Display Trafficking 101

What exactly does a display trafficker do? Well in all honesty, it’s a task that most people dislike doing because it’s very time consuming. This is why a position has been created solely for this task.

Trafficking is essentially puzzle solving. It is my daily responsibility to make sure every little piece of a puzzle has a home. It is important to look at trafficking in a strategic and organized manner.

There are many platforms out there that allow you to organize your brand’s display campaigns, but I spend my time working mainly with DoubleClick Campaign Management platform or called DCM.

Here’s a high level overview of my time as a trafficker:

1. I will receive a media plan that details out the goals and KPIs of a specific digital campaign with various publishers or networks that we partner with, similar to the one below:

My job is to organize this into DCM so that everything is tracked properly, which will in turn allow for the campaign to run smoothly.

2. Each of the above line items are a piece of the puzzle that need to be bucketed into a specific hierarchy in order for the campaign to run correctly. Think of DCM’s hierarchy as Russian Nesting Dolls. Here is diagram of the set up:

There can be multiple placements, ads and creatives within each of the larger dolls. This allows you to rotate out assets and optimize towards the strongest performing ones.

3. Once everything is organized into its correct doll, I can download HTML tags. These allow me to see what all is going to run and a sample of how it will look within a website.

4. If the HTML tags look good, I will send a tag sheet to all of the vendors that were dictated on the media plan. These vendors implement the tags on their end and send back confirmation when they go live.

5. While the campaign is live there are a few things that I am responsible for.

Pulling daily tracking to make sure everything is pacing evenly and we are on schedule to spend our planned budget in full.

Create weekly reports for each campaign that is live.

Weekly checks are done to see if there are any outperforming creative assets or ones that need to be taken out of rotation.

Rotate creative assets as they are scheduled to run and take down ones that are out of date. This is how we manage promotional changes and creative refreshes.

Assist in all optimization needs of the vendors.

6. Once the campaign is over, I will send wrap reports that encompass vendor, placement, creative and size performance at a granular level. This allows you to see how each piece of the puzzle performed.

Overall, a digital trafficker’s responsibility is to make sure that there are no holes in your puzzle. If there are holes, the campaign will not be successful. This makes digital traffickers = puzzle masters.