Planning

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Overview

Planning enables publishers to respond efficiently to campaign briefs by creating plans to store campaign opportunity information and build targeted audiences with instant insights. The product provides a collaborative workspace where teams can combine existing cohorts using boolean logic, analyze audience reach and composition, and generate targeting expressions for ad servers. Publishers can create plans for each campaign opportunity, build audiences from multiple cohorts, and access detailed insights about audience reach, overlap, devices, and domains—all within a single workflow designed to accelerate brief response times.

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Why Use Planning?

Centralize campaign opportunity management — Planning provides a single source of truth for campaign opportunities, enabling teams to store advertiser information, RFP deadlines, budget details, and audience configurations in one place that can be easily shared with colleagues. Find the most relevant cohorts for your campaign with AI — Find the right cohorts using AI-powered recommendations and search (if enabled), or search manually across all of your cohorts to identify cohorts that overlap with your target audience. Build audiences with flexible boolean logic — Combine cohorts using ANY (OR), ALL (AND), and NONE (NAND) logic across multiple groups to create precisely targeted audiences that meet campaign requirements. This allows you to re-use existing cohorts to respond to custom requirements, making it easier to quickly create insights and run inventory forecasting. Get instant insights for brief responses — Access detailed Plan Insights including reach metrics, overlap analysis, device breakdowns, and domain distribution to quickly respond to briefs with accurate audience information.

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Concepts

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Definitions

• Plan: A container for campaign opportunity information including advertiser details, RFP deadline, budget, and one or more audiences. Plans serve as the central workspace for responding to campaign briefs.
• Audience: A combination of cohorts connected using boolean logic to define a target audience within a plan. Each audience generates real-time metrics and can include up to 15 cohorts across 3 groups.
• Plan Insights: A set of analytics tabs (Overview, Overlap, Devices, Domains, Categories, Activity) that provide detailed metrics and visualizations for audiences within a plan.
• Audience Expression: The targeting logic generated from an audience’s cohort combination, formatted for use in ad servers. GAM360 users can copy expressions directly to line items.
• Boolean Logic: The operators used to combine cohorts within and between groups—ANY (OR), ALL (AND), and NONE (NAND) within groups; OR and AND between groups.
• Unique Users (UU): The number of distinct Permutive user IDs that meet the audience criteria within the last 30 days.
• Pageviews (PV): The number of pageview events registered by users in the audience within the last 30 days.
• Overlap: The percentage of users in an audience who are also members of a comparison cohort.
• Index: A measure comparing the overlap of an audience with a cohort versus the overlap of all users with that cohort. An index greater than 1 indicates the audience over-indexes for that cohort.

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Workflows

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Creating a Plan

Publishers create plans to capture campaign opportunity information. Each plan includes required fields (Plan Name, Advertiser, RFP Deadline) and optional fields (Agency, Budget, Countries, Domains) that help organize and filter campaign data.

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Building an Audience

After creating a plan, publishers build audiences by combining cohorts using boolean logic. The audience builder provides real-time metrics showing unique users and pageviews as cohorts are added and logic is adjusted.

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Viewing Plan Insights

Once an audience is saved, publishers can access Plan Insights to analyze reach, overlap, device distribution, and domain breakdown. These insights help you respond to brief requirements with accurate audience data.

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Activating Audiences in Ad Servers

To activate audiences, publishers copy the individual cohort IDs or targeting expressions from the audience and apply them to line items in their ad server. GAM 360 users can copy GAM-specific expressions directly.

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Key Features

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Plans

Plans store campaign opportunity information and serve as containers for audiences.

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Plan Fields

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Plan Management

• Sorting: Sort plans by Name, Advertiser, RFP Deadline, or Created Date
• Sharing: Share plans with colleagues via unique URLs
• Auto-save: Audiences are automatically saved when created

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Audiences

Audiences combine cohorts using boolean logic to define users for campaign targeting.

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Boolean Logic Structure

Audiences support up to 3 groups with up to 5 cohorts per group (maximum 15 cohorts total).

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Real-time Metrics

As you build audiences, the following metrics update in real-time:

• Est. Unique Users: Estimated distinct users meeting the audience criteria (last 30 days)
• Est. Pageviews: Estimated pageviews from audience users (last 30 days)

Metrics are shown for each group and for the total audience.

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Cohort Discovery Methods

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Audience Builder - Analyze Tab

The Analyze tab provides visualizations to understand audience composition and optimize reach.

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Audience Targeting Logic

After building an audience, access the targeting logic panel to see:

• Cohorts List: Full cohort names with their cohort IDs
• Boolean Expression: Standard representation of the audience logic
• GAM Expression: Copy-ready expression for Google Ad Manager line items (GAM 360 only)

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Plan Insights

Plan Insights provide detailed analytics across six tabs. Access insights after saving an audience within a plan.

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Overview Tab

The Overview tab also includes a 30-day trend chart showing daily unique users or pageviews.

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Overlap Tab

Analyze how your audience overlaps with cohorts organized by tags. Select comparison tags to generate tables showing:

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Devices Tab

View audience distribution across devices, platforms, and browsers. The tab includes:

• Distribution Charts: Percentage breakdown by unique users or pageviews
• Engagement Charts: Pageviews per unique user for each category

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Domains Tab

Understand how your audience is distributed across properties—useful for demonstrating the value of cross-property targeting.

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Categories Tab

View content category insights for your audience based on Watson categorization. Here you can see how your Audience engages with primary content categories (IAB tier 1) compared with your total audience.

• Audience - colorful bars in the foreground
• Total Audience - grey bars in the background

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Activity Tab

View engagement by time of day for your audience with the ability to select individual Watson categories for more detailed engagement insights. The heatmap shows daily % of unique users or time spent broken down by device type.

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Guides

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Troubleshooting

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Environment Compatibility

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Core Product

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Dependencies

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Limits

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Feature Limits

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Data Limits

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FAQ