Interpret a forecast

Forecast view

A forecast displays a quick summary of available inventory, a contending line items list, and a criteria breakdown section.

Forecasts can tell you:

• Whether a line item is likely to meet its delivery goal
• If it’s likely to impact other line items along the way
• Information about other impressions or clicks

Let’s take a closer look at each of these sections in the forecast display.

Forecast summary

The Forecast Summary section includes a forecast bar. This provides a quick look at whether a line item is likely to meet its delivery goal, if it’s likely to impact other line items along the way, and information about other impressions or clicks.

Below the forecast bar, the numbers provide additional details. These metrics vary depending on the type of forecast. For example, Available appears only for forecasts with a Max Available goal. 

Contending line items

The Contending Line Items section reveals the competition between different line items in your network, which line items have overlapping targeting criteria and campaign dates, and how many impressions are being contested.

Line items will be displayed (maximum line items displayed is 3,000) as contending with the prospective line item, if they’re forecasted to receive at least 100 impressions, and they’re a standard or sponsorship line item.

This report is useful for optimizing and reallocating scarce impressions to more important and higher value line items.

Criteria breakdown

The targeting criteria for line items in Ad Manager can be very built-out, with various combinations of sizes, inventory, geography, and so on.

The Criteria Breakdown section of a forecast shows impression information for each value of targeted criteria. It tells you how many impressions are available, and how many match.

This is useful because it reveals which criteria are bottlenecks that could prevent delivery. It also identifies opportunities for optimizations.

Interpret a forecast summary

Using the Check Inventory function, forecast for 728×90 inventory, for the month of March, with an impression goal of 25%, on Ad_Manager_News and Ad_Manager_Sports ad units. Click Check Inventory to generate the forecast.

And it’s good news because you’re shown that the 25% share of voice goal is likely to deliver. 

For sponsorship line items, Ad Manager also calculates how many impressions the share of voice is likely to correspond to. Twenty-five percent of the impressions for this forecast is just over 6 million impressions.

The colored bar gives a visual indication of the forecast result. The green area of the bar shows the number of impressions that are likely to deliver, and what percentage of the total matched capacity this amounts to. Likely to Deliver means the line item should fully deliver on its goal without causing any other line items to underdeliver.

Below the bar, are the numerical calculations. The first number after the green Likely to Deliver shows how many impressions are likely to deliver, but may impact same or lower-priority line items. This means that it might cause other line items to underdeliver.

Using the Check Inventory function, forecast for 728×90 inventory, for the month of March, with an impression goal of 20 million, on Ad_Manager_Sports ad unit. Click Check Inventory to generate the forecast.

The forecast bar visually represents the matched capacity. The green portion shows that 20 million impressions are likely to deliver.

Ad Manager provides a breakdown of where the impressions are coming from. Further to the 20 million matched impressions, there are another 20 million remaining that are unreserved. These are impressions matching the forecast criteria that haven’t been reserved by other line items.

There are only 75,836 impressions reserved for standard line items of a lower priority than the standard-normal criteria set. 

The next number reveals how many matching impressions are unavailable for this line item. This represents how many impressions have been booked for both standard line items of a higher priority and sponsorship line items. Notice that there are 6 million unavailable impressions.

The final number shows the total matched capacity and is the sum of all the previous numbers.

Now, what would happen to the forecast result if you increased the impression goal to 50 million?

The message now reads that there are not enough matched impressions to reach goal and only about 40 million are likely to deliver. Not only would this line item fail to meet its impression goal, but the impressions that it would deliver would be at the expense of other line items.

The solid green portion of the bar is likely to deliver with 3,296 being the amount that this line item will need to take from already reserved line items. 

The red sections together denote the remainder of the line item’s goal, 9.9 million, that will likely not deliver. This includes the patterned section representing the 6 million   unavailable impressions as well as other inventory that might also be limited because of frequency capping, competitive exclusions, or other restrictions – about three million or so impressions in this example.

The matched capacity doesn’t change because you’re using the same forecasting criteria as in the previous example. It’s just reflects a different impression goal.

As this line item is not expected to meet its goal of 50 million, you’ll need to decide if you want to revise your included criteria or risk overbooking when saving to a new or existing order.