Troubleshooting deals with RTB breakout

The RTB Breakout tool allows you to view detailed activity for specific deals, bid responses that are filtered, and impressions lost due to issues.

View RTB activity data

1. Sign in to Authorized Buyers.

2. Click Troubleshooting  RTB breakout.

3. Click Add filter to select your criteria.

4. Select a particular preferred deal or private auction.

   Parent accounts that are bidding for multiple seats can also select a particular account account, before selecting a deal.

Common issues with deals that can be flagged by RTB Breakout

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No available impressions

RTB breakout allows you to confirm there are impressions available for a deal:

This may be an estimate rather than an exact value. In some cases, it is not available (N/A). (e.g. if you are using a parent bidder to place bids)

What you can do

In the event there are no impressions available for your deal ID, reach out to the publisher.

Filtered impressions due to pretargeting configuration

What you can do

If you've confirmed that available inventory exists for a deal and you see a large amount of impressions filtered due to pretargeting configuration:

Activate the setting in the Deals section under the Pretargeting Configuration tab. Once activated, the setting enables you to receive all traffic for private auctions and preferred deals, regardless of how you configure pretargeting.

Make sure you are not bidding in a location where you don't have an endpoint (for example, you are buying European traffic, but you don't have a European server endpoint set).

If the deals pre-targeting option is not available, make sure your pretargeting isn't too restrictive:

• Make sure the publisher's domain is not excluded.
• Make sure the creative size and format targeting are correct (for example, display, mobile app or mobile web, video).
• Make sure you are targeting to SSL inventory.

Learn more about how to set up pretargeting configurations.

Bid requests not sent: Out of quota

Bid requests for these impressions were not sent because you've reached the account's quota limits.

What you can do

• Make sure you are not using HTTP endpoints for matches that require HTTPS. Unless you are in China, you need to bid using HTTPS.
• Your network error rate is less than 15%.
• The server has reached capacity for the region where the deal serves. If you need to increase quota in a specific region, you can do so yourself anytime through the Authorized Buyers REST API.
• In the event you need to increase your total Maximum QPS for the whole account, contact your account manager.

If you are using Maximum QPS for each pretargeting configuration, you may want to make sure you reserve some QPS for deals pretargeting.

Example

You have a capacity for 50k QPS in your account setup, and have pretargeting groups A, B, and C. You can cap groups A and B to a combined QPS of 40k, which means pretargeting group C will have 10k in reserve (based on the account max of 50k).

Bid response errors

These bid responses were unsuccessful. This may be because of a timeout, incorrect response formatting, or other response errors.

What you can do

Your bidder must return a parsable BidResponse to every BidRequest, to avoid bid response errors, timeouts, and bidder throttling.

Learn more about how to build a response using the Authorized Buyers Real-Time Bidding Protocol Response Guide and view the best practices for developing applications.

Responses without applicable bids

Responses without bids issue means that your bidder either chose not to bid on these requests, or didn’t bid on them under the deal lD.

What you can do

Responses without bids

• Check your bidder logic. Bidding behavior is controlled by your bidder's logic and Authorized Buyers Support has no access to it.

• Some things to keep in mind: Check how your bidder logic works in relation to block override, also check the value of publisher_blocks_overridden field in a bid request. Learn more about  publisher block override for deals.

• Check the bid request samples to troubleshoot Responses without applicable bids filtering. Please reach out to the Authorized Buyers technical support team if you are unable to retrieve bid request samples yourself.

  Note: for deals with a low volume, sometimes we are not able to pull out bid request samples.

Responses with bids not for this buyer

• Make sure you are bidding with correct child account. Learn how to respond with multiple accounts

Note: This would mean that the same inventory is available for multiple child seats. You might want to discuss with the child seats how to distribute bids on this inventory.

Responses with bids not for this deal

• Make sure you respond to the bid request with valid bids and valid deal ID.

