Track Programmatic Sales Efficiently with an Advanced OMS

If you’re a publisher struggling with streamlining deals and forecasting, you’re not alone. Many publishers selling their inventory via a mix of programmatic and direct deals are still using spreadsheets to manually track deals, forecasting, and commissions. 

For many teams, there is no single destination that captures and consolidates all transactional data. The result is a logistical mess and many hours lost to double entry. The good news? The automation that comes with an advanced OMS can fill the void.

The contemporary OMS should be able to track programmatic sales and integrate with a CRM like Salesforce so that operations, accounting, and sales can efficiently visualize all of a publisher’s transactions and streamline dealmaking. This ensures all team members get proper credit for their work, and it centralizes intelligence so that every department can work in tandem to best serve advertisers and maximize revenue. 

Let’s dive into the costs of relying on an outdated OMS, how an advanced OMS automatically tracks programmatic and manual sales, and what the evolution of the OMS portends for the future of ad ops.

The cost of relying on manual deal reporting and forecasting

Publishers use various fulfillment channels to sell inventory. Inefficiency arises when transaction data is siloed across those channels and systems. For example, a publisher might have a system that automatically records data for direct sales, but that system often does not provide the same level of support for programmatic sales. As a result, the publisher might house this critical information in a Google Sheet, create representative orders in an OMS, or let the data live in the fulfillment platforms themselves. All of these are inefficient, siloed data storage methods.

These silos lead to great inefficiency. Each time someone needs to manually enter, transmit, or check data, they encounter a hitch that costs them the opportunity to save time and money, improve accuracy through automation, and deliver a better service to their clients. This inefficiency also presents internal challenges: for example, it prevents ad ops and sales teams from getting their CRO a holistic revenue picture because dollars are tracked in several different places.

Even worse, inefficient deal, commission, and finance reporting can undermine complementary business functions. For example, publishers have created integrated business processes like yield optimization around the OMS. If reporting for programmatic sales lies outside the OMS, yield analysis becomes harder. Publishers may struggle to answer fundamental questions such as whether they are selling the right segment of their inventory on the right channels at the right prices. That’s an inefficiency that cuts to the core of an ad-supported publisher’s business model.

How to track programmatic sales with an advanced OMS

An advanced OMS centralizes and streamlines reporting of both direct and programmatic sales so that publishers can easily keep track of the data in one place. This facilitates complementary business needs like yield optimization, accelerates analytics, and allows publishers to focus on serving their customers and innovating – not entering numbers into spreadsheets.

Data capture is the main capability an OMS brings to the table when it comes to tracking programmatic sales. The publisher has a product, a CPM against it, and dates for a campaign to run. The advanced OMS captures that basic information, plus metadata that it may want to attribute to the campaign and reflect in downstream reporting. Ultimately, that data should easily find its way to external systems with which the OMS integrates to facilitate reporting, measurement, and optimization.

In addition to data capture and ease of use, publishers evaluating an OMS need to consider whether it has been constructed to process both programmatic and direct transactions. Even some established order management systems are great at capturing the details that go into direct orders but are not built for programmatic deals. This can lead to the aforementioned inefficiencies and saddle publisher teams with manual or incomplete reporting. There is no reason to settle for an OMS not built to handle programmatic sales.

Ask more from your OMS

Ultimately, problems in reporting programmatic sales come down to learning to rethink how much business value an OMS should deliver. The contemporary OMS should not just complete basic business functions like reporting direct and programmatic deals (though, to be sure, not every OMS covers those bases). It should be a connection point for all the automation that goes into running a media business. 

A modern OMS should unlock advanced capabilities such as dynamic rate management, financial controls, and reconciliation without expensive API integrations between third-party systems. It should fuel cost savings, maximize revenue, and spur innovation that boosts overall business success and growth. 

So, publishers, ask whether your OMS is making reporting sales of all deal types easy. And once you’ve checked off that box, learn to ask more from your OMS.