Creating Print and Digital Ad Inventory
It is crucial to keep track of inventory, to make sure your sales team knows what they can sell and a customer isn’t promised something you can’t deliver. The system allows you to control print positions and digital ad inventory for each issue. The inventory feature comes along with a digital ad inventory report and checks and balances on the order screen and order approval.
In order to set inventory on an issue for print items, you must have at least one position on a rate card for the print publication. For digital, you must have at least one rate card with ad sizes set up. Once you have your rate cards ready to go, you can create or edit issues to set the inventory.
The ability to add or adjust inventory is on the add or edit issue screen. There is a table at the bottom of the page that will show either all the print positions available or all the digital ads and frequency options available.
Note
You don’t have to enter a value for each field. If you leave it blank, the system will assume there is no inventory limit and a user can sell unlimited amounts of the position or ad/frequency combination.
You need to enter a value into the field for the system to track inventory. For example, it is common for print publications to have an inside front and inside back cover. You would enter a 1 in each of those fields so that a user can only sell a single ad into that position.
Digital can get more complicated. Read through the document below to learn more about digital inventory, and please reach out to our support team with any questions or if you need additional assistance. If you are using CPM, you could have thousands of impressions available to sell and may enter in 300000 per ad size. But if you use CPF, which we use as flat rate, you may have 1 or 5, if you sell rotating ads. CPF is also used often if you are using a digital publication to sell a weekly newsletter. You may set up an issue for each week and have 3 available slots. Or maybe you create a top, medium, and bottom spot and have 1 for each area.
No matter how you set up your inventory, once you enter the values, you can see available inventory on the ad inventory report.
For print, when a user selects a premium position, issues that don’t have available inventory are greyed out and the checkbox is disabled. When a user selects an issue before the position, any issue that would be oversold is then unchecked and greyed out. The user will be alerted with a warning that states, “Your selected ads included issues that would become oversold. We removed those issues from your selection.”
For digital, the inventory options are based on ad size, frequency, and units. Once a user has all of those items selected, the issues that do not have available inventory are greyed out and the checkbox is disabled. When a user selects the issue prior to selecting ad size, frequency, and units, any issue that would be oversold is then unchecked and greyed out. The user will be alerted with a warning that states, “Your selected ads included issues that would become oversold. We removed those issues from your selection.”
