Get To Know Bionic Data Structure

Learn about how data is structured and the flow of data in Bionic.

It is important to understand how data is structured in Bionic, as you have a lot of flexibility to customize your set up to enable the right type of reporting for your needs. Understanding how the data flows will help you make the best decisions up front.

As part of your initial setup, you will need to define your clients and their potential hierarchy. From there, you will need to define what makes up individual campaigns. Then define the workflow for planning, buying, trafficking, performance monitoring, and reconciliation.

When you think about building out your instance of Bionic... Follow the money!

Here is what you need to know about the structure of data in Bionic:

1. Structure Data Flow
2. Structure Advertiser Hierarchy
3. Structure Campaigns
4. Structure Budgets
5. Structure Media Plans

Structure Data Flow

Here is the general structure of data flow in Bionic:

Organization - The organization is the company you are logging into. All users logging into this organization will have access to advertisers, campaigns, orders, and financials by default. At the organization level, you can control users, organization defaults, custom fields, integrations, and terms that users can utilize. Learn more about Organizational Administration.

Advertisers - Advertisers represent your clients if you are an agency. If you are an in-house media team, this will represent the structure of your company. Advertisers can support hierarchy, as described below. Campaigns will live under specific advertisers.

Campaigns - Campaigns can be defined as a marketing initiative that is tied to a particular budget. If you have historically been using spreadsheets, a campaign will often be equivalent to a plan you have build out in that spreadsheet. The campaign will serve as a "folder" that stores everything related to it - settings, documents, budgets, RFPs & Proposals, media plan, orders, performance data, and payables.

Media Plans - The media plans will be made up of placements that represent the tactical level details of your media. Each placement can include details about who you are advertising through, details of the ad space, dates the ad is running, the rate you are paying, and the KPI goals you want to achieve. From this it can help you calculate and manage cost breakdowns such as production, commission, and delivery fees. It can also automate operational functions such as placement naming conventions and tracking URLs.

Client Presentations - Because Bionic stores the data in a structure manner, once you have media plans set up, this data can be used to produce one-click flowcharts, media authorizations, and trafficking sheets.

Orders - Placements from the media plan can also help streamline order management by enabling point and click order generations, approvals, and electronic POs.

Performance Management - By integrating platform (or offline) performance results, actuals can be easily compared with planned data to help monitor daily pacing and report performance results back to your clients.

Reconciliation - Bionic will streamline reconciliation by calculating your monthly orders against performance actuals as you record the vendor bills. As payments are made you can track those too. Integrations with financial platforms are available as well.

Reporting - Since Bionic offers structure data, it makes reporting a breeze. Bionic provides reports in nearly every page of the platform. If you need something more specific, a direct integration with Looker Data Studio is included, or Bionic can send nightly data feeds to ingest to other BI tools.

Structure Advertiser Hierarchy

When you start with Bionic, it is good to think about how you want to structure your advertisers. Advertisers support hierarchy. Since campaigns/media plans live under the Advertisers, data will roll up to enable structured reporting. Follow the money!

• How do you need to report data back to clients (or internally)?
• What kind of data break outs do you need?
• Do you need to consider restricting access of specific users to certain clients or business segments within a client?

The following example is an Automotive Group that creates campaigns for individual dealerships. They may also do automotive brand advertising, as well as automotive group advertising.

Because Campaigns can be created under any of these advertisers, and data can be rolled up, this structure will provide the flexibility to report data for any individual advertiser (just Honda Dealerships or just ABC Automotive Group), or it can be rolled up at any level (report everything happening under Chevrolet Dealerships include the child advertisers).

This also enables you to limit access to specific users. For example, you can limit specific users to just access to Honda of Concord so they can't access other dealership data.

Shifting this structure later is relatively easy. If you try one way and don't like it, don't fret. It can be adjusted later if needed.

Feel free to reach out to your CSM if you need help.

Learn how to build out your advertisers.

Structure Campaigns

The concept of a campaign may vary between companies. Ultimately, the campaign is the folder that stores everything related to a marketing initiative, regardless of how you define it. It could be the entire annual multi-channel plan, or maybe you break it out by shorter time periods or even by specific channels. Completely up to you.

Here are a couple of things to consider:

• Some outputs such as media authorizations are only available in individual campaigns. If you need it together, it should be in one plan.
• Budgets are managed at the campaign level. If you need automated calculation of combined budgets, it's usually best to keep everything in one plan.
• You do have the flexibility to move placements between campaigns. You can plan in 1 mode and breakout or merge placements later. Note that RFPs, Proposals, and Orders cannot be moved between campaigns - just the placements.

Each campaign should be thought of as having the following core components (though not an absolute requirement):

• Start & End Date
• Overarching budget
• Media Plan

Everything related to these will be stored together under this 1 campaign.

Feel free to reach out to your CSM if you need help.

Learn how to build out campaigns.

Structure Budgets

While you may have an overarching budget for your campaign, you may also have a strategy about how that money should get spent. Budget Buckets can help you define strategic initiatives and allocate funds so you can track that the money is spent appropriately.

Say you have a multichannel plan with a $1m budget, but have allocated budgets to specific types of media. You could build out budgets like this:

Once you have define your budget buckets, as you plan, you can allocate placements to these buckets and Bionic will calculate your spend against the available funds. Note that budget buckets are specific to a given campaign.

Defining your budgets can help you organize and report to ensure you are spending money in the right areas - whatever those are to you.

Lean how to build out budgets.

Structure Media Plans

As you build out placements within your media plan, consider that most of the time, each placement should represent an individual ad space. This will allow for 1:1 relationships when integrating or uploading performance data. It also ensures the appropriate information can be shared with vendors or the activation teams when defining orders.

Examples of specific placements:

The details you include in your placements can be used to generate flowcharts and media authorizations, drive orders, monitor your performance, generate placement names and tracking URLs, and generate various reporting.

Another valuable tool in media plans are the customizable costs - Production, Agency Commission, & Delivery. Be sure you to include those where applicable to manage your complete budgets.

Learn how to build out media plans.

Learn how to build out customized costs.