OpenX Blog

“Sometimes your success is your undoing” - someone famous

It’s every ad trafficker’s nightmare, a very happy salesperson tells you that ‘Client Y’ has just bought another 50k impressions and wants them to deliver by the end of the month. You try and explain that Client Y’s campaign for the initial 100k is only just delivering but to no avail, you are going to have to make some changes!

OpenX defines three types of ad campaigns: exclusive, high priority and remnant. As you might imagine, the ad server will attempt to deliver the exclusive campaigns to the exclusion of all else. Next, the high priority campaigns will be delivered and finally, remnant inventory will be given the chance to fill any gaps.

If you oversell, the practical implication is usually that you have sold more direct ad campaigns than you can deliver, so you need to tell the ad server which one to give priority to. This is where the priority system fits in. Each high priority campaign has a priority level set between 1 and 10. Campaigns with a higher priority will be given precedence meaning that all things being equal (e.g. no targeting) a campaign with a higher priority will be delivered to contract. It is also worth remembering that if a zone is not fully allocated then the prioritisation does not make a difference so it may be the campaign’s targeting that is limiting its delivery.

Ultimately, you have a finite inventory. In this situation your ad server will do everything it can to make sure the most important ads are displayed based on the rules you define, but if you’ve over sold your inventory then something has to give. This means you need to make some hard decisions and tell the ad server how you want this situation to be handled.

Here are some helpful tips…

Step 1 – Resist the temptation to just increase the campaigns priority (or weight)
It is key to remember that campaign priority is relative so having all your campaigns as Priority 10 will not help because the delivery engine will not be able to determine the optimum order for delivery.

Step 2 - Double check the campaigns existing settings just to ensure it is set up as expected

• What priority level is it? (Exclusive / High / Low)
• If it is a high priority, what priority level is assigned to it?
• If it is exclusive or low priority, what weight is assigned to it?
• What distribution settings are applied to the campaign? (e.g. is there a limit to the number of impressions per day?)

Step 3 - Check the prioritisation of other campaigns that are competing on the same zones
Look at the probability screen for the zones that a campaign is linked to, this tells you the % chance that a campaign will be delivered for any given impression. If the campaign has a very low % score, find out why the other campaigns have a higher probability; if the campaign you are focusing on is a higher business priority then reduce them.

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Step 4 – Adjust the campaigns priority & targeting
If the campaign and its competing campaigns are correctly set up then you are going to have to make some changes, but often a re-prioritisation or the broadening of a campaign’s targeting will help you find some additional impressions. The key thing to remember is that changes made to allocate extra inventory to one campaign will impact others.

Let us know how you manage these issues…

For further information join in the OpenX community forum on managing inventory.