Ad sales operations need a new approach to ad trafficking
What do you think of when you think of ad trafficking? For many ad sellers, it’s a byword for a whole host of manual work and painful recurring chores.
First off, there’s the trafficking of ads into a campaign’s different channels through a range of platforms (like GAM, The Trade Desk, Meta, and Criteo, to name a few). And it only snowballs from there. Teams have to log in to these various platforms to set up a campaign; then they have to return to them all separately to get performance information, to find out how budgets are being spent, and to retrieve billable data to show if the ads actually ran.
All of this makes ad trafficking one of the most obvious areas of inefficiency to optimize for ad sellers. Now is the time for them to act. The growing capabilities of AI and a new opportunity to handle ad-trafficking through a central solution means ad ops teams should be able to optimize campaigns more effectively and work more efficiently with other departments, boosting productivity, revenue, and margins.
How ad trafficking is changing – and why it needs to
If you don’t have ad trafficking on your list of processes to optimize, you’re grossly underestimating the importance of what it means to do it well.
Relying on manual processes and data entry is asking for mistakes in campaign activation, optimization, and reporting. These errors translate into delays, revenue leakage, and unnecessary internal friction between sales, finance, and ops. Try to scale the business by selling offsite ads, meanwhile, and you’ll add even more complexity to the equation by giving your team extra ad-trafficking tasks to manage in different platforms.
If ad trafficking is error-prone or opaque, it’s impossible for you (let alone advertisers) to have full confidence and trust in the quality and robustness of your ad sales operation. Clients want to know how their budgets are being spent. And they want to know that ads are being accurately trafficked across omnichannel campaigns, ultimately guaranteeing maximum ROI. So you can be sure that the manual mode of ad trafficking will have a direct impact on your ability to win business and grow partnerships.
Treating ad trafficking as something that starts when creative arrives, and ends when a campaign goes live, is a thing of the past. Modern ad sellers are reframing ad trafficking from a discrete operational task into a connected, revenue-critical system. It’s a full-cycle workflow that begins with order creation and runs through launch, optimization, delivery, and reconciliation. And it touches sales, operations, and finance along the way.
Only with an end-to-end approach, connecting the sales team to the ad ops team that’s trafficking and then on to the finance team, can you start eliminating complexity and risk.
An operating system for ad sales transforms ad-trafficking efficiency
When ad trafficking is handled through a central solution, ad ops teams can optimize campaigns more effectively, reclaim lost productivity, and create smoother hand-offs across departments, all of which ladder up to more revenue.
An operating system for ad sales, such as AdSalesOS from Placements, integrates all the different campaign management platforms and interfaces into one consolidated view, making ad trafficking more straightforward. Ad ops teams can quickly check what’s going on across their ad platforms without the time-wasting hassle of leapfrogging and manual click paths. This superior level of integration also enables ad traffickers to collaborate with other departments and play a more strategic, cross-functional role.
AI is allowing ad sellers to lean further into this new role by reducing their ad-trafficking workload through automation. Instead of having to continuously monitor the performance of all their ad placements, an ad sales solution can automatically notify teams if a particular account or campaign falls below a performance threshold. And if any campaign optimizations need to be made, ad ops teams can leverage AI to do it for them.
AI gives everyone the power to improve ad sales efficiency
There’s a reluctance to fully embrace AI because many ad sellers don’t understand how it works and are therefore skeptical about the ROI. But the way we’re applying AI across our platform at Placements helps fill in teams’ skills gaps, rather than create new ones, lowering the bar to effectively managing ad sales.
We’re enabling our platform’s AI so that it’s not purely an LLM where you’ve got to be a clever prompt engineer to get the most out of its capabilities. Instead, teams can simply ask our AI agent for support on how to perform a task, or to take optimization action for them, such as updating the targeting of specific ad placements. We’ve seen agencies use an AI agent to quickly update dozens of lines in a campaign, for example, without having to reach out to a technical account manager to do it for them.
As companies increasingly search for a more efficient and cost-effective ad sales operation, an AI-powered operating system doesn’t just streamline complexity; it unlocks the ability to do more, regardless of a team’s skills. Ad sellers can use it not just to tighten the nuts and bolts of ad trafficking, but to maximize the value of their entire digital advertising business.
