Programmatic: Should you manage your campaigns in a DSP… or in Excel?

A few days ago, a media trader told me: "I manage everything directly in the DSP, it's more than enough for me to track my campaigns and adjust my investments." Obviously, that sparked a debate 😉

🚨 The trap: by limiting yourself to the DSP, regardless of the technology (Google's DV360, The Trade Desk, Amazon DSP, Adform, Hawk (an Azerion company), you lose the big picture:

• each report is pulled on a case-by-case basis: investigations become a real headache
• it's difficult to keep a history of optimizations

In reality, all DSPs have two basic functionalities:

1️⃣ Setting up campaigns (set-up & optimizations)
2️⃣ Generating custom, granular reports

And the gold is hidden in that second point 💰:

From the DSP reporting interfaces, you can build the foundation for an automated, ultra-granular tracking file = Excel scorecards.

How does it work?

You set up a report template in the DSP gathering all the useful dimensions (dates, campaign, line, media_type, size, SSP, seller, device, site…). The DSP will generate a massive Excel extract.

From this raw extract, you create around ten pivot tables that will allow you to:
📈 View the campaign's evolution, the delivery trend, and keep a history of changes
🚨 Get results on key dimensions and understand at a glance where the bottlenecks are, thanks to color coding (cf. conditional formatting)
⛏️ Dig deeper by cross-referencing dimensions with each other in just 2 clicks
The best part: once you've saved your reporting template in the DSP and created your Excel scorecard, you can update your automated tracking file every day in just a few clicks 😯

Result?

A clear and historical view of your campaigns, instant diagnostics (color codes, filters), and above all… a real time-saver 🚀

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