Using relationship automation

Owned by Semjon Nirmann
Last updated: yesterday at 1:27 pm by Tobias Rast
4 min read

Why relationship automation?

Creation, acceptance, and rejection of relationships between advertisers and partners may happen case-by-case. In many cases, these actions may follow a specific process. Streamlining and automating these processes may come in handy, which is the primary purpose of relationship automation.

  • Create a relationship for ad spaces belonging to the partner ABC.

  • Accept all relationship applications that belong to a specific ad space category (or subcategory).

  • Reject all relationship applications that belong to (another) specific ad space category (or subcategory)

Executing these steps by hand will quickly become tedious and redundant. Relationship Automation provides a versatile tool for these purposes.

Before you start

Get familiar with relationships/ and its mechanisms.

How to use relationship automation

Visit Partnerships > Relationships > Automation to get started.

Find the type of automation you want, and click Edit. You are now ready to define the specific details of your automation.

Create an automation

The creation of automation consists of three main sections. Let’s inspect those in detail:

  • Advertiser selection

    • Relationships connect advertisers, partners, and ad spaces. Choose an advertiser first.

  • Time context selection

    • Minimum age: The automation should consider subjects at least X days old. In this context, subjects refer to ad spaces or relationship applications.

    • Consider currently existing ad spaces: For automation of type “CREATE”, the user may choose to consider existing ad spaces, or only those created after the automation has been set up.
      (Again, for automations of type “ACCEPT” or “REJECT”, relationship applications will be inspected instead.)

  • Definition of rules

    • Rules are inclusion filters defining what type of relationship will be created upon applicability.

    • Rules are applied in order of priority, in ascending order (i.e.: a rule with priority 1 will be considered before a rule with priority 2).

    • Rules consist of two main sections

      • Selection Criteria

        • Define partners, ad space categories, and ad space sub-categories.

      • Financial Agreement

        • Define the characteristics (commission model, commission rule, fee model) of the relationship that will be created as a result of this automation.

        • The user has the designated option to choose dynamic values for the fee model and the commission model. This can be done by selecting “using future default” (for commission model, fee model). If the default should change in the future, the system will know to choose the fresh values. (In contrast, a static option can be selected; this option will never change unless edited by hand.)

        • The priority system enables the user to define conditional logic describing the resulting relationships for different cases of selection criteria.

          • E.g.: Suppose that relationships should be created if Partner XYZ creates ad spaces. Now the user wants to assign a different commission model to relationships that are created as a result of a rule specifying the inclusion of “Fashion Blogger” ad spaces. The user may define two rules to implement this behavior: One includes “Fashion Blogger” ad spaces for this partner and one includes any other type of ad space. The rules will be checked from top to bottom: the first applicable rule will lead to the creation of the relationship, given the financial data supplied in this rule.

 

Example

Let’s take a look at an example of creating an individual rule by clicking the “add rule” button:

Assume we need a rule to include ad spaces to which the following criteria apply:

  • They belong to the partner Jay.

  • Their category is “Fashion Blogger”.

  • Their subcategory is “Fitness Blogger”.

The system will check all valid ad spaces and filter them accordingly. Further rules may be defined, too: If the first rule doesn’t allow ad space XYZ to be considered, another rule with a lower priority may. Depending on whether the user wants to consider existing ad spaces, these will be considered valid candidates.

 

Any number of rules may be defined, but at least one has to exist to proceed.

Let’s say we are happy with one rule and decided for the automation to consider ad spaces that are at least 1 day old. We also allowed existing ad spaces to be considered. The “Confirm”-button in the bottom now displays “Preview”. This mechanism is enabled when retrospective consideration is activated. As you will see, this will come in handy, to check the expected results of the automation (as of now).

Differences between automation types

This example used the automation type “CREATE”, though all discussed mechanisms apply to the types “ACCEPT” and “REJECT”, respectively. In the latter cases, the only things that change are the following:

  • The subject of consideration is relationship applications, not ad spaces.

  • Automations of type “REJECT” do not include “Financial Agreement”-Data during the creation of rules.

Managing relationship automation

Congratulations, your automation has been created.

Side note: Only one automation per type can be created. If any changes need to be made, the automation can be edited.

You will find your automation in the Relationship Automation Manager (and respectively, Relationship Automation Explorer). Upon selection in the table, the info panel will display all associated data that may be relevant. A quick inspection of the rules can be done by clicking “Inspect”.

In the Activities tab, all changes to this automation can be viewed in detail, as well as who these changes are attributed to.

The inspection of rules will open a dialog, displaying their state before or after a specific change.

Different actions on automations

Next to editing automation, automation may be paused and re-activated at any time.