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:
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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.