Why Is My Campaign Not Spending?

"I’ve spent a month's worth of budget in a matter of a couple of hours because I’ve entered it as a daily, instead of monthly. I’ve also served 1M impressions blank because my CM360 placements had a different end date then my actual campaign. "

- Hélène A. Parker (over 10+ years in programmatic buying)

These are just a couple of the hard lessons I’ve had to learn as a trader and why it is so important to QA before and after a campaign launch. If your programmatic campaign has started but you're not seeing any spend, here's a step-by-step guide to QA your campaign and help you address it.

But first, QAing means going over your campaign and verifying that the setup is correct according to the media plan before and after launch. Before launching (before a campaign starts), verify that everything is accurate – from budget and targeting to ad creatives. This helps prevent costly mistakes and ensures your ads align with brand guidelines, setting you up for a productive and efficient campaign monitoring journey.

After launch, keep a close eye on real-time data and creative performance. Look for opportunities to adjust and refine targeting based on insights. This ongoing QA process helps maximize budget efficiency and campaign effectiveness. Remember, it's crucial to catch any issues early on and continuously optimize to get the most out of your programmatic campaigns.

Here’s a step-by-step guide or QA checklist to consider implementing:

Check Your Campaign Status:

• Verify that your campaign is active and not paused. For real, though, this might sound counterintuitive, but sometimes we activate the ad group but not the campaign, or we activate the campaign but not the placement/ad server tags.

Budget Availability:

• Confirm that your campaign budget is set and available.
• Check for any daily or lifetime budget caps that might be limiting spend. Also, be sure to check if the dates are correct.
• For example, I’ve set an end date for a year ahead of the actual date because I entered 2019 (instead of 2018).

Bid Settings:

• Check that your bid is competitive enough especially based on your tactics or ad formats.

Ad Creative Approval:

• Confirm that your ad creatives have been approved. Check that the creative formats comply with platform guidelines.
• Friendly reminder to check your status here as well.
• For example, did you activate the creative + ads + placement in CM360?

Ad Delivery Settings:

• Check ad delivery settings, including ad scheduling, flights dates, etc.
• Ensure your ads are set to deliver during active and relevant times.

Targeting Criteria:

• Check your audience, site lists, keywords targeting, and inventory.
• Is it too narrow? Are you too niche? Do you need to adjust to expand reach?

Geographic Targeting:

• Review your geo settings. Very often we target super niche, especially in some verticals (Auto, EDU, Political, etc).
• For example, if your geo is niche, try to expand the audience! or if the audience is specific, try to open geo restrictions.

Frequency Caps:

• Check if frequency caps are preventing ads from being shown. Remember that a frequency too high can prevent unique impressions.
• For instance, if you serve ads to the same household multiple times because your frequency is higher/more aggressive, you have fewer chances of serving “new” households.
• Broadening frequency can help with increasing net new/unique impressions, especially in top or mid-funnel tactics.

Platform-Specific Checks:

All DSPs aren't created equal but this checklist can be tailored into your UI.

• For The Trade Desk: Check your bid landscape and troubleshoot any bid issues.
• For DV360: Verify that your line item settings are configured correctly.
• For Adelphic: Review targeting options for audience alignment.
• For Adlib/Mediamath: Confirm the correct configuration of line item settings for MediaMath.
• Roku: Ensure ad creatives meet Roku's format and size requirements.
• Similarly, for Yahoo DSP, Xandr, Basis, and others, the above steps are relevant and definitely something to consider adding as a QA effort.

Ask your DSP team:

• Reach out to the support team of your DSP: ask, ask, ask for assistance to QA and ask, ask, ask for recommendations to make this process more efficient.
• Once you've tried their way and remixed it into your internal ways, teach your team!

Monitor Real-Time:

• Look for any sudden dips or anomalies that might indicate issues.
• This ain’t no set it and forget it, people!!!!
• Schedule daily/weekly reports to help keep track/monitor spend.

By systematically checking these steps, you can identify and address the possible reasons behind the lack of spend in your programmatic campaign. Adjustments may be needed based on the insights gained during this troubleshooting process.

Please note that some clients and industries require specific targeting criteria. Therefore, some of the above may not be doable! If this keeps happening, you many have another issue in your internal workflow which include planning. If your media plans cannot be executed, you will not be able to pace/spend unless something is adjusted.

Also happening this week:

• New episode of the Programmatic Digest podcast is coming out Tuesday(tomorrow) and I am discussing my takeaways from The Navigator’s conference hosted by the Beeler.Tech . Check out YouTube and all major podcast platforms
• In this episode, I have special interviews and videos recorded during the day: special shoutout to Grouchy Greg Watkins , Jaime Schultheis , Mebrulin Francisco , Emily Scadden , Tom Triscari , Renee Appelle , Devon Christopher Johnson , Rob Beeler and more.
• I help individual programmatic ninjas and programmatic team become efficient on how they buy/execute. If you interested in a programmatic optimization bootcamp for you and your team? Request a copy of a training timeline at [email protected]

This week's Vibe:

Go ahead and ask for what you need! Put yoursef out there! Post about it! Email about it! Do it!

Self-sabotage can look like different things. If you are afraid to put yourself out there or put your work there because people will judge, it is because you are already judging yourself in the first place. Trust that your work is the best you could do in this moment and that people judgement cannot affect you unless you allow it.

Paraphrasing from the book we are reading in my book club hosted by Jelisa Smith , The Mountain Is You by Brianna Wiest.

My Networking Tip:

Since there are a few conferences in the horizon this month (and the rest of the year) I strongly recommend my friends attending any events to invest in this Solar Portable Power Bank with Built-In Cables!

It's 30% off right now and you will thank me later!