LEARN ADOPS

Ad operations troubleshooting guides

Short, practical explanations of the problems AdOps teams actually hit. Each guide gives you the answer, a way to practice it live in the Flight Lab simulator, and links to go deeper.

Deals

Why is my PMP or programmatic deal active but not spending?

A deal that shows active but wins nothing usually has a mismatch between the deal ID or buyer seat configured on the SSP and the one the DSP sends in its bid, so the private auction returns no eligible seatbid. The bid never becomes eligible even though targeting looks open.

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Video & VAST

Why does a VAST video ad time out or fail to play?

A video ad usually fails because the VAST response is buried under too many wrappers, so the player hits its wrapper limit or its timeout before it reaches the actual media file. Each wrapper adds a network hop, and players cap both the number of wrappers and the total resolve time.

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Header bidding

Why are my header bidding bids missing from the ad server?

Bids that appear in analytics but never win in the ad server usually lose the handoff: the server-side timeout is too tight so bids arrive after the auction closes, the ad server request fired before the targeting keys were set, or the generated price bucket does not match a line item. The bid exists; it just never enters the auction.

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Measurement

Why don't my ad server and third-party reports match?

Most reporting discrepancies are not a counting bug. They come from comparing two systems that use different timezones, date ranges, event definitions or invalid-traffic filtering. A gap that clusters on day one or at midnight is almost always a timezone or flight-start misalignment.

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Delivery & pacing

Why is my guaranteed campaign underdelivering despite enough inventory?

When forecast inventory is healthy but a campaign still underdelivers, the constraint is usually not supply. It is a frequency cap or a targeting or creative rule shrinking the eligible pool. Raising priority will not help if most matched requests are being filtered by the cap.

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Supply path

Why is my inventory flagged as an unauthorized seller (ads.txt)?

An 'unauthorized seller' warning means a buyer could not confirm your account is allowed to sell a domain's inventory, usually because the exchange's line is missing from the publisher's ads.txt file or the seller ID does not match sellers.json. DSPs then suppress or discount bids on that inventory.

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