Once a campaign is activated in a Demand-Side Platform (DSP) like DV360, it’s crucial to monitor its delivery throughout different stages. If you notice that some line items are underperforming or not spending at all, it’s important to conduct a thorough investigation rather than just focusing on one or two potential issues.
Key Checks for Delivery Issues
Active Status
Ensure that the campaign, insertion order (IO), and line item are all active. If any are paused, this can prevent spending. Reactivate them after completing QA.
Creative Rejection
Check if any creatives have been disapproved. Review the creative section for alerts and verify their status in the impression lost chart. A high percentage of “No eligible creatives” can indicate this issue.
Flight Date Discrepancies
Confirm that the flight dates for the IO or line item are correct, especially if you duplicated a line item. Campaign-level dates do not affect serving.
Narrow Targeting
Excessive restrictions can lead to low or no delivery. Consider loosening targeting criteria with client approval to test delivery.
Geographic Targeting
Targeting a small number of specific regions, cities, or zip codes can limit spending.
Digital Content Labels
Restrictions on content labels can impact delivery in brand safety targeting.
Creative Restrictions
Creatives in sensitive categories (e.g., alcohol, gambling) require manual review, which may delay serving.
Impression Lost Chart
Use this chart to identify where impressions are being lost. A 100% auction lost rate suggests your bids may be too low.
Time of Day
Analyze the Time of Day report to identify low spend periods. Some line items may only be intended for weekend delivery.
Audience Targeting
If your audience list has no users, the line item won’t spend.
Frequency Capping
Ensure frequency caps are not too restrictive. Applying limits at the campaign level can hinder impression delivery across multiple IOs.
Targeting Combinations
Certain combinations of targeting criteria may result in low spending. For example, selecting Affinity or In-Market audiences while excluding Google Ad Manager can limit inventory access.
Custom Audience Targeting
Low inventory for specific keywords can prevent delivery. Adding more relevant keywords may help.
Viewability
Ensure a high percentage of viewable inventory is available.
Inclusion Lists
Having too few keywords or URLs in your inclusion list can restrict inventory.
Technology Targeting
Be cautious with overly restrictive browser, OS, or carrier targeting.
Change History
Review recent changes in the line item’s history to identify any modifications that may have affected spending.
Budget at IO Level
Check for any removal of budget from the IO that could prevent spending. Budgets may shift to better-performing IOs.
Over delivery
Line items may overdeliver quickly, leading to no spend the following days.
Deal Line Items
Ensure that targeting layers are only set on one side (supply or buyer), not both.
CPM in Deals
Verify if the bid is competitive enough to account for platform fees, which can reduce your effective CPM.
Inventory Availability Report (IAR)
Low or no inventory in the IAR can halt spending.
Demographic Targeting
Be cautious if you’ve narrowly defined demographics or excluded unknowns
Troubleshooter
In DV360, If your line item is not spending or having delivery issue, you can use Troubleshooter to Troubleshoot your deals and line items DV360 Troubleshooter
Although the article above provides an extensive summary of this subject, we will attempt to look into it and understand it using an example.
In the below image, you can see "Total Available Requests" has some numbers. If you notice zero for it, that means the publisher stopped sending bid requests. Flag it to the team and ask them to look at the supply
Line item Troubleshooter - Requests vs Responses vs Won But in this example line item, Total available requests = 326k
Stage 1:
Out of 326k available requests, only eligible impressions are 212k (66% of total), as shown below.
Then what about the remaining impressions (34%) ? - Those are filtered because of the reasons mentioned below.
We can compare it to a pipeline, where water supply flows from the tank to the end user. By the time it reaches the end user, there are multiple leakages.
DV360 - Line item Troubleshooter - Filtered by Impressions
Because of targeting restrictions, 34% of impressions were filtered out, which is a major reason for this stage.
Other reasons mentioned, such as Prebid or Creatives can be ignored in this case, which are negligible
We are left with 212k Eligible impressions
Stage 2 Eligible impressions : 212k The number of impressions that were not filtered impressions
DV360 - Line item Troubleshooter - Filtered by the Eligible imps
In this pipeline, impressions were filtered due to Frequency, Budget and pacing, is negligible and can be ignored
So out ofEligible impressions : 212k, 92.6% of impressions are passed to next stage
These are "Bids submitted" = 197KIt is the number of eligible bids that were submitted into the auction (internal)
Stage 3: Bids submitted = 197K
DV360: Line item Troubleshooter, Filtered by the Auction
Below minimum Bid You might put a bid price that doesn't reach the minimum bid, and then you will see drop in impressions. In other words, if the supplier floor price is higher than your bid, then you lose the auction.
Auction Lost (Internal): The competitor is also using DV360 and bidding higher than your bid. It means it lost the bid for all the line items in DV360. It is not just related to your partner's, it is actually for every bid in dv360. Here, it is 0% in both cases.
Stage 4 So, whatever, bids submitted = 197k are now having bid responses = 197k As an advertiser or buyer, everyone wants to win the auctions that are submitted. But along with us, there are other buyers in the ecosystem, who also participate in auctions and want to meet their goals. Now competition comes into play.
DV360 - Line item Troubleshooter - Filtered Bid responses Out of bid responses = 197k, 92% of impressions were filtered due to Auction Lost (External)
Auction Lost due to external: The competitor is bidding higher than you through other DSPs. It means any buyer through any DSP that is competing for that inventory. In this case, suggest to raise your bids slightly until you meet the daily required goal.
After losing 92% of impressions which are responsed with bids, Left over impressions are 15.3K Finally, the impressions that you see are the impressions that you bid and won
DV360 Troubleshooter
