Paying for media across ad platforms

A growth team launches on a new platform on a Friday. Over the weekend the card on file reaches its limit, the campaigns stop, and on Monday someone is on the phone with the bank while the plan falls behind.

Platforms offer some mix of paying after delivery with a card or saved method, paying in advance, and monthly invoicing on a credit line for accounts that qualify. The terms differ by platform and by country, and they change, sometimes for whole groups of advertisers at once. When a credit line is reached, the accounts that share it can stop until it is paid down or raised.

An ad account is billed in the currency chosen when it was created, and often it can't be changed later without opening a new account. Where a platform offers consolidated billing, it may join only accounts with the same payment profile and the same currency. Advertisers with markets in several currencies end up with accounts per currency, and exchange differences to explain at month end. See account currency.

With a prepaid balance, funds are deposited in advance and pay for campaigns as they run, so no platform waits on a card or a credit line. A balance can be split into sub-balances for each brand, team, client or market, each with its own limits, and a spend cap sets the most a campaign, account or balance can spend in a period. The useful questions are who can move money between sub-balances and what happens when one runs low.

A consolidated invoice covers spend across several platforms and accounts in one document. To be useful to finance it should carry the order or plan reference, the advertiser, the brand or campaign, any references the buyer asks for, and the net cost by calendar month, with proof of delivery available on request. Then it can be matched to purchase orders without rebuilding anything by hand.

Some platforms remove the invalid traffic they find before the billing cycle closes, and return what they find later as a platform credit in a following cycle. When campaign reports are frozen at month end, the credit shows on the invoice and not in the campaign data, and only reconciliation brings the two back together.

The same is true of make-goods on guaranteed buys, refunds of unspent prepaid funds, exchange differences, and the surcharges some platforms add for ads served in certain jurisdictions. Each belongs to a line, and each should be matched back to it.

Reconciliation keeps planned, delivered, billed and paid together on every line. Before a payment goes out, a three-way match checks the plan or order, the proof of delivery and the invoice against each other. In direct buys, the agreement sets how differences between the seller's count and the buyer's count are settled, and that rule should be known before the campaign runs.

• Access to ad accounts by role, with the people who plan, buy and approve payments kept separate
• A cap on each account, and alerts on unusual spikes
• Separate payment methods for separate accounts
• A fast way to lock an account that may be compromised
• Ads checked against each platform's policies before they go live, since a rejected ad or a suspended account stops spend as surely as an empty balance

With us you fund one balance, we pay each platform you run on from it and alert you before it runs out, and one invoice comes back with every line matched across planned, delivered, billed and paid. The details are on Spend. The events behind each line are in our guide Server-side tracking, explained, and how their effect is measured in Attribution, experiments or mix models?. How a campaign runs on each platform is on Digital advertising.

• Single counterparty
• Prepaid balance
• Sub-balance
• Spend cap
• Account currency
• Consolidated invoice
• Platform credit
• Invalid traffic
• Make-good
• Reconciliation
• Three-way match
• Pacing