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The Trade Desk Kokai Guide — 168-Page Handbook for Traders
2026 Edition · Fully updated for Kokai
Mastering The Trade Desk — the complete Kokai handbook
You have a Trade Desk login. You see a wall of tiles with two-letter codes. Every tutorial you find describes menus that aren't there any more.
This is the 168-page manual that fixes that. Launch, optimise and scale Display, Video, CTV and Audio campaigns — from your very first login, without anyone sitting next to you.
168 pages25 chapters6 campaign walkthroughs
Kokai-onlyInstant PDF download
Get instant access — ₹599
Instant download · Costs less than one takeaway · All sales final
168 pages · PDF168PAGES
25CHAPTERS
6CHANNEL WALKTHROUGHS
8SELF-TEST CHECKPOINTS
Why most Trade Desk tutorials fail you
Almost every guide online describes a platform that no longer exists
Until 2023, The Trade Desk's interface was called Solimar — tabs across the top: Campaigns, Data, Inventory, Reports. Then Kokai replaced it entirely with the tile-based Programmatic Table, and since 13 August 2025 you can't even create a new campaign in the old interface.
So when a blog post or a YouTube walkthrough tells you to "click the Data tab and select Audiences", you go looking for a menu that was removed years ago — and quietly conclude the problem is you.
- The Trade Desk's own documentation sits behind a partner login, so you can't just go and read it.
- Edge Academy courses are gated and assume you already have someone to ask.
- Free guides are years out of date — no Programmatic Table, no Seeds, no Deal Desk, no Sincera controls.
- Nobody explains where anything actually is. Which tile holds the audience? Which one holds the deals? What does Se even mean?
- You learn by breaking a client's budget, which is a slow and expensive way to learn.
What this book is
The colleague who sits next to you and explains it
Written entirely for Kokai — the platform you're actually using. Every tile decoded, every setting justified, every step in order.
SeAuKaDmSh
IsInvBKRf
GDdCreMmRp
Every one of these is explained — what it does, where it lives, and what to set inside it.
Outcomes, not chapters
What you'll be able to do by the last page
A book is only worth its price if you can do things afterwards you couldn't do before. Here is the specific list.
- Find any setting in the platform without being told where it is
- Create a Universal Pixel, install it via GTM, and verify it's actually firing
- Build a Seed — and understand why a campaign without one quietly underperforms
- Build audiences from pixel data, and know which of the nine audience types is worth paying for
- Accept a PMP deal and get it delivering the same day
- Set up a Programmatic Guaranteed deal and pace it so you don't under-deliver on a contract
- Read a Deal Quality Score and decide whether a deal is worth its premium
- Launch Display, Video, CTV, Audio, Native and DOOH campaigns — six full walkthroughs
- Run one omnichannel campaign instead of four siloed ones fighting each other
- Optimise deliberately towards reach, CTR, CPC, CPM, CPA or ROAS — a playbook per goal
- Apply bid factors by site, browser, device and environment — the thing this DSP does that others can't
- Diagnose a campaign that isn't spending in minutes, using a decision tree
- Pull the right report for the question you've actually been asked
- Decide when to let Koa run and when to take the wheel
The full contents
What's inside the 168 pages
Eight parts, twenty-five chapters, built so a complete beginner can start at page one — and an experienced trader can jump straight to Part 6.
Part 1 · Chapters 1–3
Foundations
How one impression is bought in under 200 milliseconds. First-price auctions and bid shading. The metrics that matter, with the arithmetic worked through. Open internet vs walled gardens.
Part 2 · Chapters 4–5
The platform map
The Programmatic Table, tile by tile. Where the audience section is, where inventory lives, where reporting hides. Campaign structure, pacing, and the Decision Power Score.
Part 3 · Chapters 6–8
Data foundations
The Universal Pixel start to finish. Seeds — the Kokai concept with no equivalent in any other DSP. All nine audience types, and where identity really stands in 2026.
Part 4 · Chapters 9–11
Inventory, deals & creatives
Open marketplace, PMP, Preferred and PG. Deal Desk and the Deal Quality Score. Sincera supply-quality controls. Complete creative specs for every channel.
