Troubleshooting Tips & Tricks

This article covers common problems and how to tackle them.

M
Written by Marcus Johansson
Updated over a week ago

No Impressions from Bid Strategy

There can be a number of reasons why bid strategies are not generating impressions:

  • If bids are placed, contact the publisher / seller to understand reasons for not winning. It might be that the advertiser is not whitelisted by the seller.

  • If bids are not placed, inspect Bid Metrics to get clues.

Common reasons for no bids placed include:

  • Floor price is not met / max CPM bid is too low. Read more about max CPM here.

  • No creative sizes and formats matches the targeted site list inventory

  • Their is no overlap of the targeted audience and the targeted site list inventory

  • Creatives are not audited or rejected

  • Creatives are not secure

No Impressions from Deals

  • Is the deal active?

  • Do we receive deal requests on the creative formats used by campaign?

  • Do deal request volumes match what have been said by the publisher?

  • Make sure we don't bid below the floor price when audience and BidTheatre costs have been subtracted from the max bid CPM.

  • Is deal and sites correctly linked to the site list used.

Bid strategy gets fewer impressions than wanted

  • Set a target share to increase that the bid strategy bid rate and pace

  • Add more inventory to the targeted site list

  • Use a larger audience

  • Use a wider geo target

  • Modify filter to be less discriminatory

  • Improve the win rate by raising the max CPM bid

Decreasing delivery from bid strategy

Start by understanding the change:

  • Verify is there has been a decrease in number of bids, or a decrease in win rate, or both?

  • Verifying if the decrease is limited to certain sites or across all targeted inventory

Use Bid Metrics to understand in detail what happens during campaign targeting. Consider any changes done:

  • Has there been a change in targeting or creatives to the campaign?

  • Has any other other campaign(s) started that targets the same inventory, but bids a higher CPM?

Comparing Campaigns

The programmatic ecosystem has several moving parts, and there may be several explanations for a campaign not performing as expected. Sometimes several campaigns run simultaneously, and it may seem strange that one campaign performs as expected, while another has trouble clearing the needed impressions.

The general rule when troubleshooting comparable campaigns is to identify difference in the campaign setup. Often assumptions can be the enemy here, and we highly recommend to verify assumptions about what's common between any two campaigns.

Inspect the campaign log (in Overview) to see changes made to the campaign.

Some caveats:

  • Max CPM - If campaign A has a max CPM that exceeds campaign B, campaign A will always take precedence over campaign B for the impressions where they compete.

  • Frequency cap - If campaign A has a frequency cap, and campaign B has not, campaign B will always have an advantage to campaign B as campaign A will not compete in as many auctions.

Always verify details about audiences used. If an audience targets a segment, a cookie group or a data list, verify that your assumptions about segment or cookie group sizes hold. If using data lists, verify that they contain what you assume.

Reporting Discrepancy with 3rd Party

To investigate tracking discrepancies with third party adservers, consider the following:

  • Is cache busting used in the third party tags (all of them)?

  • Is click tracking properly integrated in the third party tags (all of them)?

  • Is the third party doing filtering of any kind, such as frequency capping, geo targeting, etcetera?

  • Pull and compare reports grouped by day, hour or creative, to see if discrepancies are evenly spread or get clues.

Please note that partners to BidTheatre may execute ad tags and test clicks as part of ad audit and/or quality assurance. This traffic is filtered from BidTheatre's reporting, but may appear as valid traffic in third party systems.

Did this answer your question?