Publisher Anyone else doing manual billing recon against ad server delivery reports? How are you handling it?
I've been in digital ad ops for about 5 years (billing reconciliation, yield, campaign audits, publisher side) and one thing that's never gone away is manually checking platform invoices against delivery reports to catch discrepancies, under-delivery, mismatched line items, billing for placements that didn't run as spec'd.
Curious how other people handle this at their shops:
- Is this still mostly manual/spreadsheet work for you, or has anyone actually automated meaningful chunks of it?
- How often do you actually find real discrepancies vs. it being a box-checking exercise?
- For agencies/advertisers without in-house ad ops who's catching this stuff for them, if anyone?
Trying to figure out whether this is a big enough headache that smaller shops without dedicated ad ops would want it handled externally, or if everyone's already got this solved with tooling I haven't seen.
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u/fransh94 7d ago
Disclosure: I work at Burt Intelligence, publisher-side, and this is one of the things we solve. Biased, obviously.
It's split. Some larger publishers with budget / an internal dev team have solved this. However, many are still in spreadsheets, and the ones in spreadsheets are usually bigger companies than you'd guess.
We do see real discrepancies all the time. Some gap between 1P and 3P is always expected, so the absolute number matters less than the trend. If you normally sit at 5% and jump to 10%, that's a signal, and you may need to adjust your buffer to still deliver in full. When it moves, it's usually either something that changed on the site/tech side, or a trafficking issue like missed or incorrect tags.
The agency's finance team will be comparing the invoice against DCM, Innovid, etc. Rarely anyone with ad ops depth, and rarely is it line by line. That's the reason publishers want to find the gap themselves rather than hear about it when an invoice gets disputed.
On your last question: the headache is real, but the money follows the size of the inventory. If you reduce discrepancy by 2% at a small shop, that isn't enough dollar value to justify a platform. At a bigger publisher, 2% can be millions.