Puzzling delivery and priorities

[malmazan]

Hi all:

After many years with phpAdsNew (and a failed tryout of OpenX), I installed Revive 3.2.5 (don't have the PHP version for v4 just yet) from scratch for testing.

I have two 728x90px zones and two 240x400 zones, plus an e-mail zone and a zone I was planning to use with direct campaign invocation (which I have not found how to do on Revive yet).

I have about 15 advertisers and 20 contract campaigns, uncapped for the most part, plus a couple of remnant campaigns. I have checked that campaigns are correctly assigned to zones, and that contracted views and end dates are fine. I use normal JS invocation.

My web site shows about 10.000 impressions daily, and I've set tests for a few days that would serve 5% of contracted adviews and zone priorities are all wrong, with hardly any priorities assigned to contract campaigns. I tried also for about 8 hours to run 30% of views with similarly low priorities for contract campaigns even though remnants should be 0% (see attached image, a small number of contact banners have some priority, which can be 0.5%-12%), though stats showed mostly contract campaigns being delivered, albeit with very low views, about a third of what they should be. (Zone in this test is set not to show banners if the are none that can be show, though I have not seen this happen).

I have changed a few file delivery names and used re-directs in .htaccess.

I have checked the debug log and it seems fine, with maintenance running OK. I have checked the "Troubleshooting banner delivery" document. I know there was a command line way of showing some priority tables, but since the openx site is down and they are not documented I have not been able to run those tests.

I'd be very grateful for some advice. Thanks in advance.

 

Edited October 14, 2016 by malmazan
wrong image

[malmazan]

I'd be grateful for some help on this

[andrewatfornax]

Try for longer than 8 hours! Revive's model is to use information about past days to forecast inventory, so if it's a brand new install, 8 hours isn't enough. 

Let it run for a few weeks, and see how things go. :-)

[malmazan]

17 minutes ago, andrewatfornax said:

Try for longer than 8 hours! Revive's model is to use information about past days to forecast inventory, so if it's a brand new install, 8 hours isn't enough. 

Let it run for a few weeks, and see how things go. :-)

I've tried several days. Although I can understand it can take days for an accurate prediction, I definitely cannot understand even for a very ballpark estimation.

Advertisers do not have weeks.

I started from stratch with revive v4 and just a zone, two campaigns (one contract and one remnant), and the one contract banner has a priority of 0.5% percent without any impressions yet.

[malmazan]

Finally managed to bet it working reasonably by multiplying the contracted views in contract campaigns by a factor of 1000.

I guess I'll be gradually dropping zeros at some point.

[andrewatfornax]

Hi @malmazan,

Glad to hear you got things working in the end. It turns out that I was wrong - it was actually a very long time ago that Revive Adserver used the idea of weekly cycles to predict upcoming inventory, and it took a couple of weeks for new zones to start working. These days, Revive Adserver only uses the last hour of delivery data to forecast upcoming inventory - so, provided maintenance is set up and running, then waiting a while won't make any difference to performance.

If you're still having issues, as you say, starting out with a simple setup with just a few campaigns and banners, and slowly adding more things over time, may help you figure out what's causing things to not work as you expect.