Daily Contract Limit Not Reached, Remnant keeps delivering, if turned on. Options

[JPW]

Hello everyone,

we've been working with OpenX for quite some time now and we really appreciate the effort you've put in. That being said, we keep having some issues despite trying everything we could possibly think of - to no effect unfortunately.

Anyway, I'll try to make this as simple as possible.

We do have quite a number of 'contract' campaigns, that started at a specific date and don't expire. They each have a priority of 8 (all contract campaigns), and are limited to, for instance 20,000 impressions a day. Also: no pricing, unlimited impressions, no delivery capping per visitor.

At some point of the day, banners just don't get delivered anymore despite not reaching the daily limit. Instead, no banners get delivered at all then.

We used to have a remnant campaign also with no limitations whatsoever and a campaign weight of 1. This campaign used to get a whole bunch of impressions. I turned it off for testing purposes thinking that it might cause our other campaigns to not get enough impressions, but they still don't reach their daily limit. And guess what? Once I turn this one back one, banners of the remnant campaign is all we see.

We're kind of desperate at this point, please let me know if there's anything else you need to know and I'm really looking forward to hearing from you guys!


Thank you very much in advance!

Kind regards,
Jens

[rakshan]

When you select contract or exclusive, you should read the fine print below that selection and try to understand what it is.

Contract will "smoothly" deliver over the period of time. So, if you have 10 impressions to deliver over 10 days, it will deliver 1 per day.
If your website gets more than one visit per day, it will NOT use up the remaining impressions, but will serve remnant or blanks.

If you choose Exclusive type of campaign, it will deliver 10 impression ASAP, i.e. all your impressions might get used up within a single day, and then it will serve remnant or blanks for the rest of the period.

All zones MUST contain a remnant campaign if you dont want to serve blanks. Serving blanks = incompetent ad-ops = lost revenue.

So, you should really be aware of your per-day visitor count, and setup campaigns accordingly. In the above scenarios, if you had 2 million visitors per day, and only 10 contract ads to serve for 10 days, then 1,999,999 times a day, it will serve the remnant, which is why you see such a large amount of remnant campaigns being served.

[JPW]

Hey,

thank you for your quick reply!

I think I understand but the problem is a different one.

These contracts do not have a specific time limit so the only way for the system to know how many banners to deliver would be limits per day. Unfortunately, we don't get anywhere near this limit on any given day. Instead, the remnant campaign picks up thousands impression.

The system is supposed to do the high priority contract
campaigns first and should then do the
remnant campaign once all contract campaign limits are reached.

Am I wrong here?

Thanks a lot in advance.

Kind regards,
Jens

[rakshan]

If you dont have time limits, then use exclusive and setup the limits for repeat visitors (for example, dont show this banner more than once, or dont show it more than 4 times per session, or per day etc).

The system is supposed to do exclusive campaigns first, then contract campaigns if they havent reached their limit, and only then remnant.

This doc should help if you havent read it already
http://www.openx.org/docs/tutorials/priori...icking+examples

[JPW]

Thank you for your reply.

We don't use exclusive campaigns nor do we use limits for repeat visitors.

It's basically just about the contract campaigns. They have no end date, just the daily limit of, say, 10.000, impressions. Our adserver does, however, deliver way less than these 10.000 a day but shows remnant instead.

[thejfk]

We have exactly the problem as JPW. We have long running campaigns (>1 year) and we want to guarantee a fixed number of views a day. So I put the campaign to Contract with priority 5, unlimited views in total but limited to X views per day.

At around 8pm it stops delivering the campaign and shows remnants instead, although the daily limit is not even half reached.

What could be the problem? We are using the latest OpenX version.

[rakshan]

It's basically just about the contract campaigns. They have no end date, just the daily limit of, say, 10.000, impressions. Our adserver does, however, deliver way less than these 10.000 a day but shows remnant instead.

http://www.openx.org/docs/tutorials/priori...icking+examples

Please read it very carefully.