V.2.8.5 Contract Ad Priority Issues Options

[spcover]

I have Community v.2.8.5, the latest version, installed on my dedicated server.

I have a client who has purchased contract for leaderboard and banner ads over the next two months. I added the client as an advertiser and created two new "contract" campaigns and added the leaderboard ad graphic and the banner ad graphic, respectively. With each ad I linked them to zones where I had either Google Adsense ads (for the leaderboard zone) or other ad networks (for the banner as zone) as Remnant advertisers.

Well, I can't get the clients contract ad campaign to get anywhere near the ad impressions required. The leaderboard campaign should run at a clip of about 50% of all ads in that zone. It is not. After running the maintenance script and even upgrading from v2.8.3 to the latest version, v2.8.5, today and going through several maintenance cycles, my client's leaderboard campaign is only getting 6% of the ads. See the attached printscreen.

So then for debugging purposes, I created a brand new zone for 468x60 banner ads. And I assigned my client's contract banner ad campaign as the only one for that zone. What % of ads does it get? 0.60%!!! The zone only has one ad!!! See the second attached printscreen.

WTF is going on? Normally I am stuck running network ads all over my site and here I have a good paying contract customer and the system is dispensing crap? This software used to be reliable. And after checking the forums, I see lots of others have had similar problems. I was hoping their bug fixes had made it into v.2.8.5. My maintenance script runs hourly via cron job.

I am very upset. Either I figure this out this weekend or I seriously have to consider dumping this script. And I have been a faithful user since phpAdsNew verson 1.

Anyone recognize this problem and have a fix for it? Help would be appreciated!!!

Thanks in advance.

Sean

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[dacumen]

I have Community v.2.8.5, the latest version, installed on my dedicated server.

I have a client who has purchased contract for leaderboard and banner ads over the next two months. I added the client as an advertiser and created two new "contract" campaigns and added the leaderboard ad graphic and the banner ad graphic, respectively. With each ad I linked them to zones where I had either Google Adsense ads (for the leaderboard zone) or other ad networks (for the banner as zone) as Remnant advertisers.

Well, I can't get the clients contract ad campaign to get anywhere near the ad impressions required. The leaderboard campaign should run at a clip of about 50% of all ads in that zone. It is not. After running the maintenance script and even upgrading from v2.8.3 to the latest version, v2.8.5, today and going through several maintenance cycles, my client's leaderboard campaign is only getting 6% of the ads. See the attached printscreen.

So then for debugging purposes, I created a brand new zone for 468x60 banner ads. And I assigned my client's contract banner ad campaign as the only one for that zone. What % of ads does it get? 0.60%!!! The zone only has one ad!!! See the second attached printscreen.

WTF is going on? Normally I am stuck running network ads all over my site and here I have a good paying contract customer and the system is dispensing crap? This software used to be reliable. And after checking the forums, I see lots of others have had similar problems. I was hoping their bug fixes had made it into v.2.8.5. My maintenance script runs hourly via cron job.

I am very upset. Either I figure this out this weekend or I seriously have to consider dumping this script. And I have been a faithful user since phpAdsNew verson 1.

Anyone recognize this problem and have a fix for it? Help would be appreciated!!!

Thanks in advance.

Sean

Dude, seriously; the only fix for this problem is to regress back to OpenX version 2.8.1. OpenX development has checked out. I check the boards every month or so to see if anybody at OpenX has gotten a clue yet, but so far no dice. I almost lost my business waiting for these people to wake up and smell the coffee, but in the end my faith ran out and I went back to what works. 2.8.1 is a safe install. Anything newer is a fool's errand.

Cheers!

[spcover]

OK. Where can I get a copy of v2.8.1?

And do you think it would work over my v2.8.5 database or that I will have to go back and rebuild my ad zones and inventory from scratch?

Sean

[dacumen]

OK. Where can I get a copy of v2.8.1?

And do you think it would work over my v2.8.5 database or that I will have to go back and rebuild my ad zones and inventory from scratch?

Sean

http://download.openx.org/openx-2.8.1.zip

Unfortunately you have to start over from scratch. I know it COMPLETELY SUCKS, but at least it works. I spent my entire Christmas vacation regressing my server back to 2.8.1, but after the switch everything worked perfectly! My contract campaigns now deliver within a few impressions of target and all my probabilities are spot on! 2.8.1 is a good product worth PAYING for. Everything after is an exercise in futility and a waste of time.

[spcover]

OK. I installed OpenX v.2.8.1 in a new directory.

"You are currently using OpenX v2.8.1 running on Apache 2.0.63, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 4.1.22-standard."

For testing purposes I created one zone for 468x60 ad banners and 3 advertisers. One advertiser is a plain contract campaign for a 100K impressions over the next 2 months (roughly 50% of the actual ad inventory available) and two remnant campaigns. Right from the beginning it seems OpenX was not calculating priorities correctly as the remnants looked like they were going to split 96% of the inventory. But I figured I would run the ads for a while, allow the maintenance script to recalc priorities a few times, etc.

I placed the ad code on my website and waited.

After about 6 hours, the contract campaign is only getting 3% of all impressions and the remnant campaigns are getting 97%. Now exactly what I was hoping for. If OpenX was working right, I'd expect the contract campaign to get about 50% of the inventory and the two remnant campaigns to get about 25% each.

