Summarize how to quickly identify the root cause of a revenue drop
Introduction
During your daily monitoring, there are several things you want to identify in order to resolve bugs and problems.
A drastic drop in your revenues may be due to:
- a brutal traffic drop (Auctions drop, i.e. more than 50%)
- a drop of your advertising performances (RPM drop)
The first step to troubleshooting is to identify where the revenue drop is coming from as it may come from four different places and may impact:
- all websites, all bidders and all ad slots (i.e. CMP malfunction on all the inventory)
- a particular website, all bidders and all ad slots (i.e. publishers' developers broke something on the page)
- a particular ad slot on one website (i.e. an unsuccessful mapping change)
- a particular bidder (i.e. SSP configuration error)
We'll explore a simple process we recommend you to do (at least) every week to be more responsive in error correction and to avoid substantial revenue losses.
First of all, we'll explain the generic process then we'll explore a specific in-depth example.
The generic process
In-depth example
In this example, we want to quickly spot a revenue drop and identify its root cause.
First of all, we'll check Revenues and RPM on each site for the last three weeks (from January 18th to February 13th):
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The first three websites look fine but we may already spot a problem on welcome-publication.com as a revenue drop occurred from February 4th.
Let's find why!
We check the number of Auctions. There is quite the same number of daily Auctions (even more on some days) so no problem here, as well as the eCPM which is constant.
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So let's check the RPM to discover that it's crashing from February 4th (0.089$ the 3rd to 0.052$ the 4th and even 0.024$ on the 10th). Same thing with the Fill-Rate, it dropped substantially from around the same time window as the RPM.
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As we previously identified a suspect drop in RPM (and Revenues) at the website level, we want to check by ad slot and bidder in order to identify if it's impacting all ad slots and all bidders or if the issue is concerning only one specific area of your ad stack.
Let's check each ad slot for welcome-publication.com:
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The first ad slot (Leaderboard-0775) seems to be working fine but at least "Sticky-5897", "InContent-3238" and "Sticky-5748" are broken from February 4th.
While we dug on only four ad slots, we already found three of them are broken. You must check each and every ad slot setup on this website as it is the root cause of your revenue drop.