The Trade Desk with the Cost Stack Published Monthly

Before the first impression we publish the cost stack: for every thousand euro you approve, working media, the platform fee, third-party data CPM and the exchange take appear as four separate numbers. On accounts we take over, the data line alone commonly runs one to three euro CPM against a four euro media CPM — roughly a third of the budget buying audience segments that had never once been tested against a holdout. Identity in Europe: European reach cannot be planned from a US or UK template. TCF v2.2 removed legitimate interest as a basis for advertising purposes, and consent rates differ sharply between an Irish news publisher, a German one and an app environment. We measure the addressable pool on your actual media list before committing a budget, activate through EUID where consent supports it, and write the plan around the reach that survives that check rather than the reach the forecasting tool shows on an unconstrained query. First-party data before anybody's segment: A candidate database, an order file, a shipper list. These get onboarded and used as the seed, with placed candidates and won accounts suppressed rather than re-served for six weeks. Ten percent of the file is held back untargeted so the segment can be graded later. Only after that do we consider a paid segment, and it has to earn its CPM against the held-back group. Bid factors we set by hand: Koa optimises toward whatever KPI it is handed, and in most inherited accounts that KPI is a proxy nobody validated. We take manual control of the bid list — supply vendor, device, day-part, frequency, creative — and hand the algorithm a KPI only after it has been reconciled against a downstream record. Frequency in particular: the Irish inventory pool is small enough that an unconstrained plan will serve the same person eleven times in a week and call the resulting click performance. Supply path: The same impression is routinely offered by five sellers at five prices. We build an allowed sellers list, buy through direct integrations and OpenPath where they are genuinely shorter, and re-cut the list monthly on delivered quality rather than on a deck from the exchange. Reporting that survives a board meeting: Reporting is pulled through the Trade Desk API into BigQuery and joined to your own records. Everything we present comes off that join, never off a UI export, which means the numbers do not change when somebody re-runs the report in a different time zone. Outside scope: Creative production, ad server work, retail media networks, and search. We will not resell data segments to you at a marked-up CPM, and we do not take commission from any supply partner in this plan. Say no to us if: You need the agency to hold the Trade Desk contract for procurement reasons. You want prospecting audiences bought on third-party segments without ever measuring whether they beat run-of-network. Your working media is under about twenty-five thousand euro a month, where the fixed costs of this platform are hard to justify against a mid-market seat. Or the account has three agencies in it already and this would be the fourth — we take the buy or we leave it, and we do not co-manage a seat.