Contract Campaigns Under-Delivering.

A troubleshooting guide to help when contract campaigns are not meeting their set targets.

You may also want to review the Impressions are Too Low troubleshooting guide.

Symptoms

Contract campaigns (which are configured with a daily target for impressions, clicks or conversions) are consistently delivering at a rate below the set target. 

Troubleshooting Process

Step 1: Check Expectations

Before you start to dig into the issue, it's worth double checking that your targets are valid.

• Are you certain that the location(s) you will be displaying the campaign's banners on has sufficient inventory to meet the target?

This may be more difficult to know for certain, if you are using click or conversion targets - you may need a few days of delivery information before you can estimate your click or conversion rate, to then decide if you have sufficient inventory linked to the campaign.

You will also need to think about competition for the linked inventory:

• Are there any Override campaigns that will be taking inventory which will not be available to the under-delivering campaign?
• Are there any other competing Contract campaigns that will be taking inventory which will not be available to the under-delivering campaign? (The information about the priority weight for Contract campaigns should assist you with this.)

Once you've double checked that the inventory the campaign is linked to should be sufficient, proceed to Step 2.

Step 2: Understand Delivery Options

Revive Adserver's delivery process calculates a "probability" for how frequently each banner should be delivered during the running of the maintenance script. This ensures that banners can be delivered quickly, without lengthy delays that slow down page load times.

However, when Delivery Options are in place for a banner, the banner selection mechanism will, when required, exclude banners from being able to be delivered, based on those Delivery Options - but the maintenance script process which calculates the "probability" for banner delivery has no ability to factor in how likely banners will be excluded - so this is simply ignored.

This means that, in the event that banner Delivery Options frequently exclude a banner from delivery, the banner will under-deliver, as the calculated "probability" for how often the banner should be delivered (when it is has not been excluded from delivery) will not be high enough to take the frequent exclusion from delivery into account.

If the under-delivering campaign has Delivery Options on its banners that may be frequently excluding the banners from delivery, you may need to consider:

• Removing some of those Delivery Options, if possible, to allow the banner to be excluded from delivery less frequently;
• Link the campaign to additional inventory which will allow the banner to be delivered more often; and/or
• Consider if an Override campaign may be more appropriate to ensure that the restricted target audience defined by the Delivery Options always sees the campaign when possible - perhaps with appropriate Delivery Capping to restrict this to a defined number of times per day.

Step 3: Understand Delivery Capping

Delivery Capping can have exactly the same effect as Delivery Options - the Delivery Capping can exclude banners from delivery, resulting in the calculated "probability" for how often the banner should be delivered (when it is has not been excluded from delivery) to not be high enough to take the frequent exclusion from delivery into account.

If the under-delivering campaign has Delivery Capping at either the campaign and/or banner level, you may need to consider reviewing the cap levels to allow more frequent delivery.

Step 4: Consider Intentional Over-Delivery

Revive Adserver includes a global setting to intentionally over-deliver Contract Campaigns. This allows Contract Campaigns to be deliberately targeted for a given percentage of over-delivery, which may help in cases where a systemic under-delivery problem is seen.