Part 5 · Chapters 12–17
Launching campaigns
The heart of the book. Six campaigns built from an empty screen: Display, Online Video, CTV, Audio, Native/DOOH/Retail, and a true omnichannel build.
Part 6 · Chapters 18–20
Optimisation & troubleshooting
A playbook per KPI. The granular bid-factor method — site, browser, environment. And a decision tree for when a campaign isn't spending or isn't converting.
Part 7 · Chapters 21–22
Measurement & reporting
Every report and which question it answers. Attribution models and their biases. View-through done honestly. Incrementality testing and the Measurement Marketplace.
Part 8 · Chapters 23–25
Kokai AI & going live
What Koa actually does inside every bid, why it's a different animal from Solimar's AI, and how much to hand over. Plus a full capstone campaign and the habits of a professional trader.
Reference section
The part you'll keep reopening
Tile directory · creative specs for every channel · the formula sheet · pre-launch checklist · the weekly optimisation routine · glossary · answers to all eight checkpoints.
See how it's written
A real page from the book
No vague advice. Real numbers, worked through, so you can check the arithmetic yourself and apply it on Monday morning.
Chapter 14 · Connected TV
Why the frequency cap is the biggest lever in a CTV campaign
Connected TV is the channel most clients come to The Trade Desk for — and the one where habits from digital advertising do the most damage. It isn't clickable. Targeting is at household level. And an unmanaged frequency cap is how one viewer sees the same 30-second ad eleven times in an evening.
Worked example — what £35,000 actually buys
- Blended CPM £26 → 1,346,154 impressions
- At an average frequency of 6 → reach ≈ 224,359 households
- At an average frequency of 3 → reach ≈ 448,718 households
Halving frequency doubles reach for exactly the same money. For an awareness campaign, the frequency cap isn't a hygiene setting — it's the single largest lever you have, and it costs nothing to pull.
Chapter 19 · The chapter people re-read
Granular bid control — what The Trade Desk does that other DSPs can't
On most platforms you optimise at ad-group level and hope. Here you can leave the ad group intact and adjust the price you'll pay for any specific characteristic inside it — individual sites, browsers, environments, devices, dayparts, supply quality.
One dimension, one afternoon
- Web desktop — £4,100 spend, 142 conversions, £29 CPA
- Web mobile — £3,800 spend, 71 conversions, £54 CPA
- In-app — £4,100 spend, 18 conversions, £228 CPA
A third of the budget producing 8% of the conversions. Reweighting that £4,100 towards desktop at £29 CPA would yield roughly 142 conversions instead of 18 — and on most other DSPs you couldn't have made that adjustment without rebuilding the ad group.
Is this for you?
Who gets the most out of it
| You are… | What this book does for you |
|---|---|
| New to The Trade Desk You've just been given a login | Read Chapters 1–17 in order. You'll go from "what is a DSP" to launching a live omnichannel campaign unaided. |
| Coming from DV360 or Amazon DSP | Chapter 2 for what's different, Chapter 4 for the interface, Chapter 7 for Seeds — which have no equivalent on the platform you know. |
| Already trading, want depth | Go straight to Part 6. Chapters 18 and 19 are where the money is, and Chapter 10 covers Deal Desk, which most material doesn't mention at all. |
| Interviewing for a programmatic role | Eight checkpoints with answers, a glossary, and a formula sheet. The questions interviewers actually ask about DSPs are in here. |
| An agency onboarding a team | A single shared reference so juniors stop asking the same fourteen questions. (Team licences — just ask.) |
| Looking for Meta or Google Search tactics | This isn't for you. The Trade Desk buys the open internet — display, video, CTV, audio, native, DOOH and retail media. Not Search, not Meta, not YouTube. |
The package
What you actually receive
- The complete 168-page PDF, designed for screen and print, delivered instantly
- Six step-by-step campaign walkthroughs — Display, Video, CTV, Audio, Native/DOOH, omnichannel
- The tile directory — every Programmatic Table tile and its code, on one page you can photograph
- Creative specification tables for display, video, CTV, audio, native and DOOH
- The formula sheet — every calculation in the book on two pages
- A pre-launch checklist you can work through before every campaign
- The weekly optimisation routine — roughly 100 minutes a week, day by day
- Eight self-test checkpoints with full answers, so you know what you've actually absorbed
- A glossary of every term the platform and your clients will use
Let's talk about the price
It costs less than one takeaway
Here's what ₹599 buys you elsewhere this week:
₹650One food delivery order
₹700Two cinema tickets
₹600Three coffees
₹599The skill your next role is hiring for
One badly-paced campaign costs a client more than this book costs you. One PG deal that under-delivers because nobody checked the frequency cap costs more than this book a hundred times over. And a trader who can run The Trade Desk unaided is paid meaningfully more than one who can't.
