Priorities and contract vs Remnant

[malmazan]

I'm confused as to why my system is showing so many Remnant impressions even though most of the campaigns are lagging behind and use no capping or limitations of any kind on both the campaings or the banners. I have set an over-delivery of 99% in the Maintenance settings to try and minimize the problem, but I need to keep checking stats daily to ensure a specific campaign does not overdeliver.

Maintenance runs fine every hour.

In a zone that carries little traffic I just saw a remnant ad (and saw it also 1 hour later) and checked the zone's priorities. There 6 contract campaign banners that all but one belong to campaigns that are lagging behind, yet each of the banners' priorities is set to 100%, which the only Remnant campaign banner for that zone has 100%. This zone runs fine (i.e., shows contract campaign banners) in other days and times.
 

[andrewatfornax]

On 2/23/2020 at 9:39 PM, malmazan said:

I'm confused as to why my system is showing so many Remnant impressions even though most of the campaigns are lagging behind and use no capping or limitations of any kind on both the campaings or the banners. I have set an over-delivery of 99% in the Maintenance settings to try and minimize the problem, but I need to keep checking stats daily to ensure a specific campaign does not overdeliver.

I assume that you mean that you need to keep checking to ensure that a specific Contract campaign does not under-deliver?

If you mean anything other than a Contract campaign, then please note that Remnant and Override campaigns are not designed to deliver a contracted number of impressions - only Contract campaigns do this.

If you mean that your Contract campaigns are over-delivering (apart from not making any sense based on your first sentence), then you need to turn down the over-delivery setting, because that will not be helping!

However, if the issue is that your Contract campaigns are under-delivering....

On 2/23/2020 at 9:39 PM, malmazan said:

...the campaigns are lagging behind and use no capping or limitations of any kind...

In a zone that carries little traffic ... There [are] 6 contract campaign banners that all but one belong to campaigns that are lagging behind...

I think that this may actually be your problem - you are describing a zone that has very little traffic, but you have 6 different Contract campaigns linked to the zone, and they are all competing for traffic!

As per Step 1 of https://documentation.revive-adserver.com/display/DOCS/Contract+Campaigns+Under-Delivering - do you actually have the inventory in your zones to meet the demands of your Contract campaigns?

However, if we assume that you do have enough inventory, please take a look at Step 2 of the above guide, which links through to how the delivery engine works. If you have 6 Contract campaigns banners linked to a zone, with no Override campaign banners present, then Revive Adserver is guaranteed to select one of those banners only if it believes it is required to do so to meet the delivery requirements. It does this based on a forecast of expected impressions in the zone.

If the zone traffic varies wildly, then sometimes, it may not make an accurate estimate of inventory for any given hour, and may display a Remnant banner, because it is expecting there to be many more impression occurring that actually happen. However, that forecast should then be updated in the next hour, and the situation should improve.

Over a long enough time period, this should even out (roughly) to meet delivery needs.

Have a look through that documentation and see if that helps explain the situation?

[malmazan]

2 hours ago, andrewatfornax said:

I assume that you mean that you need to keep checking to ensure that a specific Contract campaign does not under-deliver?

If you mean that your Contract campaigns are over-delivering (apart from not making any sense based on your first sentence), then you need to turn down the over-delivery setting, because that will not be helping!

Hi Andrew:

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post.

No, I meant over-delivering. Since I need the 99% over-delivery setting to minimize impressions wasted on Remnant campaigns. some campaigns overdeliver (I do not really undertand why, really, if anything, when there are more than enough impressions for everyone, they should all over-deliver in a similar way assuming they are all uncapped). Obviously if I do not have enough impressions for fulfill my Contract impressions that would be my problem.

i had read all the documentation before, and use this forum as a last resort. It was there that I found the over-delivery setting, which minimizes my problem at the expense of creating over-delivery issues on some campaigns.

