Under-delivery

An automated guaranteed campaign is booked on a promise of volume. Sooner or later someone asks whether that volume was delivered.

This page is for the employees who have to answer — owner, admin, manager, and a viewer who can read the same figures.

Comparing delivered ad plays with booked volume, and deciding what to do about a gap, is the operator’s job and happens in the reports and with the buyer.

What the platform does watch

The platform watches whether the campaign reached the content management system at all. The platform retries a push that fails on a server error and notifies the operator after repeated failures. A push that fails terminally stores the error on the campaign and waits for someone to press Retry. See Delivery.

This tells you whether the campaign reached the content management system. How the campaign is running against its plan is read from the report, below.

Checking delivery against plan

Comparing an automated guaranteed campaign against its plan

  1. Open the campaign and read the plan off the inventory tab. For each face it shows the agreed frequency, creative duration, periods and broadcast windows, and the total the platform computed from them. That total is the booked volume.

  2. Generate an automated guaranteed report for the period you care about. In the client cabinet this is under the ad-play statistics, where automated guaranteed reports are listed separately from the real-time bidding ones. Generation is asynchronous and the report arrives as a downloadable spreadsheet.

  3. Read delivered plays per campaign, per advertisement and per face out of the report, together with the amount and the commission.

  4. Compare the two.

The monthly settlement reports cover real-time bidding and programmatic guaranteed campaigns. An automated guaranteed report is generated when someone requests it.

The report shows the delivered figures, and the booked volume is on the campaign’s inventory tab.

When the numbers disagree

A gap between booked and delivered is not automatically a delivery failure. Work through these in order before telling a buyer anything.

Check What it would mean

Is the campaign in Processing with no error message on it?

A campaign carrying a terminal push error never reached the content management system. Nothing played, and Retry is the fix.

Were the advertisements confirmed, and when?

Only confirmed advertisements are pushed. An advertisement confirmed a week into the campaign delivered nothing in that first week.

Do the campaign’s periods and broadcast windows match what you are measuring?

Booked volume is computed from the windows, less the face’s daily downtime. A campaign restricted to weekday mornings will not deliver a fortnight’s worth of plays.

Was the face active and reporting for the whole period?

A face that went dark stops producing plays.

Was there an outage between the platform and the content management system during the period?

Ask the platform operator to collect the period again.

What to do about a real shortfall

The remedy is set by the contract with the buyer.

If a campaign is falling behind and there is still time, the practical levers are to reject the campaign and rebook it on terms that fit, or to add capacity by attaching more faces to the automated guaranteed price list and having the partner propose a second campaign. Both are new bookings and both go back through the capacity check.

Related pages

  • Delivery — how plays are collected and what the platform retries.

  • Booking and capacity — what is checked at booking.

  • What gets billed — why automated guaranteed revenue is not in the financial transactions.

  • Reports — generation, retention and download.