So right now I am not seeing that v2.8.1 is fixing my problem at all. Dacumen - are contract campaigns working for you in v2.8.1?

Thanks in advance.

Sean

[dacumen]

OK. I installed OpenX v.2.8.1 in a new directory.

"You are currently using OpenX v2.8.1 running on Apache 2.0.63, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 4.1.22-standard."

For testing purposes I created one zone for 468x60 ad banners and 3 advertisers. One advertiser is a plain contract campaign for a 100K impressions over the next 2 months (roughly 50% of the actual ad inventory available) and two remnant campaigns. Right from the beginning it seems OpenX was not calculating priorities correctly as the remnants looked like they were going to split 96% of the inventory. But I figured I would run the ads for a while, allow the maintenance script to recalc priorities a few times, etc.

I placed the ad code on my website and waited.

After about 6 hours, the contract campaign is only getting 3% of all impressions and the remnant campaigns are getting 97%. Now exactly what I was hoping for. If OpenX was working right, I'd expect the contract campaign to get about 50% of the inventory and the two remnant campaigns to get about 25% each.

So right now I am not seeing that v2.8.1 is fixing my problem at all. Dacumen - are contract campaigns working for you in v2.8.1?

Thanks in advance.

Sean

My contract campaigns work perfectly in 2.8.1. I waited 24 hours to check priority so the MPE could have some data to predict traffic from, but after that everything was clean! The MPE gets better the more data you have to predict from. It sounds to me like you need to give it a day to true up.

[spcover]

It is still not work for me. My contract campaign is only getting 2% of the inventory and the two remnant campaigns are splitting the remaining 98%. Today is the 3rd day after I installed the software. Yesterday out of 3000 impressions the contract campaing got 150 impressions while the remnants split the rest.

I wonder if there is some incompatibility of OpenX with PHP 5.2+ or something else on my (and other) servers. Here is my info, per my OpenX install:

"You are currently using OpenX v2.8.1 running on Apache 2.0.63, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 4.1.22-standard."

What does your OpenX install say?

Sean

[dacumen]

It is still not work for me. My contract campaign is only getting 2% of the inventory and the two remnant campaigns are splitting the remaining 98%. Today is the 3rd day after I installed the software. Yesterday out of 3000 impressions the contract campaing got 150 impressions while the remnants split the rest.

I wonder if there is some incompatibility of OpenX with PHP 5.2+ or something else on my (and other) servers. Here is my info, per my OpenX install:

"You are currently using OpenX v2.8.1 running on Apache 2.0.63, PHP 5.2.6 and MySQL 4.1.22-standard."

What does your OpenX install say?

Sean

"You are currently using OpenX v2.8.1 running on Apache 2.2.14, PHP 5.2.11 and MySQL 5.0.89-community-log"

Let's have everyone who's still having issues post their version and maybe we'll figure out where the incompatibility lies.

Is your maint. script running? Post an excerpt from the maint. log.

[spcover]

Is your maint. script running? Post an excerpt from the maint. log.

Is that the debug.log file in the /var directory? If so, the debug.log says this:

Mar 25 10:00:04 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Running Maintenance Engine
Mar 25 10:00:04 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Running Maintenance Statistics Engine
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - Maintenance statistics will be run
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - The intermediate table statistics will be updated
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - The final table statistics will be updated
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - The ox_data_bkt_a table is a raw data table. Data logged in real-time, not operation intervals.
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - Accordingly, pruning of the ox_data_bkt_a table will be performed based on data that has a logged date between
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] 2010-03-25 13:00:00 UTC and 2010-03-25 13:59:59 UTC
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - The ox_data_bkt_a_var table is a raw data table. Data logged in real-time, not operation intervals.
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - Accordingly, pruning of the ox_data_bkt_a_var table will be performed based on data that has a logged date between
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] 2010-03-25 13:00:00 UTC and 2010-03-25 13:59:59 UTC
Mar 25 10:00:05 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] - Managing (activating/deactivating) campaigns
Mar 25 10:00:06 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Started oxMarket_ImportMarketStatistics
Mar 25 10:00:07 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Finished oxMarket_ImportMarketStatistics
Mar 25 10:00:07 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Started oxMarket_UpdateWebsites
Mar 25 10:00:07 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Finished oxMarket_UpdateWebsites
Mar 25 10:00:07 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Maintenance Statistics Engine Completed (Started at 2010-03-25 14:00:04 UTC)
Mar 25 10:00:07 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Running Maintenance Priority Engine
Mar 25 10:00:09 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Maintenance Priority Engine Completed (Started at 2010-03-25 14:00:04 UTC)
Mar 25 10:00:09 -0400 OX-maintenance [ info] Maintenance Engine Completed (Started at 2010-03-25 14:00:04 UTC, taking 00:00:05)

and there are similar entries on the hour every hour. Looks like the maintenance function is working fine.

Perhaps I will change my cron job to not run in quiet mode, so I can see if anything stands out there.

Sean

[spcover]

Perhaps I will change my cron job to not run in quiet mode, so I can see if anything stands out there.

I changed the cron job to not run in quiet mode and it shows no errors when invoking the maintenance script.

Sean