Loss Reasons

Loss reasons provides insight into why a buyer lost/is losing in the programmatic auction. Media owners can share this information with the buyer to help them improve their bidding strategies.

How can this be used?

Whenever an advertising campaign isn’t performing as well as expected, it's natural to want to figure out why. Loss reasons help media owners quickly identify the root cause of the problem, pinpoint the issue, and take the appropriate next steps to immediately improve campaign performance.

Loss Reasons Diagram

The following visual explains how loss reasons are passed back to the buyer:

Infrastructure

Loss reasons are part of the standard Open RTB v2.5 specifications. In addition to the loss reasons listed in the Open RTB v2.5 specifications, Vistar’s loss reason list also includes those commonly seen in the Vistar exchange ecosystem.

Loss reason codes, descriptions, and their definitions are provided below:

OpenRTB Defined Codes

Code	Description	Notes
0	Bid Won	Bid won the auction.
1	Internal Error	An error on Vistar's end prevented the ad from serving.
3	Invalid Bid Response	Bid response doesn't match bid request buy type.
4	Invalid Deal ID	The deal ID in the bid isn't in the request.
6	Invalid (i.e. malformed) Advertiser Domain	No adomain passed.
7	Missing Markup	No creative found.
8	Missing Creative ID	No crid passed.
9	Missing Bid Price	No bid price passed.
100	Bid Below Auction Floor	The bid was below the open exchange auction price floor.
101	Bid Below Deal Floor	The bid was below the price floor for the PMP.
102	Lost to Higher Bid	The bid lost to a higher-priced bid CPM.
103	Lost to a Bid for a PMP Deal	Lost to a buyer bidding on a deal.
104	Buyer Seat Blocked	The buyer seat isn't eligible for the bid request.
202	Creative Filtered - Disapproved by Exchange	Creative is either denied or not yet approved.
205	Creative Filtered - Advertiser Exclusions	The requesting venue doesn't allow the advertiser contained in the bid.
209	Creative Filtered - Category Exclusions	The requesting venue doesn't allow the category contained in the bid.
210	Creative Filtered - Creative Attribute Exclusions	The requesting venue has a block against the creative contained in the bid.

Vistar Defined Codes

Code	Description	Notes
1000	Invalid Bid Type	The bid is for open exchange when open exchange isn't supported.
1001	Missing Campaign ID	The bid response is missing the campaign ID.
1002	Missing Burl	The bid response is missing the billing URL.
1003	Lost to a Direct Bid	The bid lost to a direct campaign at a higher priority level.
1004	Lost to an Exchange Bid	The bid lost to an exchange campaign at a higher priority level.
1005	Lost due to Weighted Auction	The highest bid doesn't always win for open exchange auctions.
1006	Invalid Auction - Multiple Bids Won	Vistar doesn't support multiple bids with the group set to true.
1009	Lost to a Guaranteed Bid	The bid lost to a programmatic guaranteed campaign.
1010	No Expected Guaranteed Bids Returned	The targeted bidder didn't return a programmatic guaranteed bid.
1011	Unknown Bidder for a Guaranteed Bid	Can't identify the bidder making the programmatic guaranteed bid.
1100	Creative Filtered - New Creative Asset	Vistar system sees a new creative and is processing the information. When this process is complete, the media owner will be able to see the creative for approval.
1101	Creative Filtered - Audio Not Allowed	The bid required audio to play and the requesting screen doesn't support audio.
1102	Creative Filtered - Assets don't Match Targeting	The creative size, duration, or mime type in the bid doesn't match the request.
1103	Creative Filtered - ID Excluded	The creative ID is blocked.
1104	Not IAB Category	The creative category isn't a valid IAB category.
1200	VAST Error - Error Unmarshaling VAST XML Bytes	The VAST doc is incorrectly formatted.
1201	VAST Error - VAST XML has No Ad	The VAST doc doesn't contain an ad.
1202	VAST Error - VAST XML Has Multiple Ads	The VAST doc has multiple ads when only one is supported.
1203	VAST Error - No InLine Ad Found	The full VAST doc passed via adm doesn't contain a video file.
1204	VAST Error - Duration and Media Files Missing	Missing duration and media file.
1205	VAST Error - More than 1 Redirect	Vistar supports at most 1 redirect.

How do I get started?

There are two ways to view loss reasons:

For buyers, Vistar surfaces loss reasons to DSPs directly through the bid stream. DSPs pass a macro in their loss URLs that Vistar replaces with the loss reason code.
For media owners, loss reasons are available in Auction Analytics. Auction Analytics provides media owners insight into the bid exchange process.. Visibility into loss reasons presents opportunities for media owners. They can proactively collaborate with buyers to increase monetization opportunities in active campaigns. It can also be used reactively to troubleshoot buyer issues.

Auction Analytics - Loss Reasons

Specify Advertisers based on Approval

Swap to a specific advertiser domain in your filters. From here we can see a majority of their bids are not winning because the creative is not approved.
With this information, you can go approve this creative as the media owner or go and tell the advertiser that you're not approving it and why.

Discover creatives with incorrect orientations

Find an advertiser with a low win rate. Locate the exchange they're running their ads through.
Bring up their loss reasons code and look for "None of assets matched targeting."
Next, move into the size visualization and see what orientations are winning and losing. If most of the winning bids are in landscape orientation, tell the advertiser they need to bid with the right orientation on their creatives.

Diagnose specific Deal IDs and VAST errors

Log into the dashboard.
Find specific Deal IDs with high problem cases. If an exchange is throwing a VAST error and wasn’t sending out a proper ID, look up the specific error and escalate the ID to figure out the error.