When bidding on an impression for a specific Preferred Deal or Private Auction, set the deal ID in your bid response equal to the deal ID in the request: deal_id = <deal_id>. Keep in mind, that this limits your bid to that deal only, without competing in the Open Auction. Learn more about the options for setting the deal ID.

The same inventory may be available through several deals. Good practice is to avoid deals overlapping the same inventory for the same buyer.

No Bids

If you are a child account and see no bids in your RTB breakout

What you can do

Reach out to your parent account. They can reach out to Authorized Buyers support if they need additional support.

Filtered bids: Invalid advertiser in deal

The bid is filtered because it doesn't match the advertiser mentioned in the deal terms.

If you selected an advertiser in the deal setup, the same advertiser needs to be used in the bid response.

What you can do

1. Review your deal settings or change/remove the advertiser mentioned deal.

2. Check the advertiser in the Creative Explorer, REST API, or snippet status report and confirm that your creatives are categorized with the correct advertiser_id.

3. Make sure it’s the same advertiser as mentioned in your deal. If the advertiser doesn't match

   1. Insure you bid with correct creative for Advertiser specified in the deal

   2. Check that all LPs on the creative are for Advertiser specified in the deal.

   3. If none of these apply, reach out to support <link to iPH> to verify that LP for your creatives is mapped to correct advertiser.

Learn more about bid response filtering.

Filtered bids: Excluded product category detected

The bid is filtered because one or more detected product categories were excluded by the publisher through the bid request. Authorized Buyers system detects product categories based on declared click-through URLs.

What you can do

Review the excluded_product_category field in the bid request and make sure to use creatives that are not categorized with excluded_product_category. See the list of product categories in ad-product-categories.txt.

The snippet status report and REST API show the product category with which your creative's click_through_url is classified by Google.

Learn more about publisher filters

Filtered bids - Excluded sensitive category detected

The bid is filtered because one or more sensitive categories were excluded by the publisher, and Authorized Buyers system detected the same sensitive category based on the declared click-through URL.

What you can do

1. Review the excluded_sensitive_category field in the bid request. Your snippet status report and the REST API shows the sensitive category with which your creative's click_through_url is classified by Google. See the list of sensitive categories in ad-sensitive-categories.txt. Learn more

2. Request publisher to switch on block override.

Learn more about publisher filters

Filtered bids - URL excluded by publisher

The bid is filtered because the publisher does not allow this creative's URL (click-through URL in the bid response).

What you can do

1. Check the click_through_url in your bid response. You can change your bidding strategy to avoid bidding with a URL excluded by the publisher. The Publisher Setting File and PSF ID in the bid request can provide details.

2. Request publisher to switch on block override.

Learn more about publisher restrictions.

Filtered bids - Excluded attribute declared

The bid is filtered because the bid response declared one or more creative attributes that were excluded by the publisher in the bid request.

What you can do

1. Make sure your creative isn’t using any of the excluded attributes.  To determine exclusions, check the exclude_attribute field in the bid request and reference the excluded attributes dictionary file.

2. Request publisher to switch on block override.

Possible excluded creative attributes

• Native Not Eligible

• NonSSL

• RichMediaCapabilityHTML5

• RichMediaCapabilityFlash

• In-Banner Video

• IsCookieTargeted

• VPAID Flash

• IsUserInterestTargeted

Learn more about publisher filters

Filtered bids - Excluded vendor_type declared

The bid is filtered because the bid response declared a vendor or creative attribute that is excluded in the bid request by the publisher.

What you can do

1. Review the allowed_vendor_type field in the bid request. See the list of vendors. You can also use RTB Breakout to find a sample bid request and response to debug. Learn more

2. Request publisher to switch on block override.

Learn more about publisher filters

Lost in auction

What you can do

• Make sure the bid CPM meets the minimum CPM. For preferred deals, the deal's negotiated CPM may be losing out to other buyers that the publisher has a deal with or to open auction bids. 
• For private auctions, consider bidding higher.
• For programmatic guaranteed deals, your inventory may be allocated dynamically based on pacing of the deal.

You can troubleshoot issues with your active deals.