Get the book — ₹599
Instant PDF download · Secure payment · All sales are final
2026 Edition
Mastering The Trade Desk
₹1,499
₹599one-off · instant download · no subscription
Buy now & download
Delivered to your email the moment payment clears- 168-page PDF, 25 chapters
- 6 full campaign walkthroughs
- Reference section & checklists
- 8 checkpoints with answers
Who wrote it
Written by practitioners, not a content team
Not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to The Trade Desk, Inc. "The Trade Desk", "Kokai" and "Koa" are their trademarks, used here only to describe the platform this book teaches. No screenshots or copyrighted material from The Trade Desk appear in the book — every diagram was drawn independently.
Before you buy
Questions people ask
Is this current? The Trade Desk changes constantly.
Yes — it's written entirely for Kokai and includes 2026 features that most material doesn't cover at all: Deal Desk and the Deal Quality Score, Sincera supply-quality controls, the advanced AI control modes, omnichannel campaign groups and CTV pause ads. The handful of details that couldn't be confirmed against a live seat are marked in the text so you know to verify them, rather than being stated with false confidence.
I've never used a DSP before. Is this too advanced?
No. Part 1 starts with what programmatic advertising actually is and how a single ad gets bought — no prior knowledge assumed. By Part 5 you're building campaigns. The subtitle says "from your very first login" and it means it.
I've used DV360 / Amazon DSP. Will I learn anything?
Almost certainly. Seeds have no equivalent in either platform and they change how you set up everything downstream. So does the bid-factor system in Chapter 19 — the ability to adjust bids on individual sites, browsers and environments inside one ad group, without splitting your data. Most traders migrating from other DSPs never learn to use it.
Does it cover CTV?
Chapter 14 is a complete CTV walkthrough — how it differs from every other channel, why a CPA goal is the wrong KPI, how the good inventory is transacted, creative specs, the household frequency maths, and CTV pause ads. There's also a full CTV section inside the omnichannel build in Chapter 17.
Are there screenshots of the platform?
No, and deliberately. The Trade Desk's interface images are their copyright, so instead every diagram, table and illustration in the book was drawn from scratch. Navigation is described precisely in text — which tile, which code, which order — and the book explains the logic of the interface, which survives redesigns in a way screenshots don't.
What format is it, and how do I get it?
A single PDF, 168 pages, designed to read on screen and print cleanly on A4. The download link is emailed to you the moment your payment clears.
Do you offer refunds?
All sales are final. Because this is an instantly-delivered digital product, we don't offer refunds — which is exactly why this page describes the contents in so much detail. Read the full chapter list above and the sample pages before you buy, and if anything is unclear, ask us first. If the file ever fails to download or arrives corrupted, we'll fix that immediately.
Can I buy it for my whole team?
Yes — get in touch and we'll sort a team licence. The single-copy licence covers one reader.
Will this help me pass an interview for a programmatic role?
It's not written as an interview book, but it does cover the ground interviewers test: auction mechanics, deal types, audience strategy, attribution, optimisation and the specifics of this DSP. The eight checkpoints with answers are a good way to find your gaps before someone else does.
One last thing
Stop guessing which tile does what
Everyone's first hour in The Trade Desk goes the same way: log in, see a wall of tiles, click a few, quietly close the tab. This book is the colleague who explains it.
168 pages. Six campaigns built step by step. Everything current for Kokai in 2026.
Get instant access — ₹599
Instant PDF download · Secure payment · All sales are final
Instant deliverySecure checkout168 pages, no fluffWritten by practitioners