Campaign override option - setting exact number of impressions/ decreasing the time between banner cache update

[Peter P]

Hi,

I currently use Revive Adserver 3.2.1. I need to use the "campaign override option" with limit to add impressions. 

Revive Adserver 3.2.1 currently refreshes in 20 minutes and i get a vast amount of additional advertising impressions for this time period, since I have significant traffic on my website. How can I set the refresh on less than 20 minutes, maybe 1 or 30 seconds, so I can at least limit the extra impressions as much as I can. I tried to decrease the refresh time in configurations->banner delivery settings-> Time Between Banner Cache Updates (seconds), but it did not work. Once I set it to less than 20 minutes, it goes back to 20.

 

How can I set exact limit of "override" impressions, without showing extra impressions? I need the add to dissapear after exact number of impressions, not more. 

 

Just a note, we use memcache for Banner delivery cache store type

Thanks for your help!

[Alex Ra]

Hey Peter and Revive Team,

I'am experiencing the same problem. 20 minutes is too long for all changes to be applied by Revive AdServer. It's all about money lost and it makes business less profitable. If there is a big traffic flow we can lost thousands of bucks during this refresh time.

It would be highly appreciated if you guys could post something helpful on this. 

Maybe there is any possibility to affect on this using Revive API? I have a team of developers so recommendations from any angle of view would be appreciated. 

Thanks is advance!

Edited September 4, 2015 by Alex Ra

[andrewatfornax]

Hi Peter,

So, a key concept here is that for all campaigns, no matter what type, if the campaign needs to be "turned off" once the total number of impressions required have been delivered, two things need to happen:

1. The Maintenance Engine needs to run, and count up the statistics, and note that the campaign needs to be disabled; and

2. The cache files for the relevant zone(s) need to be refreshed to take into account the new state of what needs to be delivered.

There really should be no issue with setting the cache file to be < 20 minutes - this is often desirable to allow new campaigns (or manually deactivated campaigns, etc.) to be turned on or off more quickly than every 20 minutes or so.

However, while there is an option to configure the Maintenance Engine to be run more often than once per hour (the default), I really would not recommend it. The experience I had with doing so in production systems 6 years ago (or so) was that it was a great idea in theory, but in practice, it made little difference to overall results, for a LOT more configuration and management effort, and a LOT more database space and processing power required, because the volume of impressions Revive Adserver was then using to predict what would happen were smaller, and ended up being more error prone.

Fundamentally, Revive Adserver is an ad server that is based on hourly decisions about delivery, to deliver faster ad serving that is possible with at delivery time decision making about global delivery limitations (at least, without needing a load of high end kit to manage the process), at the expense of accuracy, to a degree.

 

I would suggest that if you're after more accurate delivery, perhaps Contract campaigns are the better option - are Override campaigns strictly necessary?  They are intended for campaigns that attract a premium price (on account of overriding the regular Contract campaigns), and so some over-delivery should be less important, due to the higher revenues...

 

Sorry, that probably doesn't help much!

Edited October 5, 2015 by andrewatfornax