Data retention
This page answers one question for each kind of record the platform holds: how long does it survive?
It is for the person who runs the installation, and for anyone in an organization who has been asked how far back a figure can be produced.
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Almost nothing is deleted on a schedule. Delivery records, financial transactions and the audit log are kept indefinitely. Generated reports are deleted after thirty days. Records of opportunities that produced nothing, meaning no bid, no answer and no play, are cleared out after a few weeks. |
Ad plays
An ad play is the record that a specific advertisement ran on a specific face at a specific moment. It is what delivery figures, settlement reports and every revenue number are built from.
Ad plays of every sales model are kept indefinitely.
Nothing in the platform drops an ad play on a schedule and nothing edits one after it is written.
The underlying delivery data outlives every report built from it. A settlement report that has been deleted can be regenerated, because the plays it summarized are still there. See Reporting for what a play row carries.
Ad request records
An ad request record is written for every request the platform answers, whether or not it produced a sale.
| Record | Lifetime |
|---|---|
An ad request that sold a slot, or that was written off after the request window |
Indefinite |
An ad request nobody bid on |
21 days |
The reasons demand partners gave for declining |
21 days |
COT requests that ended in error or with no answer |
7 days |
COT requests that were confirmed |
30 days |
Private-deal requests |
Indefinite |
A COT request record disappearing at seven or thirty days does not take the delivery with it, because the COT ad play is a separate record and is kept.
Generated reports
| Record | Lifetime | Notes |
|---|---|---|
A generated settlement or statistics report, record and spreadsheet together |
30 days |
Creating and deleting a report are both written to the audit log, so the disappearance is traceable even though the file is not recoverable. |
The spreadsheet produced by an ad-request export |
1 day |
This is the on-demand export, separate from the settlement reports above. |
A report generated automatically at the start of a month is therefore deleted in the first days of the month after that.
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Download a report you need to keep — for an invoice, an audit, or a counterparty — and store it yourself. The report can be regenerated later from the underlying plays, but the figures are recomputed at that moment. Late deliveries confirmed in the meantime will change them, so the regenerated file is not necessarily the file you sent. |
See Reports.
Photo captures
Photo captures live in two layers with two different lifetimes.
| Layer | Lifetime |
|---|---|
Working copy — one photograph per confirmed opportunity, as it arrived |
About an hour |
Permanent set — up to three canonical photographs per advertisement and face |
Indefinite |
The working copy exists so that the permanent set can be assembled and so that a demand partner can fetch the photograph for a specific delivery while it is fresh. Once the working copy is gone, the photograph that survives is the one that was filed into the permanent set — and each of the three day-part slots is filled once by the first qualifying photograph and never overwritten.
See Photo captures.
Money and the audit trail
| Record | Lifetime | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Financial transactions |
Indefinite |
No screen edits one. |
Audit log entries |
Indefinite |
No screen deletes an entry. |
Employees |
Indefinite |
An employee is disabled and stays in the system, which keeps an old audit entry’s author resolvable. |
Because employees and audit entries both survive, an entry written years ago still names a person. See Audit.
What an operator should actually do about all this
Three practical conclusions.
- Download the reports you have to keep
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Thirty days is the only hard deadline on this page, and it applies to the one artifact a counterparty is likely to have seen.
- Do not treat the platform as the archive of record for photographs
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The permanent set survives, but it is three photographs per advertisement and face, chosen automatically. If a particular photograph matters, take a copy.
- Do not expect a no-bid history
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Requests that nobody bid on are gone after three weeks, so an investigation into why a face was not selling has to be started while the evidence is still there. Requests that did sell are kept indefinitely.