To maximize customers' CTR, I always use an amount of banners that will roughly provide the needed impressions to meet contracted campaigns. Right now I'm lagging some 20% of a month's impressions behind but now have the number of impressions to compensate (and wasting a significant amount impressions -I'm talking 20k out of 300k within one month- on remnant campaign banner impressions does not help me get back in line, and neither does having some campaigns over-deliver to try and minimize the first issue).

 

2 hours ago, andrewatfornax said:

I think that this may actually be your problem - you are describing a zone that has very little traffic, but you have 6 different Contract campaigns linked to the zone, and they are all competing for traffic!

I do not follow your reasoning. If there are several campaigns that are lagging behind assigned to an area with little traffic, whatever little traffic there is it should be spread across them. I do not see why there should be more Remnant impressions because of this.

There is no capping at the campaign or banner level (some banners in other campaigns do have some country targeting), and there is another zone selected in the chain settings of the problem zone.

 

 

2 hours ago, andrewatfornax said:

If the zone traffic varies wildly, then sometimes, it may not make an accurate estimate of inventory for any given hour, and may display a Remnant banner, because it is expecting there to be many more impression occurring that actually happen. However, that forecast should then be updated in the next hour, and the situation should improve. 

 

The zon'e traffic varies in a similar way to the rest of my zones. I could understand banners in Campaigns that are on target showing 0% probability sometimes, but I do not see how that should be possible with campaigns that are running 25% or more behind as per the Campaign Monitor plugin.

[andrewatfornax]

12 hours ago, malmazan said:

No, I meant over-delivering. Since I need the 99% over-delivery setting to minimize impressions wasted on Remnant campaigns. some campaigns overdeliver (I do not really undertand why, really, if anything, when there are more than enough impressions for everyone, they should all over-deliver in a similar way assuming they are all uncapped). Obviously if I do not have enough impressions for fulfill my Contract impressions that would be my problem.

Hi @malmazan,

Okay, you seem to not be understanding a basic concept here in this case.

Contract campaigns are designed to deliver the contracted number of impressions over the time they are set to run.

If you ask for 100,000 impressions to be delivered over a month, and that campaign is linked to a zone that has 200,000 impressions available, then the campaign only needs to deliver 50% of the impressions to meet the target set.

If you then ask the campaign to over deliver by 99% in the settings.... Well, that's why it's over-delivering!

If you want to stop that over-delivery from happening, turn off the 99% over-delivery setting, and hopefully, the delivery of the campaigns will be about what you need to meet the contracted requirements.

If you then have unused inventory that you don't want to "waste" on Remnant campaigns.... Well, the only solution to that is to either get more Contract campaigns to use up the available inventory, or, update the Contract campaigns for more impressions.

[malmazan]

Ok, forget about the over-delivery issue, which is making the problem less obvious, and let's go back to the situation of 2 months ago when the over delivery setting was 0%.

With no capping on campaign or banner level, and just some country delivery rules or some banners, I'm wasting 20k out of 300k monthly impressions on Remnant campaigns when most campaigns are lagging behind. I have some 15 campaigns and some 100 banners.

[andrewatfornax]

Hi @malmazan,

I'm really not sure what more I can say here.

1. When you turn on the over-delivery feature, at a high level (99%), you find that campaigns are over-delivering.

2. When you don't have the feature on at all AND you are using delivery limitations (e.g. country delivery rules), you find that campaigns are under-delivering.

Maybe try setting the over-delivery rule to a less aggressive value, and see what level works best for your needs?

[malmazan]

Been there, done that, not a solution.

I should not need to set overdelivery at all. The question is why are so many Remnant campaign banners shown in the first place when there is no capping at advertiser, campaign or banner levels, hardly any rules and I'm running behind on delivery.

[andrewatfornax]

On 3/2/2020 at 5:12 PM, malmazan said:

Been there, done that, not a solution.

Okay, thanks for letting me know - but if you'd like further help, I will need more information from you than a throw away line.

