As you begin your journey with Bionic, here are some things to keep in mind that can assist you with making decisions about how your company will operate in Bionic going forward.
How you decide to setup and structure your data in Bionic should be driven based on what you want to track and how you want to report on it – to your clients (or internally if you are in-house marketing), to management, and to finance.
Advertisers
Advertisers either represent your clients, if you're an agency, or your own company/internal departments if you are an in-house marketing team.
Hierarchy
Since your campaign data all rolls back up to Advertisers, think about how you might need to break out your Advertisers to provide the reporting you need. It may be as simple as using individual Advertisers to represent either a client or your company. Or you may need to break it out by department, brand, location, or another way (use Parent Advertisers to create hierarchy). Really, it all just goes back to budgeting. Don’t worry, it’s easy to change later if you need to.
Security
Say you have competing clients, or simply restrict access to clients for those that work with them. Access to clients can be restricted at the Advertiser levels (by default everyone has access). Users will not be able to see any data with each Advertiser unless they have specifically been given access.
Campaigns
Campaigns are typically based around an advertising initiative tying back to a specific budget. This might be an event, an objective, a month, a year, or any other way you may think about budgets.
Agency Compensation
Like other settings, default Agency Compensation can be set within an Advertiser to flow to campaigns, and can be overwritten for individual campaigns or line items.
You may also have multiple compensation plans (within the same campaign) based on channel or other criteria, for which you can also setup defaults and specify within individual line items.
Media Plans
Media Plans live within your campaigns, and contain the all of the placement details, costs, KPIs and more. When building out your plans, think about what data you will need in your reporting (for both external and internal needs), as well as how performance data will tie back to each placement (if you're utilizing the performance function).
Some things that will help guide you in the right direction:
Production and/or Delivery Costs you need to track
Do you have any production costs that will apply for any ads that you have running? What about ad serving fees or any other type of delivery cost? We offer a number of common costs by default - if you need other options, an Administrator user can set them up.
Custom Data (Picklist Columns)
Take a look at the default fields that we provide you with in the media plan, is there anything missing that your company needs to track? You can always add custom picklists to your media plans to keep track of data that doesn't necessarily fit within the default fields we provide. These picklist values can be included in your flowchart and allocation reports.
Placement Names
By default, Bionic's placement name consists of the Program and Product fields. If you need a different naming convention for your placement name, that can be changed. All we need are the fields you need included in your placement name configuration and your preferred delimiter. Here are the fields that can be used to configure placement names:
- Ad Unit
- Bionic ID
- Product
- Program
- Targeting
- Custom Picklists
We also support coded values for picklists being used. We can help you set up the picklist values so that when you select a certain value the code will appear within the placement name.
Reporting
What data do you need to appear within your reports? Thinking about this will allow you to first, make sure all of the necessary data has been included in your media plans and second, help you to establish the perfect customized flowchart views so that when you pull reports for your client or an internal department all the data they need to see is included.
Performance Data Integrations
Maybe Performance integration is a key reason you signed up for Bionic. Remember that performance data can only tie back to placements that exist in Bionic. Spend some time first understanding the media plan and how you want things setup to ensure that relationship will flow correctly.
- Are you recording performance data based on ad unit (ie. 728x90, 300x250, etc.)?
- Or another identifier such as creative type?
Your placements should reflect this to ensure you have a separate placement for each identifier.
Then, let's take a look the integrations you need.
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