How do you calculate direct spend? Indirect spend?
Direct Spend - calculated from third-party partners’ (agency, brand, adtech, and publisher) actual buy prices.
Indirect Spend - calculated from programmatic clearing prices from actual media buys in the market.
For more detail on how we calculate Direct and Indirect spend, please visit the Methodology section of our Knowledge Base.
How do you calculate impressions?
We estimate impressions using statistical methods based on our data aggregator discovery of creatives seen each day on the publicly facing web. These counts are combined with third party data detailing overall traffic and visit frequency for each site. Sampled data is combined with traffic data to estimate impressions.
For more detail on how we calculate Impressions, please visit the Methodology section of our Knowledge Base.
How exactly are the Top Sites and Top Advertisers ranked?
Top Sites are found under each advertiser or category and are based on the highest spend. By viewing the actual site, you can further hone in on which advertisers contribute to this spend in ranking order.
Top Advertisers are listed in order of highest spend.
When looking at top sites for an advertiser, how can I determine the brand allocation?
Hover over the arrows, then click “Show Details” in the Top Sites section, all brands applicable to the creative will be reflected as percentages.
Example: Nike has 4 brands running on stack.com: Football accounts for 50% of the creative while, Womens at 26%, Running at 18% and Soccer with 16%.
What is an ad path and how do I read it?
Ad Paths allow you to view the daisy chain by which the inventory was both bought and sold.
Sales channel (how inventory was sold) is read from left to right. In the example above, reddit.com sold inventory to Bell Canada
Purchase channel (how the inventory was purchased) is read right to left - Bell Canada purchased inventory from reddit.com
Is spend reported in gross or net dollars?
Pathmatics reports on gross spend.