An Update On Contract Campaign Delivery Within Openx Hosted Options

[James Kung]

Hi everyone,

Many of you have been telling us of your difficulties with the delivery of contract campaigns in the free Hosted ad server. We understand the issues this causes for your ad trafficking and we want to let you know that we have been focusing the brunt of our development resources on fixing this problem.

As some of you have pointed out, the issue relates to the maintenance operation. The way maintenance is currently written for the free OpenX Hosted product, it iterates through every possible banner/zone combination and assigns a delivery probability. This operation takes a very long time to complete, in certain instances contract campaigns will under-deliver while waiting for the calculations to finish. When the entire maintenance operation finishes, the same campaigns may then try to compensate by over-delivering. (Note that this problem affects the shared hosted product only, which has unique maintenance concerns apart from the dedicated and downloaded products.)

We are currently resolving this problem by rewriting the shared hosted maintenance operation to do the following: 1) do the major part of its calculations in parallel and 2) do a significant portion of its calculations offline. By doing this, we can dramatically reduce the amount of time the maintenance process takes and alleviate the campaign delivery issues users are now experiencing. While this rewrite is not something that can be done quickly, our developers are urgently working on the project so that we can deliver a robust and scalable product to everyone on the free Hosted ad server.

As an update, today we have just pushed live one series of optimizations that have already resulted in a 75% improvement in the time it takes to run maintenance. Users who previously might have waited days to see a contract campaign start delivering should now have their campaign delivering within a day. There are still many more changes and optimizations we will be making on an incremental basis as we proceed with the rewrite of maintenance. We will continue to update you with ongoing progress.

Regards,
James

[karlequi]

Hi James,

It has been 1 month since your post, could we have an update on progress please?

I stopped trying to get contract campaigns to work about 5 months ago - I have just set up a download version of OpenX but before I go through the painful process of re-creating websites, zones, advertisers, campaigns etc, then waiting the prerequisite 2 weeks for MPE reliable targeting...

... is the end in sight?

...is it worthwhile having another go at contract campaigns on hosted?

...or are we still weeks / months away from a solution.

Regards

Karl

[emilianodelau]

For the last two days two of my zones with contract ads stopped delivering. Each ad dropped to 0% probability! What gives?

[globelister]

Hi James and OpenX team

1. Could you supply an update to the progress of this issue. Contract campaigns don't work. I have tested multiple campaigns and get no ad showing and probability says 0.

2. Could i make a suggestion in the interim, to addd "impression limiting" to contract exclusive campaigns, so we can at least use this solution..

3. Does the rest of the OpenX community have this issue, please reply to this thread and get this issue sorted?

Thanks
Gordon




[quote name='James Kung' date='Aug 4 2009, 12:40 AM' post='96535']

[Dragon777]

Hi Gordon,

its the same here. And this issue needs to be solved soon, or I would be forced to switch to Google.

Best regards
D

[johnsmith]

I've spent many hours trying to get contract campaigns to work properly, I gave up a long time ago. It would be nice to be able to use them.

[globelister]

Any Other members willing to add there 2c?

I am still having issues with this. Any updated OpenX Team?

[knorman]

This issue with contract campaigns is crushing me. All my advertisers are on contract except for Google ads (which don't pay any where near contract ads).

I have been getting around this bug by rotating advertisers as exclusive to various zones. But that takes time (a lot of time) and completely messes with campaign reporting and future OpenX calculations.

Frankly I did a lot of research into leaving OpenX, but I like the features they offer around newsletters and text ads. I would be willing to move to hosting OpenX myself. Yet like Karlequi, I would prefer not to go through the pain of re tagging the site, reprogramming campaigns, and the weeks required for Open to relearn my traffic patterns. Yet, I can't keep waiting for OpenX to fix this bug in the contract advertiser delivery.

I have heard from some forum strings that OpenX is no longer supporting the download (self hosted) product. Is that true?

The worst part of all this is OpenX is giving all my valuable impressions to Google ad sense. Why oh why is this happening when I have so many high paying advertisers who simply want their contracted impressions? Look at the attached screen shot of the probability for my top leader board ad and you'll feel my pain. OpenX wants to give the remnant ads 100% of the impressions while 7 top paying CPM advertisers sit and wait. Again I have put one contract advertiser on exclusive as I can't afford to loose the inventory.

When is OpenX hoping to have the contract ad issue resolved? Should I move away from the hosted solution?

Attached File(s)

 OpenX_Leadeboard_Probability.gif ( 33.61K ) Number of downloads: 12

 

[emilianodelau]

My zone that went to all 0% finally started displaying ads. I'm not sure what did it but the last thing I did was to turn off OpenX Market for all of the advertisers.

Now it is broken again and all I did was add one more advertiser to this zone. Aghhhhh!


== Update ==

That was the bad news. The good news is that after 24 hours the zones are working again and displaying ads properly.

[sgoldhar]

I have been having this same problem with the downloaded product. I don't think it is localized to just the hosted version.

[marlsin]

Yep. I'm afraid we are at our wits end here. It's not just the fact that it takes 24 hour or more to get a campaign working, or that sometimes they drop to 0% for no reason at all, it is the seemingly total lack of interest or response on the part of the OpenX team. This thread is the latest example.

If only we had some feedback with respect to the status of the product, when we could expect some changes, what efforts were being made, or even just the ability to force a MINIMUM 0% for each banner in a zone... we'd weather the storm. We have none of these things.

I think we have a couple of weeks left in us before we give up for good and move our 10-12 million monthly impressions to a different solution.

[thebassman]

I've come to accept that OpenX has very poor customer support for their hosted platform. This thread doesn't have an update from them in almost 2 months...

What I've done in the mean time is run all my ads as remnant ads, and just adjust weight as necessary... it's a pain in the ass, but at least it works. When I have a lower number of paying ads (to make the move easier) , I will be moving to Google Ad Manager...

[knorman]

I do agree that communication on this issue from OpenX should be better. I spoke with a sales agent for OpenX and he said that the fix for this problem was coming out with the new OpenX release in mid October. Let's hope so.

[James Kung]

I understand that its been a while since the last update on this issue. We appreciate your patience. To provide a further update on the delivery of contract campaigns:

1) In mid-October, we will do a major upgrade of Shared Hosted to our upcoming 2.8.2 release. This new version will address a number of the problems around delivery and should alleviate many of the contract campaign issues you have been experiencing.

2) One week after the upgrade, we will install a new maintenance process onto Shared Hosted. This is the rewrite that we have been focusing on for the past several weeks. Once this is installed, users on Shared Hosted should see major improvements in performance and should start seeing contract campaigns running as intended.

Again, we appreciate your patience as we roll out these major improvements. Please stay tuned for exact dates on these.

Regards,
James

[knorman]

Thanks for the update James!