On 3/2/2020 at 5:12 PM, malmazan said:

I should not need to set overdelivery at all.

I can't disagree with this. In an ideal world, yes, Revive Adserver would be able to perfectly forecast your available inventory, and then perfectly understand how much of your available inventory will be made ineligible for use because of your delivery limitations, and therefore correctly calculate the required percentage of time each ad should be shown to perfectly smoothly deliver the ads over time to meet all campaign targets perfectly.

Hopefully, though, you can see why this is never going to be possible to achieve. The over-delivery option exists for users who want to force Revive Adserver to deliver more impressions than the system thinks it will need, so that campaigns deliver above the forecast rate, so that campaigns are "ahead of the game" instead of playing catch up.

If that's not a solution for you, fair enough - but that's the solution that we have at the moment.

On 3/2/2020 at 5:12 PM, malmazan said:

The question is why are so many Remnant campaign banners shown in the first place when there is no capping at advertiser, campaign or banner levels, hardly any rules and I'm running behind on delivery.

I think we answered that - you DO have rules in place, and this WILL affect Revive Adserver's ability to deliver in any given hour. Each hour, when priorities are calculated, it will recognise that the impressions/hour needed to meet the campaign target has increased, if the previous hour's delivery failed to meet targets (or if you over delivered for an hour, it will recognise that the impressions/hour needed to meet the campaign target has decreased), and so the next hour's priorities that are calculated will take this into account.

However, that may not be enough, depending on the percent of impressions that are ineligible. If you want, you can adjust this with the over-delivery option. 

Not sure how much more I can say about this!

[malmazan]

I understand the intricacies and difficulties of delivering. However, consistently wasting 8% of impressions (I can understand some small percentage due to the issues you point out, but not this) on Remnant campaigns does not make sense when there is no capping on any kind, most campaigns are running behind and delivery rules only apply to some 5% of my contracted impressions.

Even with a setting of 99% over-delivery I could see a zone with 6 banners with 0% priority belonging to 6 different campaigns lagging behind (some of them quite significantly). For this specific zone, the banners had no delivery rules.

Right now Remnant campaigns have 95% of the priorities in one specific zone. And one banner from an uncapped advertiser, uncapped campaign, and uncapped banner with no rules shows only 2% priority. For a 12-month campaign that is running 30% behind after 1 month. All campaigns have the same weight (5). And I see no wild over delivery for that campaign today in the stats that would justify a low priority right now. Also a another banner with a similar situation and 44% underdelivery. And that's with a 99% over-delivery setting. I also see some banners with 0% priority that belong to campaigns that are on schedule or over-delivering, which makes sense, but not the other two.

[andrewatfornax]

On 3/5/2020 at 5:31 AM, malmazan said:

...one banner from an uncapped advertiser, uncapped campaign, and uncapped banner with no rules shows only 2% priority.

Presumably, this is a Contract campaign that you are talking about. (Screenshot may help here.)

Please bear in mind that Revive Adserver does the following to calculate the banner/zone priority for Contract campaigns:

• How many impressions are left to meet the target? How long until the campaign ends? => Calculate the number of impressions needed for the next hour.
• How many impressions for the campaign to deliver next hour? How many banners? What relative weights do the banners have? => Calculate the number of impressions for each banner.
• How many impressions for a banner to deliver next hour? How many zone is the banner linked to? What are the relative forecast inventories of the zones? => Calculate the number of impressions for each banner/zone pair.

And then calculate a % of the forecast inventory for the banner in that zone.

This is why you may see a Contract campaign's banner with what looks like a low % in a zone, even if the Campaign is running behind on delivery - Revive Adserver is expecting to meet the campaign target via banner delivering occurring on other zones.

Rather than looking at zones where the Contract campaign has a small % value, I'd be more interested in zones where there are multiple Contract campaigns all competing for the same inventory, and failing, because they can't all have the inventory. This is a more likely reason for the under-delivery.