TrustRadius: an HG Insights company

WideOrbit

Score10 out of 10

5 Reviews and Ratings

What is WideOrbit?

WideOrbit offers sell-side ad management solutions for media companies, including programmatic capabilities for TV, radio and the web.

Categories & Use Cases

Top Performing Features

  • Ad performance reports

    Allow users to generate reports comparing the performance of various ads or the performance of certain aspects of ads (like headlines, etc.)

    Category average: 6.4

  • Ad forecasting and optimization

    Ad forecasting models predict campaign performance to assist with optimization.

    Category average: 6.5

  • Display advertising

    Supports banner and rich media display ads, including video, audio, mobile, etc.

    Category average: 7

Areas for Improvement

  • Ad attribution reporting

    Generates accurate, detailed reports that attribute conversion to a combination of different touch points (ads, and other factors) leading up to conversion.

    Category average: 6.4

  • Ad conversion tracking

    Tracks ad conversions by campaign and type of conversion—the customer might have clicked on the ad and then purchased a product, subscribed to a newsletter, filled out a form, or downloaded a whitepaper, etc.

    Category average: 6.8

  • Cross-channel ad management

    Provides an integrated view or control panel that allows users to manage their ad campaigns across a variety of platforms in one place.

    Category average: 7.1

WideOrbit delivers a universe of capabilities

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use WideOrbit to manage our inventory both in terms of analyzing average unit rates and percent of sell out of our prime and weekend dayparts. I use WideOrbit to track key client spending trends. I use it daily to track political accounts during election season by market and station. I have used several other traffic systems in my career and I find Wide Orbit to be the most user-friendly and data-driven product in its class.

Pros

  • Revenue Reporting
  • Inventory Management
  • Competitive Category reporting

Cons

  • Would love to see the inventory codes in the drop-down menu stick like breaks and weeks..and not have to re-select each time for a report
  • would like to have better functionality when exporting to XL or to PDF. Formatting could use improvement with output
  • offer a monthly calendar of training opportunities like Nielsen offers

Return on Investment

  • helps us manage our clients
  • assists us in business forecasting and trending
  • helps us manage our sellers and markets

Wide Orbit - a wide variety of reports for your day to day business!

Pros

  • Wide Orbit offers a wide variety of reports, as a user- you are able to maximize these to your advantage and include as much or as little information as necessary for internal use or for your clients.
  • It's fantastic to be able to reference all of our orders in one place and track completion process from order entry to approvals and actual air time/run dates
  • Very user friendly and efficient to use.
  • The Revenue Reports are especially wonderful, and can be sorted according to whatever perimeters you desire.

Cons

  • Launch time seems to be way too long. It can sometimes take up to 5 minutes just to load the program, and that doesn't include pulling a particular report.
  • Some of the options to generate reports and/or input orders are repetitive- with many hoops to jump through and buttons to choose. However, I believe that some of that can be eliminated through corporate preferences on a WO subscription.
  • It tends to update often which is good and bad. Ultimately the updates are designed for more efficient use, however,it can be discouraging to have to re-train on added features and designs to WO.

Return on Investment

  • The system doesn't seem to work well with any of our digital platforms. For example, we can input an order and track an approval process through our finance system and see the invoice, but actual execution of any digital assets are NOT done through Wide Orbit

WideOrbit is out of this World

Pros

  • WideOrbit does a good job of helping to maintain revenues associated with TV and digital sales.
  • WideOrbit also does a good job of allowing different people to manipulate necessary things to make sure dollars are accounted for and spots air.
  • WideOrbit is fairly user-friendly, and when it does get hung up, they provide excellent customer service support.

Cons

  • The speed in which it takes certain areas of the software to load is one area I would think that needs improvement.
  • Some of the functionality or ease of use among the different areas for reporting can be difficult, and many times are universal in nature, so that can be tough.
  • In one particular instance, the need to be able to preempt more than one station at a time, this would be helpful. If you are trying to do a clean sweep of something, having to stop and change stations can be cumbersome.

Return on Investment

  • Since I'm not privy to the costs associated with this software, I can't speak to what the overall ROI is. However, I can say that this system is far better than previous systems of it's nature.
  • As far as what the software is used for, I would say that WideOrbit is one of the better software's out there. It isn't perfect by any means, but it is far better than others out there. It is much more user friendly, and since time is money for our sales team, I would say it is much more user friendly on the time aspect.
  • I think as far as what impact it has had on our overall business, I would say it is a positive one. We use it all day everyday, so I feel confident in saying that it has certainly made what we do easier.

Alternatives Considered

Pilat