Manually force ad probability/priority settings?

[davidr]

Hi there, I'm somewhat new to Revive, so please bear with me.

My question is: how can I manually override the calculated probability % for an ad, to force it to display based on a manual probability % I provide?

A little background: I'm working with a site that has a handful of campaigns and banners, and 5 zones where they get displayed.  The site gets around 40k hits/month.  The problem is our contract campaigns are constantly under-delivering the booked impressions, even though there is plenty of traffic to meet the # of impressions.

For example, in one zone I have 1 contract campaign and 1 remnant campaign running.  The contract campaign expires today and still needs to do about 400 impressions.  Yet the probability for that ad is continually too low -- it wanders around but typically only 5-10%.  At that rate vis-a-vis the traffic we're getting, it's just not going to meet the impressions we need.  Meanwhile, the remnant campaign gets the rest, so that ad displays a lot.

Judging from reading this forum, this seems to be a common problem.  For example: 

etc.

I've tried everything I can think of, based on other forum posts and users suggestions.  In Global Settings -> Maintenance Settings -> Priority Settings, I've set "Intentionally over-deliver Contract Campaigns" to 10%.  That seemed to help slightly, but I still don't feel confident it's enough to solve the problem.  And yes, I've made sure Maintenance is running.

What I've tried so far:

Being a naive developer, I figured I could just add a "manual override" box next to the probabilty % in www/admin/zone-probability.php, store the value somewhere, then force it into whatever function calculates the probability percentages.  But then I started going through all the methods that relate to calculating priority, compensating priority, etc, and it gets very complex very quickly.  I found that I could force in a "priority_factor" adjustment via _getPriorityAdjustment() in lib/OA/Maintenance/Priority/AdServer/Task/PriorityCompensation.php, which did indeed alter the priority % by the priority_factor supplied, but only temporarily.  It seems to get adjusted out the next time Maintenance runs.

Plus this just seems very hacky and totally not the "right" way to do it, I'm sure.

What I want:

I want to be able to bypass all the complex calculations that Revive does to calculate probability percentages.  Instead, I want a box where I can type in a number like 50% and Revive will display that ad 50% of the time no-matter-what until it meets the required impressions, and then stops.  It's far less important to me that the ad impressions are evenly-spaced throughout the duration of the campaign.  All I care is that it meets 100% of the required impressions without fail, even if it does so a day or two (or more) before the campaign is set to expire.

I think If I had some way of manually controlling the display probabilities, this would be much easier to make happen.

Any thoughts or advice would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Erik Geurts]

Probability of the outcome of a calculation (a complex one as you have found out). It can be changed manually. You're trying to fix a symptom, I'd recommend trying to find the cause and correcting that.

[andrewatfornax]

Hi @davidr,

You know, that's actually not a bad idea for a feature request. I wonder if anyone else would be interested in simply being able to manually define the % of zone impressions for each banner linked to the zone?

If you are still interested, maybe create a feature request in GitHub, please?

[rewgs]

Obviously this thread is many years old, but as it appears manual % override is not available, I'd like to add that I too would love to see that feature. For the life of me I can't get contract ad probability above 1% (and many are 0%), which more or less renders Revive completely useless. Overriding probability would be greatly appreciated.