adjust each placement in the flight.  Trying to change the flight header will not work. 

Here is an example of using the edit (or hitting “E” with the box highlighted)

Here I’ve excluded a cost, and now have the option to reset back to the default cost.

Bulk Edit

You can also select multiple rows and bulk edit.  Using the bulk editor, you can change the cost rate, change the cost buffer, exclude the cost, or reset the values in the rows you’ve selected. 

Video Tutorials

If you’d like to get more information about the upgrade, check out these two videos:

If you would like additional information about this functionality, or need assistance using it, please contact Bionic Customer Support via CHAT, email at [e-mail], or phone at [phone] Option 3.