Issue With Delivering The Amount Contracted

[gabrielt]

We had this issue since OpenX.

 

For some reason, Revive doesn't deliver all contracted impressions, even though the website has plenty of pageviews to fill the order.

 

For a real example, we have this ROS (Run Of Site) campaign that ran for the entire month of april. We manage a huge website, on the millions of pageviews. Yet, Revive underdelivered this campaign. This is happening with all our campaigns. And, yes, we are running the latest version.

 

Impressions: 340,000

Impressions Remaining:8,156

 

One trick we use is to configure the campaign with a higher amount than contracted. But we always end up having to compensate our advertisers.

 

I think this is a bug. Please advise.

 

PS: it seems image attaching is disabled.

 

 

 

[andrewatfornax]

I'm the first to admit that Revive Adserver is not perfect here (and would love to have the time to completely re-think this problem!). However, one often overlooked issue with delivering contract campaigns where there is "enough" inventory is the effect that campaign and/or banner capping or delivery limitations has on the "available" inventory.

 

Do you have any of these limitations set up?

[gabrielt]

Hi Andrew,

 

Thanks for the prompt reply.

 

No, we don't have any limitations or cap set up, other than the number of views contracted by the advertiser. In fact, on the zones of this particular campaign, we had only two campaigns running, Google AdSense as remnant and this paid campaign. The availble inventory is very high, as on this particular campaign the probability link was showing something like 45% for the paid advertising and 55% for Google AdSense.

 

Thanks,

Gabriel.

[andrewatfornax]

Okay. How long has the zone been active for? And are you running the default OI of 60 minutes, or a modified (reduced) OI value?

[gabrielt]

This zone was created many years ago and has been active ever since. Maybe this is caused by very old campaigns that were deactivated but are still linked to the zone (I remember OpenX had a bug like this, which was corrected on one of the first versions of Revive).

 

What is OI? You mean the maintenance script? It is running every hour, this is what we have at our crontab:

 

0 * * * * wget -q -O /dev/null http://ads.clubedohardware.com.br/maintenance/maintenance.php

[andrewatfornax]

Sorry, I forget I know what OI is, but not everyone else.

 

OI = Operation Interval.

 

If you're running just once an hour (and it's configured to 60 minutes, which it will be unless you have been fiddling in the config file), then that's fine.

 

I wonder if that bug is really really fixed?

 

I wrote a lot of the prioritisation code back in the OpenX days, and I would be a lot of fun to be able to completely re-build it all from scratch, and see if it could be made better. Maybe when I win the lottery :-)

[gabrielt]

That is a good question.

 

I will try to clean-up the database, deleting old advertisers and campaigns, and see if this gets better. Wait for a new contact by the beginning of June.

 

Thanks.

[andrewatfornax]

Thanks, let us know how things go after you've unlinked old campaigns etc. and let us know if that has improved things...

[gabrielt]

Hi,

 

It hasn't been 30 days since I deleted all old campaigns, but since I have to send PDF reports to our clients by the beginning of the month, it is a good time to get an idea of this underdelivery situation. Please see below the results so far. Next month I will post a follow-up for June.

 

We are seeing a 1.5%-2.5% underdelivery rate, which is not that bad. Except for campaign #6 below, which will require further investigation.

 

Campaign #1

 

Amount contracted: 200,000

Amount delivered: 180,146

Total number of views available for this adzone: 180,844

 

So, here the limitation is with the adzone, which delivered less than the amount that was contracted by the client.

 

Campaign #2

 

Amount contracted: 350,000

Amount delivered: 344,239

Total number of views available for this adzone: 3,097,155

Underdelivery rate: 1.65%

 

Campaign #3

 

Amount contracted: 150,000

Amount delivered: 144,828

Total number of views available for this adzone: 147,254

 

So, here the limitation may be with the adzone, which delivered less than the amount that was contracted by the client.

 

Campaign #4

 

Amount contracted: 550,000

Amount delivered: 536,812

Total number of views available for this adzone: 3,097,155

Underdelivery rate: 2.40%

 

Campaign #5

 

Amount contracted: 180,000

Amount delivered: 175,460

Total number of views available for this adzone: 181,387

Underdelivery rate: 2.52%

 

Campaign #6

 

Amount contracted: 160,000

Amount delivered: 122,347

Total number of views available for this adzone: 178,223

Underdelivery rate: 23.5%

 

The error was on my side. After investigating this further, found out that this campaign was linked to the wrong zone.

 

Campaign #7

 

Amount contracted: 140,000

Amount delivered: 138,152

Total number of views available for this adzone: 1,496,842

Underdelivery rate: 1.32%

 

Thanks,

Gabriel.

[andrewatfornax]

Hi Gabriel,

 

Thank you for the detailed update.

 

Personally, I'd say that Revive Adserver getting delivery within a couple of percent is really good. Obviously, there are ways to make things better - but all of the ways that I can think of mostly involve ripping most of the guts of the entire product as it stands today apart, and starting again - which isn't currently something i"m planning on taking on in the near future!

 

What's your view on that level of delivery accuracy? Something that's okay to live with, or utterly unacceptable from the product that really needs to be addressed?

 

What do others following along think?

 

Cheers,

 

Andrew

[gabrielt]

Hi Andrew,

 

This level is ok, as I can always put a little extra do match what the advertisers hired. It is always good to overdeliver a bit anyway.

 

It seems that pruning old advertisers and campaigns did the trick. (BTW, we use Revive since it was still called phpAdsNew. So you see what kind of pruning I did! Probably most users don't have such old installations.)

 

Expect me to update this topic on July 1st with numbers from June, then we will have a "final" view on this matter. As I mentioned, it hasn't been fully 30 days since I pruned the database, so numbers for June may be more accurate.

 

Stay tuned.

 

Gabriel.

[MN_JSmith]

gabrielt, I know how you feel... I need ot set caps of 10M/day in order for the contract to get 0.5M/day.

 

Some reason, the server is sending the traffic to remnant when there are so many contract campaigns it can fill. There is clearly an issue with Revive under-deliving contract campaigns.

 

My work around is the remnant campaign that sends traffic back to the system for it go go through the decision making process again. But this is straining our servers hard.

[gabrielt]

Hi, just to make it clear that the huge discrepancies I was experiencing are no longer there after I purged all very old advertisers and campaigns. So I suggest you to do th same to see if the problem is gone. As explained above, now I am seeing a 2% discrepancy, which is acceptable. By the beginning of July I will post some numbers for June, and we will see how much discrepancy we are currently experiencing. Thanks!

[gabrielt]

andrewatfornax,

 

I just came by to say that with the most recent version of Revive (3.1.0), this issue has been completely resolved. Thank you very much for addressing this very important issue. Here are some sample values:

 

Amount Configured - Amount Delivered

130.000 - 129.853

505.000 - 504.215

170.000 - 169.610

135.000 - 134.619

135.000 - 134.994

 

Thank you very much for your outstanding work. Please let me know if there is any way we can donate money to you project.

 

Gabriel.