Manage commitment deal performance

To increase the chances of full delivery, transparency, and quality of commitment deals, The Trade Desk platform monitors deal performance and keeps both you and the buying party accountable for the deal terms. When a commitment deal continues to decline, the impacted party can choose to expand the deal, if applicable, or cancel the deal as a last resort. These settings apply only when spending levels fall below the agreed-upon thresholds in the deal terms. For details on thresholds, see Create commitment deals.

NOTE: Managing commitment deal performance is a collaborative effort between all deal participants—including you as the selling party, the buying party, and The Trade Desk. This guide is from your perspective as the selling party. Any actions or responsibilities that involve the buying party or The Trade Desk are noted clearly throughout.

Here's what you need to know about commitment deal performance management:

• Only the buying party can activate expansion.
• When cancellation is available, The Trade Desk determines the party at fault and allows the counterparty to cancel the deal.
• If you have a deal without spend goals, you can add it as a contributing deal.

Commitment deal workflows

When a commitment deal underperforms against its pacing goals, both parties receive notifications and gain access to structured recovery options. During deal creation, you can decide on adding deal cancellation and recommended deal expansion terms. After the deal is in-flight, if it starts to underpace, the buying party accesses the inventory in the deal expansion terms. If the deal continues to underperform, the counterparty has the option to cancel the deal until the deal recovers. The following workflows illustrate the commitment deal life cycle, from in-flight monitoring to post-flight cancellation.

Monitoring workflow

During commitment deal monitoring, the buying party can check when expansion is possible, and both parties can compare the thresholds with media spend goals. If the deal falls below the cancellation threshold, then the deal is cancelable.

The following diagram illustrates how both parties can monitor an accepted commitment deal to activate expansion, update expansion terms, or check cancellation rights.

The following example illustrates a typical workflow for a commitment deal with default settings that undergoes both expansion and cancellation due to poor pacing:

1. If the lifetime pacing of the deal drops below the expansion terms, The Trade Desk notifies both parties that expansion is now available. By default, this happens when the deal is below an 85% pacing threshold for more than 3 consecutive days.
2. The buying party sends a request to trigger expansion through The Trade Desk platform.
3. The deal starts to send additional avails for inventory that matches the expansion terms.
4. If post-expansion pacing continues to decline below the cancellation terms, deal cancellation becomes available. By default, this is a 70% pacing threshold for another 3 consecutive days.
5. The counterparty to the party at fault has the right to cancel the deal. This option remains available until pacing returns above the pacing threshold.

For details on determining which party can cancel the deal, see Cancellation rights.

Deal expansion

To help underperforming commitment deals deliver in full, expansion provides buying parties with access to additional pre-approved inventory. To enable deal expansion, you must configure expansion terms during deal creation, define broader targeting criteria, and set adjusted floor prices for the additional inventory. When expansion becomes available, buying parties can then apply these pre-approved terms to access more inventory.

Here's what you need to know about deal expansion:

• Expansion is optionally set by declaring expansion terms that specify a pacing threshold and period.
• You can add conditional inventory access in the expansion terms.
• During expansion, the avails sent match a union of the expansion and base terms.
• When the deal underpaces below the expansion terms, the buying party can activate deal expansion.
• After deal expansion is available, the option to activate it remains available to the buying party until the end of the deal.
• Once deal expansion is active, it cannot be undone.
• You can add expansion terms during the middle of a deal by revising the deal.

IMPORTANT: Deal expansion requires cooperation from both parties: the selling party must have it configured within the deal, and the buying party must decide when to activate it.

The following table outlines how you can modify expansion terms in a commitment deal.

Revise expansion terms

When configuring expansion of a commitment deal, specify the following parameters. For details, see ExpansionTerms object.

The following example dealRevise mutation shows how to update both expansion and cancellation terms. In practice, the threshold for cancellation should be lower than expansion. This ensures the deal has time to recover before moving onto cancellation.

mutation {
   dealRevise(
    input: {
      terms: {
        commitmentTerms: {
          expansionTerms: {
            period: 7
            threshold: 0.85
            floorPrice: 10.00
          }
          cancellationTerms: {
            period: 7
            threshold: 0.70
          }
          commitmentFinancialTerms: {
            minDailyAvails: 10000
            floorPrice: 15.00
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ) {
    errors {
      ... on MutationError {
        __typename
        message
        field
      }
    }
  }
}

NOTE: These values only takes effect after the buying party has accepted this revision.

