Content ingestion and best practices

Learn about the process of video content ingestion, testing, and general best practices, including:

  Implementation
  MRSS feed sync
  Common errors

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Metadata passed through content ingestion can now be mapped to publisher provided signals ^(Beta) for the purposes of programmatic monetization.

Content ingestion is a prerequisite for targeting video content, which allows you to book orders and line items based on the metadata of video content being played. Video content can be targeted directly using CMS metadata in addition to key values added to the ad tag. If you'd like to perform a load test, Ad Manager can handle very large amounts of data. We have publishers that have 4 - 6 million videos in their network.

Implementation

Whether you are generating your own MRSS feed, or using a third party like Brightcove or Ooyala, you should review and clean up any extraneous or inaccurate metadata before you add any content sources to Ad Manager.

Tips on verifying the MRSS feed

• Ensure all required fields are included in the feed. For example, title and item are required.
• Ensure all of your keys are allowed, and not explicitly reserved by Ad Manager.
• Do not encode titles of videos, otherwise they will appear in your network still encoded.
• Cue points, if specified, must be in seconds.
• Duration has to be a numeric value in seconds (integers, not floats).

See all disallowed and reserved keys

Ad Manager disallows certain reserved keys for content ingestion. You should ensure that all of your keys are allowed before ingesting your feed.

Disallowed keys

• Keys ending in: url
• author
• Keys beginning with: broadcast_date_
• copyright
• creationdate
• description
• Keys beginning with: end_date
• episode_crid_id
• episode_name
• expiry_date
• filesize
• framerate
• generator
• height
• lastmodified
• longdescription
• pubdate
• published
• sitecore_processed
• size
• Keys beginning with: start_date
• Keys ending in: title
• type
• Keys beginning with: updated
• videoid
• Keys beginning with: width
• size

Some publishers have additional disallowed keys, while others explicitly permit keys from the disallowed list. Contact your account manager for more information.

 

Test your content ingestion by passing in a small feed first (10 videos), correcting for any errors, and then ingesting a larger feed (1000 videos), and finally your entire library of content. This allows you to address any issues (mis-formatted fields, missing information and so forth) before ingesting all of your content. Your feed should be paginated; pages of 100 are recommended.

You can optionally leverage a tool like the W3C Feed Validator or see our sample feed.

MRSS feed sync

Ad Manager syncs content from feeds according to the <lastModifiedDate>, and manually requested syncs.

Common errors

If all goes well when running the ingestion (after clicking Connect in the "New Content Source" form), you should start seeing data coming from your feed. However, sometimes errors occur in the process, especially the first time around.

Here is a list of common errors that you might come across, and what they mean:

• No data: The feed has no data. Check your feed and try again (empty feed).
• Cyclic paging: Ad Manager found a duplicate URL while paging through the feed. Fix the feed and try again (paging set up incorrectly).
• Feed parse error: The feed contains an error. Correct the error at the URL provided and try again (malformed MRSS).
• Account not found: We couldn't connect to your account. This can happen if an account gets deactivated, deleted and so forth
• Feed connection error: The feed URL is unresponsive. Verify that the service is available and try again (timeout).
• For feed parse error & account not found errors, more details are shown where possible. For example, "Invalid character (xyz) found at lineNumber:12; columnNumber:47 URL:http://the-paged-url-where-error-occurred" (mainly for MRSS feed). or "YouTube account has been closed," and so forth. (for YouTube sources).

Learn how to target video content metadata.