Release date: April 15, 2021
A key benefits of using a media planning software is to track your media expenses and remaining budgets.
MediaPlanHQ always provided many tools to define budgets, schedule ads with cost calculations and generate reports based on your planned/actuals costs to facilitate this important monitoring task.
But, MediaPlanHQ did not take into consideration the distribution of costs when your media insertion had multiple run dates. Let's see a simple example:
Imagine you book a newspaper ad running on each Saturday of March (4 run dates: March6, March13, March20, and March27) at 2000$/day (4spots x 2000$ = 8000$), you'd define the following media insertion:
So far, so good. But if you look at the blocking chart with a week timeline, you'll notice that the total cost was allocated to the week of March 1st:
That's because MediaPlanHQ distributes costs based on the start date only.
A workaround to properly distribute the cost is to create multiple line items:
Which distributes the cost properly in the different weeks:
But that's a lot of data entry to distribute cost properly. This is a simple example, but may become more complex if you allocate quantities by days or weeks.
With this release, MediaPlanHQ now provides an option to define the cost distribution method to use in your account including to automatically distribute cost on all applicable run dates.
Note that this feature as been in beta for a long time. In fact, you might already have it enabled if you created your account between 2019-2021. If you like your current cost distribution behaviour, leave everything as-is.
Let's have a look how it works...
Understanding the cost distribution on all applicable run dates methods
At its core, the new cost distribution method determines the applicable dates of each line item and distributes the cost based on the quantities for each valid date.
The system uses the start/end date and applicable days to determine the valid dates. It uses the quantity by days or quantity by weeks to determine the quantities for each valid date.
Let's have a look at a few example with their cost distribution:
Example #1: Ad running on weekends in March
March 6, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
March 7, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
March 13, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
March 14, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
March 20, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
March 21, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
March 27, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
March 28, 2021 | 1 | 2000$ |
Total | 8 day | 16000$ (8 x 2000$/day) |
Example #2: Ad running every day in the first week of March with different quantity by day
March 1, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 2, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 3, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 4, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 5, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 6, 2021 | 5 | 500$ |
March 7, 2021 | 5 | 500$ |
Total | 20 spots |
2000$ (20 x 100$/spot) |
Example #3: Ad running weekends in March with pulsing quantity by week
March 6, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 7, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 13, 2021 | 4 | 400$ |
March 14, 2021 | 4 | 400$ |
March 20, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 21, 2021 | 2 | 200$ |
March 27, 2021 | 4 | 400$ |
March 28, 2021 | 4 | 400$ |
Total | 24 spots | 2400$ (24 x 100$/spots) |
Configuring the cost distribution method
You can view the current cost distribution method in the Administration > My account module:
Click the "Edit" button to modify the cost distribution method:
Note that changing the cost distribution method does not modify the data you entered in the system - It only changes the algorithm used to distribute the costs.
The only impact, is that when you change the cost distribution method, the system will clear and recompute the cache it uses internally for performance optimisation.
Thus, you can change cost distribution method with no worries.
Contextual cost totals with date filters
All cost totals are now contextual to the date filters.
For example, if we have an ad running weekends in March:
The Planning module without date filters (#1) displays the following total cost (#2 and #3):
If you filter for the first week of March (#1), the Planning module adapts and displays the totals (#2 and #3) for this date range:
Note that the total cost and remaining budget (#4) do not adapt to the date filters.
That's it ! We hope you'll enjoy the costs distribution methods.
Give it a try and let us know what you think !
As always, don't hesitate to send us your great feedback or other idea for new features !
Have a great day,
The MediaPlanHQ team
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