Troubleshoot Delivery Issues

Perhaps you’re wondering why some ads are displaying but not others, or whether your line items and creatives are set up correctly. You can use Delivery Tools to troubleshoot these and other common delivery issues.

Use Delivery Tools to troubleshoot your ads

Solve many of your delivery issues using Google Ad Manager’s Delivery Tools. Diagnose the delivery of an unexpected line item or discover the source of an unknown creative in your web, mobile app, or in-stream video content. Simply load a webpage to see which ads are eligible to deliver. 

You can also run a simulation on a specific ad slot and see why a specific line item didn’t deliver while others did. It’s all done within the Ad Manager user interface.

Initiate delivery inspection for a webpage

To inspect delivery, navigate to the Delivery section, and select Delivery Tools. Where you go next depends on the environment you’re working in. 

Let’s continue with the webpage environment for now. Select Webpage ads to inspect ads that appear on desktop or laptop browsers. Enter or paste your site’s URL, worldnewsonline.com, into the webpage field, and click Continue. The webpage opens in a new tab, loading the ads and gathering information about them.

As the page loads, the Publisher Console is enabled. The Publisher Console has two tabs that display page information, Ad slots and Page request. 

Under the Ad slots tab, you’ll find status information and three links. You have the ability to open the ad unit directly in Ad Manager, open delivery diagnostics, or open the creative in a new window.

Under the Page request tab, you can troubleshoot why a page is loading slowly. It also provides insight into potential tagging issues on the page. 

This console also provides a link to open the Delivery Tools page in Ad Manager. Instead, let’s return to Ad Manager to see ad details on the Delivery Tools page. This view shows information about each ad request and what ad delivered. Each row on the page represents an ad slot and request. 

For each request, it shows you information about the ad slot, the demand channel, the line item that served, as well as the associated advertiser. To see more information for a given ad request, click Inspect. 

This expanded view shows more information about the ad request, including details about the the div, requested sizes, and key values. 

It also provides information about what delivered, as well as the ability to simulate the request. 

If you click the Simulate requestbutton, a new tab opens, showing which line item would win the next ad request for this ad slot. The information from the original ad request, such as sizes, country, and key values, is shown as well. You can alter any of these criteria and rerun the simulation to see how it affects what ads serve. You can also change or remove certain key values to see how much they are limiting what line items serve.

You can also search for a specific line item that you expected to win, and run it against the ad request criteria to see details on why the line item wasn’t selected in this simulation. Reasons for non-delivery in the past seven days are listed. Click on the line item ID to go directly to that line item’s page. From this page, you can choose to make adjustments, if necessary, or check the change history to see if any adjustments were made that altered the ability for this line item to serve.

You can also use the Troubleshooting tab to see the seven-day non-delivery causes without running a full troubleshoot simulation. 

When you’re looking for information on which of your ads are serving and why, be sure to make use of Ad Manager’s delivery tools.