Kevel Forecast

Kevel Forecast provides the insights you need to see what inventory is available and how a campaign will deliver. You have the ability to predict future ad traffic levels and campaign inventory availability using an unlimited number of targeting variables, including geo, keyword, key-value, user segment, or frequency capping.

What are some use cases for forecasting?

Estimate future traffic and ADR spend:

• Forecast how many future ad requests you’ll make, helping you accurately predict your overall usage spend.
• See how your usage spend will go towards different targeting parameters, such as by keyword, geo, network, site, etc. If most of your ADRs are going towards ads targeted by geography, but keyword targeting is more important to your performance, this forecast helps you adjust accordingly.

Understand existing campaign performance:

• Predict how the ads currently running are likely to perform over a period of time. You can analyze this by estimated click performance predictions, helping you decide if this campaign will maximize your revenue and user experience.
• This also helps you provide early insights to advertisers and suggestions for how they might optimize their performance with you.

Optimize future Yield:

• Through Yield Forecast, see how many total impressions are left available for all Ad Products, considering all other running campaigns. This helps identify how proposed campaigns will work alongside current or other future campaigns, allowing you to communicate with confidence to advertisers what performance they might see.

Maximize ad spend:

• Make the most of how advertisers are spending with you. By predicting the delivery of booked future campaigns and their interactions with one another, you can see if you have remaining impressions (thereby can take on more advertisers) or if you’re overbooked (allowing you to charge more for increased demand).

Streamline ad ops teams:

• Save ad ops teams time and maximize their effectiveness. No more setting campaigns and wondering how they’ll perform—forecast helps you see their performance before you get started.

How do I use Kevel Forecast?

You can use Kevel Forecast through one of its user interfaces or via API.

User interfaces:

• Availability widget, for checking available inventory for a specific Flight
• Yield Forecast, for seeing inventory-wide availability for the different Ad Products you have set up
• Forecast Explorer, your custom forecast builder to explore your future inventory

APIs available:

Forecast:

• Available forecast, provides a fast forecast with the amount of available inventory for a given new or modified set of ads, flights, and campaigns
• Deliverable forecast, provides simulated forecasted delivery of a new campaign, re-estimating the changes that will occur to all other ads in the network
• Existing forecast, provides forecasts for all currently booked and active campaigns, flights and ads
• Yield forecast, provides a set of interfaces for configuring network yield forecast settings, creating ad products, and obtaining their forecasts.

Forecast setup:

• Traffic modifiers, provides means to adjust traffic shapes for enforcing business seasonality rules
• Static audiences, provides a way to bootstrap new static audiences segments in Forecast, improving their forecast accuracy by better modeling the behavior of a static user list vs a continuously updated audience segment

How does Kevel forecast my inventory?

Kevel Forecast operates by looking at the nature and kinds of requests a network has generated historically and projecting those requests out into the future at the individual ad request level. Viewing the nature of requests means looking at repeat vs new users, the context of the ad requests (location, browser, device type, keywords used, segments, frequency of ad request per user), etc. Using these future ad requests, every time a forecast request is received, our algorithm predicts how ads will serve for those future ad requests by simulating the Kevel Ad Platform ad selection process.

The ad request parameter data used for building forecasts comes from the historical ad request parameters sent as well as the respective user data stored for the user in UserDB at the point in time of the ad request. There is no need to set or run campaigns using any of the targeting fields (like location, keyword, site id, ad type, etc.) or user data points ahead of time for them to be considered for forecasting.

Which Ad Decision Request dimensions and parameters does Forecast take into account?

Kevel Forecast considers all parameters sent through the Ad Decision Requests, as well as the appended data from UserDB and ContentDB. This includes also special support for handling Multi-winner request counts enabling, per forecast, simulating what percentage of returned winners will effectively be delivered.

Are Clicks supported? How are they predicted?

Kevel Forecast considers all individual historical click events from a network’s placements with the associated ad decision request. Kevel Forecast predicts the individual clicks that each ad request placement (siteId and adType combination) gets in the future (which can be over 1 in case of multi-winner). So click forecasting requires that the specific siteId and adType combination has received clicks in the past. When future traffic is estimated, Kevel Forecast now includes the click events associated with them with the same relationship between dimensions as it was historically observed.

When calculating ad selections for a given placement, Forecast also calculates the chance that the selected ad will be given a click and considers the individual campaign historical CTR and looks at the click events prediction to match the two together: the expected CTR and the expected click events forecasted to happen and distributes the expected clicks over the selected ads.

Are Conversions supported? How are they predicted?

Kevel Forecast has released initial support for forecasting Conversions and Conversion-related campaign types (CPA rate type, Conversion goals, etc) for an initial set of scenarios, namely:

• For Conversions issued with the Decision API based events. Other methods for issuing conversions are considered legacy and will not be supported.
• For relatively short view/click to conversion lag: while in real life, campaigns will pace as conversions come through, Forecast predicts conversions at the time it simulates an impression for delivery.

Can I get specific conversion metrics as part of a forecast?

Yes, conversion event metrics are available as part of the support for Conversion goals. Most networks would be interested in the custom event type 3 ("Server to Server Conversion") but types 1 and 2 are also available. Request these by adding the Include object in the Params object of a forecast request payload with the desired Events.

How much historical data does Kevel Forecast need?

Kevel Forecast needs a minimum of 7 days of historical data to project future ad requests. Forecast accuracy gradually increases after the initial 7-day period and will reach maximum efficiency once the product has at least 28 days of data.

Forecasting types

Kevel Forecast provides 3 different types of forecasts. Each provides insights on impressions and unique users with the ability to group the results by many different dimensions:

• Existing - Forecast how existing ads will deliver.
• Available - Forecast the remaining available inventory at a given priority level, optionally matching specific targeting criteria.
• Deliverable - Forecasts a new set of ads taking into account the impact of ads already running in the network.

What inventory, goals, and selection method types does Forecast support?

Forecast currently supports most of the setups. Supported list of settings are:

• Inventory: Ads Impressions, Clicks and Revenue
• Goals: Impression, Percentage, Clicks, Revenue, Conversions (*)
• Selection method: Lottery, Auction (CPM, CPC, CPA (*)).

(*) Conversion support is recent and is limited to Decision API-based conversion events and accurate for initial scenarios of a short log from impression to conversion.

What’s coming next

Kevel Forecast is available to selected customers. If you’re interested in learning more and signing up, please reach out to your CSM. We plan to release the following items in the near future:

• Campaign Sales Reservations UI flows to remove inventory from Availability forecast.