For complete details on deal creation, see Initiate and negotiate deals.

Configure expanded inventory

All terms that support the Selection object are expandable. Common expansion strategies may include broader content categories, additional geographic markets, or relaxed device targeting. For a comprehensive list of values, see the description of the corresponding field in the Inventory Selection object.

IMPORTANT: Expansion terms must stay within the agreed-upon channels. For example, a deal that includes only audio and display channels cannot include expansion terms for video.

The following example dealRevise mutation shows how to add expansion terms in the expansion object to grant access to inventory that was previously blocked.

mutation {
   dealRevise(
    input: {
      id: "DEAL_ID_PLACEHOLDER"
      terms: {
        commitmentTerms: {
          inventoryComposition: {
            networks: {
              base: {
                excluded: [
                  name: "BLOCKED_NETWORK_NAME_PLACEHOLDER"
                ]
                included: [
                  name: "ALLOWED_NETWORK_NAME_PLACEHOLDER"
                ]
              }
              expansion: {
                included: "BLOCKED_NETWORK_NAME_PLACEHOLDER"
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  ) {
    errors {
      ... on MutationError {
        __typename
        message
        field
      }
    }
  }
}

After expansion, the expanded inventory remains available for the remainder of the flight as The Trade Desk continues to monitor the deal. If the deal continues to decline in performance, the impacted party can end the deal early through deal cancellation.

Deal cancellation

Every commitment deal includes cancellation rights to provide a structured and agreed-upon framework to opt out of deals that are severely underpacing. Depending on which party is at fault for not complying with the deal terms, the counterparty can choose to cancel the deal, which is always manually activated. Cancellation terms define the conditions under which the party not at fault can terminate the agreement.

Here's what you need to know about deal cancellation:

• When a party is at fault, the counterparty may cancel the deal. For details, see Cancellation rights.
• When both parties are at fault, either party can cancel.
• When both parties aren't at fault, no party can cancel.
• If the deal performance recovers above the cancellation threshold, the option to cancel the deal becomes unavailable.
• After a party cancels a deal, the deal status updates to the CANCELED value.
• You cannot communicate with deal participants in a canceled deal.

Cancellation configuration

When configuring the cancellation terms for a commitment deal, you must specify these parameters based on the following table.

NOTE: The cancellation period starts as soon as the deal crosses the cancellation threshold, independent of expansion.

Cancellation rights

When pacing falls below the threshold for the specified violation period, The Trade Desk determines cancellation rights based on which deal performance metrics don't meet the terms of the commitment deal.

The following diagram illustrates the determination of fault and which party can cancel an underpacing deal.

The following table shows which party has the right to cancel the deal if certain performance metrics fall below the minimum values specified in the commitment terms.

Cancel a commitment deal

After you're granted cancellation rights, you can use the following example dealCancel mutation to cancel the commitment deal by providing the deal ID, account ID, and contact information.

mutation {
  dealCancel(
    input: {
      id: "CANCELED_DEAL_ID_PLACEHOLDER"
      accountId: "ACCOUNT_ID_PLACEHOLDER"
      canceledBy: {
        name: "Jane Doe"
        email: "janedoe@example.com"
      }
    }
  ) {
    errors {
      ... on MutationError {
        __typename
        message
        field
      }
    }
  }
}

FAQs

The following are commonly asked questions about commitment deal management.

After I cancel a deal, how long does it take for the status to update?

The system can take over a minute to calculate and process changes before updating the dealStatus field. To retrieve immediate updates on canceled deals, use the deals query and include the isCanceled field. The following example deals query shows how to retrieve canceled deals in real time.

query GetCanceledDealsExample {
  deals(
    input: { accountId: "ACCOUNT_ID_PLACEHOLDER" }
    where: {
      isCanceled: true
    }
  )
}

TIP: After you've canceled a deal, you can also remove the deal to prevent it from appearing in future deal query results.