Overview

The Troubleshooting tool helps identify and resolve issues that might affect deal performance. Its Bid status chart visually represents, with numbers, the stages at which ad opportunities exit the auction process. Additionally, it offers detailed statistics on the bid status, providing valuable insights that are crucial for resolving issues efficiently.

Access

To troubleshoot a deal, select Troubleshooting from the navigation menu. Alternatively, select Deals from the navigation menu, click the three-dot icon next to the relevant deal, and then select Troubleshooting.

Troubleshoot a deal

To troubleshoot a deal, follow these steps:

1. Select Troubleshooting from the navigation menu. Alternatively, select Deals from the navigation menu, click the three-dot icon next to the relevant deal, and then select Troubleshooting. 
2. From the Type dropdown, select Deal.
3. In the Deals field, select a deal that you want to troubleshoot.
4. In the Targeted deal field, select a targeted deal. This field is displayed only if the deal selected under Deals is a meta-deal. In this case, the Targeted deal field displays the child deals associated with the meta-deal. By default, the results shown are based on the meta-deal as a whole. Selecting specific targeted deals will filter the results accordingly.
5. In the Buyer seat field, select a buyer seat.
6. In the Publisher field, select a publisher.
7. In the Period field, specify a time period of up to 30 days.

After selecting the deal, you can click the ˅ icon to expand and view its details.

The deal's details will appear in the Troubleshooting result section.

Review troubleshooting results

To fully understand and address troubleshooting results, review the General metrics alongside the Bid Statuses chart, which visualizes the progression and reasons for ad opportunities exiting the auction process.

General metrics

The General metrics section summarizes the following key metrics: 

• Bid requests 
• Bid rate (Bids / Bid requests) 
• Win rate (Wins / Eligible bids) 
• Delivery rate (Impressions / Wins)

Bid statuses 

The Bid statuses chart visually represents, with numbers, the stages and the reason why ad opportunities exit the auction process. For example, in case of a delivery rule being responsible for your deal's delivery issues, you would see that a large number of bids aren't considered as eligible bids and that most of these have the bid status "Blocked by a delivery rule". In such a case, you would then reach out to the publisher to check their delivery rules for errors.

The chart displays the following metrics:

• Bid Requests: the ad opportunities that were sent as bid requests to the selected seats.
• Bids: the bids placed by buyers on the ad opportunity, also known as bid responses.
• Eligible bids: the eligible bids that haven't been filtered by publishers' or Equativ's rules prior to the competition.
• Wins: the ad opportunities that won the internal Equativ competition.
• Impressions: the client-side impressions, representing the counting pixels triggered by the browser when rendering the creative.

And it presents:

• the percentages/absolute numbers of bid requests, bids, eligible bids, wins and impressions that exited from or remained in the auction process.
• a breakdown by bid status, providing valuable insights into the reasons why the ad opportunities exited the auction process.

For definitions and information on how each bid status can help troubleshoot deals, see Metrics and bid statuses.

The following example indicates that 99.96% of the initial bid requests didn't progress to the next step—that is, Bids—and that 99,75% of these ad opportunities exited the process due to the bid status "Answered with No bid status".

No metrics available 

If you get the message "This deal has no available metrics for this date" after selecting the deal, the DSP you have selected is currently not configured to receive the type of inventory targeted in your campaign. To get troubleshooting data you might need to modify one or more of the geotargeting, format type, or device type settings currently set in your DSP. 

Reach out to your DSP support directly to request the change and/or contact Equativ via sbc-support@smartadserver.com if you need help troubleshooting your deal.

Miscellaneous

Deals that aren't delivering are automatically throttled to reduce unnecessary bid traffic. Throttling means the system limits the number of bid requests sent for that deal—90% after 12 hours of inactivity, and 99% after 48 hours. This throttling is lifted immediately if the deal receives a single bid. A deal is considered "Not delivering" if there are no bid requests, bid responses, wins, or impressions within specific timeframes. Throttling is fully automated and cannot be manually reversed.