Advertising troubleshooting

Advertising is important to optimize revenue from your content. The work involves several parties.

Key reasons why troubleshooting advertising can be difficult:

• Ad servers might respond differently based on how many times you access a certain ad tag.
• Ad servers might respond differently over time as campaigns change.
• Ad servers might respond differently based on the pages you've visited (retargeting).
• Ad servers might respond differently based on your location.
• Ad servers might respond differently based on your device and browser.
• With programmatic advertising, it's certain that the ads will vary a lot.
• With VPAID javascript ads, there can be issues.

All of these factors can make it difficult to find and debug an ad error. We recommend you try the items below to debug advertising.

Validate your ad tag is working in a reference implementation

Make sure that your VAST Ad Tag actually returns valid ads by checking it with Google VAST validator.

If the Ad Tag is not working there, it's likely the problem is related to the booking/delivery of the ad from the ad server. Reach out to your ad provider with a copy of the VAST Ad Tag response and compare with sample tags to see what could be causing the problem.

Save a copy of the VAST response as a text file to make the problem repeatable

If the VAST tag does work in the Google VAST validator, there may be something configured incorrectly in the set-up or similar.

To ensure you're always debugging the same VAST ad response, we recommend you save the VAST response as a text file on your server. Then, instead of directing the player to the Ad Server URL, direct the player to your text file.

If you need to send information about the problem to someone else that can help debug it, the first question they will ask is what the VAST response is. If you've saved it as a text file, you can show the setup so they can debug to see if that's the issue.

Review potential ad errors for additional clues

There are several different settings for advertising. Because there is a multitude, you may have incorrect settings that cause your ad not to display as expected.

You can see what response the ad server is giving by inserting your ad tag into a browser. It should something like this:

<VAST xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="vast.xsd" version="3.0">
<Ad id="697203496">
<InLine>
<AdSystem>GDFP</AdSystem>
<AdTitle>External NCA1C1L1 Linear Inline</AdTitle>
<Description>
<![CDATA[ External NCA1C1L1 Linear Inline ad ]]>
</Description>
<Error>
<![CDATA[
https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/pagead/conversion/?ai=BUFIagmB-W_LZDsKLZqOPtbgB8NiP6wYAAAAQASCo3bsmOABY2MayxdcBYPGt_IWkH7oBCjcyOHg5MF94bWzIAQXAAgLgAgDqAiUvMTI0MzE5MDk2L2V4dGVybmFsL3NpbmdsZV9hZF9zYW1wbGVz-AKE0h6AAwGQA8gGmAOsAqgDAeAEAdIFBhCo9rnMApAGAaAGI6gHmM4b2AcB4AcL0ggJCIDhgBAQARgB&sigh=4QaLBuZ5PxU&label=videoplayfailed[ERRORCODE]
]]>
</Error>
<Impression>
<![CDATA[
https://securepubads.g.doubleclick.net/pcs/view?xai=AKAOjsvQEoZXxF619N6dCa6B8Wa1tJZ7UwxoUTSR0usl7cvn3GXSoVvbPUh82hCsw561efljEBFwosBIo2F78P9A35bRKk2R0m3JOEZKNoPNWwF5-GFR0uEHkKTRDlRM0tnu9e16Ml4BFIZw78QKZ6Oqk3EGADvEM_PJ2JzIfCZLjfP0DkZbbLQe0FHN16cGsuLXOKCXkI6soH6buPGisBU_tQ_fPVOFUn4mpYd7rvLG9gCDWz5C7BAWtcMVFVpx&sig=Cg0ArKJSzD2yRXVU-6Y3EAE&adurl=
]]>
</Impression>
<Creatives>
<Creative id="57859154776" sequence="1">...</Creative>
<Creative id="57857370976" sequence="1">...</Creative>
</Creatives>
<Extensions>...</Extensions>
</InLine>
</Ad>
</VAST>

Below are common cases where you might not see an ad:

• The VAST response is empty.
• You are getting a VPAID / Flash based ad that is not supported.
• You have a VMAP response where the player expects a VAST response.
• You have not configured ad breaks in the player to trigger ad playback.
• The ad creative is missing or in an incorrect file format (sometimes .flv video files are used).

Here you can see a list of ad errors and their potential source of problem and also recommended actions.

Try the same settings in the player with a sample tag of the same type

If you cannot find any reason for the ad tag to fail, you can use a sample VAST tag mimicing your type of ad to see if that ad tag is working. This will help you troubleshoot cases where you have set the player up to play only HTML5 ads, but you are getting a VPAID/flash based ad back from the ad server.

Debugging VPAID javascript ads

We recommend not to debug VPAID javascript ads. They are too complex to debug. Instead, reach out to the provider of the ad and have them debug it.