Reporting Overview

In addition to the management UI, BidCore partners also have access to IPONWEB’s proprietary data analysis and reporting tool known as u-Slicer. This has been specifically built in-house to allow you to analyse and visualize business metrics based on data which flows though the advertising chain and its rich tapestry of interwoven services.

Prior to loading data into u-Slicer, a number of processes happen in the background to ensure data is of sufficient quality, commonly known as the extract, transform, load (ETL) process. As a result, most data in u-Slicer is between 2-4 hours behind real-time trading data as it is collated from various systems.

The benefit of ETL is that is removes noise from the data set such as duplication, trading anomalies, and unrelated errors. Data sampling is also applied to certain fields to improve ones ability to query a data set without performance issues caused by too much unimportant data. This data is then available for you to access using two options: the Reporting UI and the Reporting API. Both of these options are generally used for the following purposes:

  • Monitoring campaign, deal, or line item performance.

  • Analysing trading patterns to identify advantageous combinations of inventory source, user segments, buying strategies, or supply partners.

  • Analysing trading patterns to identify under performance or system problems like timeouts, deal inactivity, or below floor bidding.

  • Setting up custom reports and scheduled reports.

  • Exporting data to your own system.

  • Creating custom metrics to apply your own logic to quantifying your trading performance.

Getting Started

Hint

Whether you wish to use the UI or API, if you are new to u-Slicer it is highly recommended to take both introductory courses available in the UI. You can find both the Introductory Tour and the Advanced Filters tour using the Get a tour button.

To access u-Slicer, click the REPORTING link in the menu of BidCore UI. Analysis is based on key-value pairings, which you can use in combination to get the information you need from the underlying data, e.g.

  • By querying the data using country(key) / impressions(value) you will get the amount of impressions per country

  • By querying the data using two filters SSP(key) + Country{US}(Key) / iOS(value) you will get the Suppliers from which you are buying most iOS inventory in the US

Data Timing and Sampling

Data Accuracy for Today

Using data for today’s date is not accurate, as many of the figures used to calculate the values u-Slicer reports come into the system with different time delays. Figures and calculations will be accurate from yesterday’s date backwards.

Data Sampling

The data to which certain values refer is sampled to reduce noise, and when you query such data it will also have an associated confidence range. This can be seen in the UI e.g. ±.01 and API response confidence_range. Also, if you split data using multiple keys which are sampled, the level of accuracy decreases.

Bidfloor Calculation

The Bidfloor is an average value. It is calculated based on the following figures, and it the average of these.

  • If the Buyer responds with the Deal ID, the bidfloor for that Deal ID is stored.

  • If the Buyer responds without the Deal ID, the impression bidfloor is stored.

  • If the Buyer responds with no-bid, or a timeout, the impression bidfloor is stored.