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Microsoft Monetize - Broker fees

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Important

Broker fees are deprecated on augmented line items and programmatic guaranteed line items. If you wish to track a third-party fee for an ALI or PGLI, please use Partner Fees.

If you use standard line items, broker fees provide a way for Networks to calculate payments and fees for third party "brokers," such as data providers, agency partners, finder fees, ad serving costs, etc. Broker Fees come in two flavors:

Commissions: Commissions are used on Line Items and Insertion Orders, and they are taken out of booked revenue (the amount that the advertiser pays to the Network.) They can either be a percentage of revenue or a flat CPM. Think of this as the Network paying out a portion of its cut from the advertiser.

Serving Fees: Serving Fees are fees that a Network must pay in addition to media costs when serving an ad. These can be data costs or additional ad serving or creative hosting fees. They can either be a percentage of costs or a flat CPM. Think of this as the Network having other costs associated with acquiring the inventory.

Microsoft Advertising does not physically handle broker fees: we don't collect money from Networks and pay out to third parties. But we want you to be able to run the business side of things as easily as possible on the platform.

Applied at line item or insertion order levels (Commissions)

Warning

  • Broker fees applied to an insertion order do NOT apply to any augmented line items belonging to that insertion order. They apply ONLY to standard line items.
  • If you set broker fees at both the line item level and the insertion order level, the line item fees will override the insertion order fees.
  • When goal priority is set to prefer delivery or prefer performance, line item level broker fees are not deducted from the bid. To always deduct broker fees from the bid, the trader should select margin as the goal priority.

When creating or editing a line item or insertion order, click the Add Fee button under Commissions. You can then select the broker, enter a description, choose the fee type, and enter the fee value in the box that appears.

For non-CPM buying strategies, bids are calculated according to the new booked revenue, after the commission was deducted. For example, a Line Item with $1 CPM booked revenue and a 10% broker fee would result in a new "revenue" of $0.90, and a relatively adjusted bid.

Note

The decimal position support for the broker fees is for 1 place after the decimal. For example, if you set 16.67% as a broker fee in the Commissions section, after saving, the value would round off to 16.7%. However, there is no restriction on number of places after decimal if the Insertion Order service API is used to create the broker fee.

Applied at campaign level (Serving fees)

When creating or editing a campaign, click the the Add Fee button under Serving Fees. You can then select the broker, enter a description, choose the fee type, and enter the fee value in the box that appears.

In the details screen, click Advanced Options > Serving Fees to get the Serving Fees panel.

Third-Party inventory

For optimized bids, bids are automatically reduced to account for serving fees. For example, a campaign with a CPC goal and a $0.20 CPM serving fee would result in bids being reduced by $0.20. For all other bids (flat CPM bids and learn bids) serving fees are calculated on top of your bid. For example, for a 10% serving fee on a $1 cpm bid, you will still bid $1, but your net media cost will be $1.10.

Direct inventory

You may owe serving fees to third parties for services such as creative hosting or user data. Serving fees are applied to your media cost, so, for example, a 10% serving fee on $10 of media cost would result in $1 in additional serving costs.

Reporting on broker fees

You can report on Serving Fees and Commissions in Network Analytics and Advertiser Analytics.