Consolidated Reporting vs. Consolidated Inventory Reporting

Generally, mediators return two types of reports, waterfall reports, combined into the Consolidated Reporting Table and Inventory Reports known to us as Consolidated Inventory Reporting.

What's the difference?

  • Consolidated Reporting shows demand source and placement information, but does not merge with ad requests.

  • Inventory Reporting shows ad requests, which don't merge 1:1 with ad networks or placement information.

Why are there two types of reports?

Simply put, it’s not possible to tie a single ad request to multiple ad delivery attempts through a waterfall.

Think of it this way, a single ad request is sent to your mediator, it travels through 6 ad units before being filled. Which line item owns that request? Is it correct to assign 0 to the other line items? What do you do in the case of a lost (unanswered) attempt?

How to use each report

  • Consolidated Reporting is most commonly used to determine network & placement performance.

  • Consolidated Inventory Reporting is good for monitoring overall fill rates-- it powers our App Performance Page -- and is uniquely useful for the metric of Revenue per Thousand Ad Requests (Rev per AdReq) which shows the revenue generated by total device impression requests and can often be a more useful metric than CPM to judge performance.

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