Outside of inventory forecasting, campaign delivery is the most common problem we see publishers turn to Yieldex to help solve. And there are a number of possible solutions to most underdelivery problems, but you can’t know how to fix a campaign without understanding what the root cause of the problem is first. The trouble is, there are quite a number of possible culprits, and it’s difficult to know where to start. Which ones do you eliminate first, and what’s the fastest way to figure it out?
This problem is actually getting more complex as well. In fact, as publishers have seen their business shift into more programmatic channels, we’ve seen reasons for campaign underdelivery that many old pros haven’t seen before and typically don’t consider in their analysis. We’ve focused on the five most common reasons why campaigns are unable to meet their quotas, as well as a sequence of questions to identify which issues may be in play for any specific order line.new
For all these reasons, we’ve boiled down our knowledge into a decision tree that provides an exact sequence of causes to eliminate first, as well as the possible solutions to any of the five common root causes. Keep in mind that these diagnoses aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive – many campaigns might suffer from many issues at once! We hope this helps publishers standardize a campaign management process in their own organizations, and helps shed light on new underlying causes as well.
Download the At Risk Management Flow Chart.
Most of these steps should make sense for anyone working through delivery issues as part of their core responsibilities, however there are a few terms and steps worth clarifying.
- What are ‘zombie order lines’? We coined this term at Yieldex to make an often-overlooked problem memorable enough to stay top of mind for users. A zombie order line is demand stuck in pending status – meaning it holds inventory – but has a start date in the past, meaning it didn’t go live when it was supposed to. These are often cases where creative is late or the order was cancelled entirely but the inventory hasn’t been released – undead demand! And the problem here is that zombie order lines create false positives on at-risk reports, wasting your time and corrupting the accuracy of your inventory avails.
- What do you mean, ‘Is there enough capacity?’ There are actually two items to check around capacity. First off, is there any reason to suggest a technical issue with your ad tags? You can often see this in a sudden and dramatic drop in traffic from one day to the next. It’s rare, but it happens. Next, you want to see if the campaign you’re reviewing has a goal that’s greater than the entire capacity of the product it’s running against. In this case, no amount of re-jiggering priorities will help. It’s a common issue with narrow geotargeting or granular audiences with volatile traffic.
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