Maybe you have noticed that you are receiving plenty of pings to request bids on calls, but your bids just aren't winning as often as you want. Fortunately, Ringba has the tools you need to dig into why your bids aren't winning so you can optimize your campaigns.
This article describes the steps to take to make optimize your RTB campaigns for more winning bids and more revenue. It follows the following steps:
-
Identifying Problems
- Troubleshooting Configuration Issues
- Correcting Errors with your Buyer
- Setting your Bid Amounts
- Connecting with your Publisher
- Getting Help from Ringba
Identifying Problems
The first step in winning more bids is to understand the technical reasons why your bids don't win. Reviewing the bid rejection reasons can help you uncover any technical problems with your campaign.
Find Bid Rejection Reasons
Use the Real Time Bidding reporting tool to export information about your bids:
- Export today's RTB bids on the Reporting > Real Time Bidding screen. See Exporting RTB Bids for step-by-step instructions.
- Open the exported CSV file in your favorite spreadsheet application, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets.
- Filter the spreadsheet:
- Filter the sheet to include only rows where column O, Bid Rejected, contains TRUE.
- To focus on a particular campaign, filter the spreadsheet by a value in column A, Campaign.
- To focus on a particular publisher, filter by column B, Publisher.
Now you have filtered the export file to include only the rejected bids for a particular campaign and/or publisher. You can begin to look for patterns in why these bids are rejected. Review the values in column P, Reason for Rejection.
Tip: Consider using a pivot table to find which values occur most often in the Reason for Rejection column to prioritize your optimization.
See the RTB Error Codes article for an explanation of what causes each of these error codes. You can start adjusting your campaign to address your most common rejection reasons.
Deep Dive into Bids
You might also find it useful to dig deep into a few bids to review the details and understand some examples. Use the same report from the Real Time Bidding reporting tool to get a bid ID from column N, Bid ID and search for it in the Search Bids section of the Real Time Bidding screen.
You can click the bid in the search results to expand a panel with Bid Details, Bid Trace, Events, Ring Tree Events, and Tags tabs to help you research the lifecycle of the bid. The Ring Tree Events tab is particularly useful because it contains all the requests and responses you receive from the buyer. This is usually where you find the reason why the buyer declined the request.
Tip: The Ring Tree Events tab is probably your most important resource when you are researching bids while using RTB Pass Through.
Troubleshooting Configuration Issues
Sometimes, bids are rejected because of settings you can fix in your own Ringba account. For example, if you are receiving a lot of bids rejected because of error code 1001 - Disabled, that could mean that the campaign is paused. In this case, simply unpausing the campaign could fix the problem.
If you are using RTB Pass Through, you should verify the configurations as part of this step.
Correcting Errors with your Buyer
Your next steps depend on the errors you discover. However, often users discover buyer-related issues. For example, if you are receiving a lot of bids rejected because of error code 1003 - No capacity, you should contact your buyer to understand how to get more capacity for your calls.
Setting your Bid Amounts
If your campaign settings are fine and there are no errors with your buyer, the next step is to examine whether you are bidding enough for your calls. Ultimately, real-time bidding is an auction and the highest bidder wins. Bids have to be competitive to win.
Connecting with your Publisher
If you have checked all the previous sections and even experimented with increasing your bid amounts, and your bids still don't win as often as you think they should, you should contact your publisher. It's possible the publisher is using a predictive routing setup that unfairly disadvantages you. They might be able to give you a priority bump so your bids can become competitive again.
Getting Help from Ringba
If you still have questions, you can contact Ringba support through chat or by email to support@ringba.com. Make sure to provide the specific RTB ID you want help investigating.