Performing and Not Delivering
Delivery is a tricky problem. If you have a very specialized audience such as a remarketing group, it's most likely a small audience. In these cases, it's often a high performing campaign while it struggles to meet delivery goals. If a campaign is meeting or exceeding the performance goal but not meeting delivery, there are several approaches to take that will accelerate spend while minimizing the risk to performance.

Troubleshooting Checklist for Under-Delivering Campaigns:

• Are all Ad variations active?  Has an Internet crawler paused any?  Or are the tags corrupted? - Check to make sure the Ads are actively running and being properly tracked in all Networks.
• What is the frequency setting?  Can it be loosened? - If possible, increase the frequency setting to up to five impressions per user per day. Often times, an Internet user will miss the first two or three impressions anyway, so delivering five to each user each day increases the chance that the Ads will be noticed.
• What is the performance goal? Is it too tight? - Often, a machine-learning technology in the DSP will keep delivery low to increase the performance factor when a performance goal is set very tight. Adjust the performance goal by about 10% to 20% per day until you notice an increase in delivery.
• Is the targeting too restrictive? - Validate that the right audience is being reached by running performance reports by user profile or behavioral profile. Find more inventory for that audience once validated.
• Are all possible inventory sources being utilized? - Check to see if there are additional inventory sources available to you that you have not used for your campaign.

Delivery Boosting Tactics Checklist

1. Add more inventory sources similar to well performing inventory - if delivery improves but performance suffers, roll back or pause the additional inventory
2. Adjust the frequency to somewhere between two and five impressions per user per day to find out where the balance is between optimal performance and delivery.
3. Relax the targeting constraints or expand the audience to similar behavioral categories if the target audience is too small.
4. Increase the bid amount if possible to allow your Ads to play in a higher tier of inventory
5. Reset performance goals to match market averages. Do your research and make expectations align with the current market.
6. Increase inventory that is performing well, if possible. Often, it's not possible to get more of a good thing, but sometimes it is.
7. Adjust the timing, if possible. If the flight dates are flexible with the Advertiser, extend the duration of the campaign.
   
   

In the final installment of this three part blog series, we'll look at the last two scenarios and how to optimize for them: delivering and not performing; not performing and not delivering.