A Plan answers a question that comes before measurement: if we bought this inventory, who would it reach?

Where a Campaign looks backwards at media that ran, a Plan looks forwards at media that has not been bought. It assembles a candidate set of inventory and profiles the audience that passes through it, so the composition of a buy can be evaluated while it is still a proposal.

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Plans Do Not Measure Anything

A Plan produces no lift, no conversion rates, and no attribution. It describes an audience, not an outcome. Measurement happens on a Campaign, after media has run.

What a Plan Is Made Of

A Plan carries a name, an optional description, and a date range. The dates set the window of location data the audience profile is computed over - a recent window describes who is passing that inventory now.

Against that, you associate the inventory itself.

Associating Inventory

Inventory comes from Network Sources - Sources marked as describing a vendor's standing, long-lived inventory rather than one campaign's buy.

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Only Network Sources Can Be Added

A Source that is not marked as a network will not appear when building a Plan, and network Sources must be Static. This is deliberate: planning against a Source describing a single finished flight would profile a buy that is already over.

Each association carries filters, and this is where most of the work happens. A network Source typically holds a vendor's entire inventory - every unit they operate, nationally. A Plan is rarely about all of it, so filters narrow the network to the subset actually under consideration: a market, a set of venue types, a format.

• Add a Plan and click to associate a Source
• Select a network Source
• Add filters by choosing a filter key and entering the values to include
• Repeat for each Source the plan draws on

A Plan can draw on several network Sources, which is what makes cross-vendor planning possible - a proposed buy spanning three vendors is three associations, each filtered to the relevant subset.

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An Unfiltered Source Is Usually a Mistake

The Console flags associations with no filters, because attaching an entire national network unfiltered will profile far more inventory than the plan is really about, and produce a correspondingly generic audience. If you genuinely intend the whole network, the flag is safe to ignore.

Reading the Demographics

The Plan's demographics describe the audience observed passing the selected inventory over the Plan's date range, broken into the same categories as Demographic Reports - age, household income, education, employment, urbanicity, tech use, and household summary figures - each compared against the national distribution in percentage points.

As on a Campaign, these are head-of-household figures rather than individual ones, so they skew older and higher-income than a person-level profile of the same audience. Read the index against national rather than the absolute levels when comparing a Plan to anything outside Mira - see Demographic Reports.

The profile can be grouped along two dimensions:

• Market - how the audience differs between the markets the plan covers
• Venue - how it differs by venue type, comparing the audience at one kind of placement against another

Grouping is what makes a Plan actionable rather than descriptive. A single national profile tells you the buy skews a certain way; grouped by venue type, it tells you which part of the buy is doing that, and therefore what to add or drop. Selecting a group recomputes the national comparison for that subset rather than carrying over the total.

Working With Plans

Compare alternatives. The straightforward use is building two or three Plans over the same dates with different inventory and comparing their profiles. Because the date window and the demographic method are held constant, the difference between them is attributable to the inventory.

Iterate on filters, not on Sources. Refining a plan usually means changing which subset of a network is in scope. That is a filter change on an existing association, not a new Source.

Keep the date range recent and consistent. The profile reflects who passed the inventory during the window. A stale window describes historical traffic patterns, and two Plans over different windows are not cleanly comparable.

From a Plan to a Campaign

A Plan and a Campaign are separate objects, and building one does not create the other. Once a buy is agreed, the Campaign is set up in the usual way - see Campaigns - with Sources describing what actually ran.

The two are worth reading together afterwards. A Plan's projected audience and a Campaign's demographic report describe the same thing at different times: who the inventory was expected to reach, and who it actually did.