Underdeliverance When Using 'contract' Campaigns

[zoria]

I have a serious problem with underdeliverance of campaigns which are set as 'Contracts'.

 

The problem is they're seriously underdelivered, e.g. they should have 10000 impressions per day and they get only 6000-7000.

 

I thought maybe setting one of campaigns as 'Remnant' leaving the rest as 'Contract' would solve the problem, but apparently it didn't, they still get underdelivered.

Remnant campaign, though, got loads of impressions during the same period.

 

I know for sure that I have amount of impressions daily which is enough for all the campaigns to be delivered, so that'n not a problem either.

 

 

 

So... maybe some of you have any idea what may be causing those underdeliverances? Now I have to manage all of my campaigns manually.

[andrewatfornax]

If you didn't have any remnant campaigns before (I assume so from the post) then you may need to wait a couple of weeks unfortunately before things improve - after 2 weeks, Revive Adserver uses a longer-term algorithm to predict the number of impressions in a zone, so it will take a while for the effect of having a remnant campaign active to come into effect.

UPDATE: Just to help anyone reading old posts via a Google search, Revive Adserver no longer requires "a couple of weeks" to learn and predict traffic. It uses a simpler approach now, and waiting a few weeks won't make any difference to how well Revive Adserver delivers.

[zoria]

OK, that was my wild guess. I've just left all those campaigns as remnant now, managing them manually, so let's see what happens in a few weeks.

[zoria]

Another question:

 

letting Adserver "learn" how to manage campaigns' impressions, can I set some of them as contract during this period, or do they all have to be set as remnants for Revive to learn about impressions?

[andrewatfornax]

Using contract campaigns during the learning period is absolutely fine - just don't expect that delivery will be as good as it will be later on (i.e. more over/under delivery). But do make sure there is always a remnant campaign present and active, so that all inventory can be tracked and Revive Adserver can learn about it.

[zoria]

Now, more than 2 weeks have already passed since I've been posting here. But there's still no improvement.

My campaigns still get underdelivered when I turn them into 'contracts'.

 

Other campaigns which are set as 'remnants', with minimal weight, still get overdelivered.

 

Do You have any other ideas, what may be causing those problems?

 

It surely looks like my Revive didn't learn his lesson

[zoria]

I've been digging in Revive forum and I found some more topics related to the problem.

It seems some other users also had problems with contract campaigns after switching to Revive.

 

Maybe something else than algorithm is causing those underdeliverances?

Campaigns begun to get underdelivered after upgrading from Openx.

Is there something my CTO should check?

 

Regards,

Zoria

[andrewatfornax]

I can honestly say that we've changed absolutely nothing in the Revive Adserver 3.0.x series of releases from the most recent 2.8.x of OpenX Source. So, there is absolutely no difference in how Revive Adserver predicts zone inventory, prioritises campaigns, and delivers.

 

That said, we know things are not perfect - there are some circumstances where we know under-delivery can happen, and we also have some ideas for how we might be able to make things better. Stay tuned! 

[mc8]

I have the same problem.

now, i need keep monitoring the delivery and manully switch the campaign to "exclusive" to take all the impression

[bryanwoj]

This is nothing new with Revive. We've had this problem for the entirety of the time while using OpenX and now Revive. We have just made a habit of switching the contract campaigns to remnant in the last couple of days to make sure they deliver the entirety of their impressions in the contracted time period. 

[karen.mikaela]

Hi @Zoria. Did you get solve your problem with contract campaign? I have the same issue.

Tks.

[jpm]

We also have this problem. Running revive now for more than 6 months and it still underdelivers contract campaigns.

I don't understand why this problem can't be solved. We were using the very old phpAdsNew, from were OpenX and revive came,

for many years and this never had any problems with underdelivering.

 

Now, the problem is very urgent as we created a few new zones for the coming mobile version of our website, putted in

already running campaigns or banners and nearly nothing is displayed on these zones, maybe one impression per

100 pageviews.

 

Is there any solution possible, in a very short term?

 

Or can anyone recommend a commercial support/company which can solve this for us?

[andrewatfornax]

Anyone tried using the deliberate overdelivery option that was introduced in 3.1?

 

http://documentation.revive-adserver.com/display/DOCS/Maintenance+Settings

[guidomonacci]

HI Andrew, 

    I test it but nothing change (even with 100% of overdeilvery). I use to run OpenX and Revive for 5 years. In my last installation we just work with contract campaign and we are facing serious under-delivering  problem. Only deliver 75% of the impressions. 

 

We change the OI calcule function to have less OI assuming that history is not relevant to one day campaign and  but it still don't reach to the campaign goal. 

 

When we run the maintenance on debug mode all the contract campaign have been compensated, maybe the compensation algorithm is not working.

 

 

Thanks!

[Anne]

I have the exact same problem. My "contract" campaign that needs 85% of all impressions gets 50% (set at a weight of 10 + # of impressions) and my "remnant" campaign set at a weight of 1 is getting 50%, when is should get 15%.  I will seriously be undersold for the contract campaign (paying customer) and oversold for the remnant (freebie).  If I remove the remnant, I get white space in between the ads of the contract campaign.  Seems to be a major issue.

[karen.mikaela]

Maybe that behavior happens because there is a bug timezone on Revive 3.1.0 see this issue

https://github.com/revive-adserver/revive-adserver/issues/497

[Anne]

I ended up duplicating my campaign as a remnant campaign and will monitor it that way.  Now, at least, it is getting a lot more impressions and may hit its target!

 

I couldn't get into that link above.

[andrewatfornax]

Apart from, as @karen.mikaela mentions, there being a bug in earlier Revive Adserver versions (now fixed), there's also an option in Revive Adserver to deliberately attempt to over deliver, which some users report is giving them good results in keeping Contract campaigns on track.

http://documentation.revive-adserver.com/display/DOCS/Maintenance+Settings