Reporting & Attribution

Bid Metrics & Troubleshooting Delivery

Bid Metrics:

Bid metrics are displayed on both the Campaign details and the Line details to provide insight into the bid funnel, real time delivery and any issues that may need to be addressed.

Eligible Requests: Bid requests or impressions that meet the targeting criteria for the Line or Campaign. This considers parameters in the ‘Targeting’ section – deals, geo, inventory targeting lists etc. If you are not seeing any eligible requests, your targeting may not be feasible if there are no impressions that meet all of the selected criteria. See the below section on troubleshooting delivery for more information.
Bids: Bids placed on eligible impressions. If your Line or Campaign has eligible impressions, but is not bidding there may be additional requirements blocking the bids from being placed. See the below section on troubleshooting delivery for more information.
Imps: Bids won, the number of confirmed impressions served by the Line or Campaign in the selected time frame.
Confirmed Spend: Confirmed dollars spent by the Line or Campaign in the selected time frame.

Troubleshooting Delivery Issues

1 ) Are there any eligible requests? If no, here are some steps to troubleshoot the lack of eligible requests:

Check the creative audit status on your ads, this can be seen in the Advertiser screen next to the creative ID.
- If the status is ‘pending’ (yellow caution symbol) there cannot be eligible requests until your ads are audited by the Pontiac audit team. Keep in mind that the audit process may take up to one business day.
- If your creative is rejected, it will not be able to serve on the Pontiac platform. Review our creative acceptance policy for more information on prohibited content.
Run an inventory availability report with the selected targeting parameters applied. If there are no estimated daily impressions available or the estimate is very low, your targeting may be too restrictive and should be expanded to find eligible impressions that meet your requirements.
Check your campaign & line set ups to verify that there are no conflicting targeting parameters. For example, if the campaign was set to target the state of Florida and the line set to target the state of Alabama, the line would not be able to serve. An impression must meet the targeting criteria of both the line and campaign to be eligible.
Check sample logs on the deal for publisher b-cats and any specific creative requirements such as duration, bitrate, etc. Verify that your creative meets all platform and publisher specs.
If you have content level targeting lists applied, check the deal sample logs to verify that these values are correctly formatted and in the correct field. Values in these lists will need to be exact matches to the values in the bid request (except for capitalization).
If you have ‘Require X’ applied on content level fields (require network, require channel, etc), check the deal sample logs for the deals targeted to see if they are passing values in these fields. If they are not populating these fields, you will need to select other deals that pass this info, or remove this setting from targets.
Check the deals table in the ‘Inventory’ tab for the ‘last served’ date on the deals being used. If this date is not current, it is possible the deal has expired, but has not yet been removed from the system. Reach out via the Help Center for assistance with this deal.

2 ) If there are eligible requests, are there bids being placed? If no, here are some steps to troubleshoot the lack of bids:

Check deals table for ‘publisher approval’ required column. If the deal requires approval, you will need to submit a request via the Help Center to start the approval process for that deal. Once your creative is approved, this will appear below the creative preview in the section ‘Approved for: ‘ with the publisher name. You can find more info on this here: Publisher Specs & Approval Processes
Check for ‘sensitive categories allowed’ on the targeted deals if your creative has been flagged as sensitive. These creatives will only be eligible to run on deals that have explicitly been marked this category as accepted. You can find more information on this here: Sensitive Creatives
Reach out through the Help Center for further technical assistance if you try the above recommendations and are still not seeing bids on eligible impressions.

3 ) If there are bids being placed, are there impressions being won? If no, here are some steps to troubleshoot the lack of wins:

Remove bid at floor price – if you are bidding higher than the floor but have this feature enabled, you will only be bidding at the floor and may be missing out on impressions that could’ve been winning with your max bid.
If you do not have ‘bid at price floor’ applied, you may still want to test incremental increases in the bid to see if more impressions can be won at a higher price point.
The publishers targeted may have additional specs or creative requirements that are blocking your creatives from serving. In most cases the specs can be found on the publishers website, the sample logs on the CTV landscape report also provide insight into requirements such as bit rates, video protocol (vast version) & more.
Reach out out through the Help Center for further technical assistance if you have tried the above recommendations and are still unable to see impressions won.

4 ) If there are impressions being won, but the line or campaign is not meeting expectations for delivery, the following are suggestions to increase scale:

Increase the budget multiplier
Apply ‘catch up ASAP’ in the Pacing section
Increase frequency caps
A low win rate is most likely due to the bid on the Line, test incremental increases to see how this affects Line delivery.
Run an inventory availability report with the selected targeting parameters applied. If there are no estimated daily impressions available or the estimate is very low, your targeting may need to be expanded to allow the line to serve. Can you add additional inventory, expand the geo or audience size, etc? The inventory availability report will also provide insight into the bid floors across the inventory within a deal, geo etc.

Campaign Optimization

In an effort to drive the best possible performance for CTV, Online Video, and other channels without the use of cookies for optimizations, Pontiac leverages regression optimization models to home in on the most influential factors in driving conversions. Using “Random Forest” regression modeling which is a machine learning algorithm that runs data from multiple decision trees, Pontiac can identify the variables that have the most influence on performance. This model has proven to drive better performance than other optimization methods

To run a regression analysis on a Pontiac campaign, you will first need to place an IP Conversion pixel on the Advertiser’s website to track the desired outcomes (website visits, conversions, etc). For more information, reach out through the Help Center.

Sample Results:

Conversion Tracking

Pontiac IP Conversions

With the Pontiac pixel, a client can place this on their website and attribute online actions (browsing a page, loading the shopping cart, purchases) to CTV campaigns run through the Pontiac platform. Pontiac IP Conversion Pixels are a proprietary and privacy safe attribution solution that utilizes the user’s IP Address to track website traffic and online purchases driven by your campaigns.

To create a new pixel, enter the Pontiac platform and create or open an Advertiser. Once inside the Advertiser, click the ‘New Pixel’ button and enter a name for the pixel. Wait for 30-60 seconds for the pixel to generate, then click back on the name of the pixel to view the code. Both an image version and a script version of the pixel will generate. The format required may depend on the configuration of the website where the pixel will be placed. The pixel should be placed directly in the source code in the header or the body, then associate it to the Line Item where you wish to track conversions.

If you wish to track an action such as purchase, this pixel should be placed on the page the user will see once the transaction is completed, ie. the ‘Thank you’ page. If you want to register any website visit as a conversion (ie. a user that sees your CTV ad, then goes to your homepage), you can place the pixel in the header to fire on all pages, or one specific page you wish to measure.

IP conversion pixels have a standard lookback of 30 days in the metrics under the Advertiser. This means that the user must complete the desired action within 30 days of seeing the ad for it to count as a conversion. If you would like to pull reporting with a custom lookback window, this can be done in Custom Reporting using the IP Conversion Custom Report. You can select from ‘5’, ‘7’, ’15’ or ’30’ day as the lookback.

For metrics in the Advertiser and Campaign screens, a conversion will be attributed to each Line Item that contributed to the action. For example, if a user sees an ad from 2 lines under a campaign and then completes one purchase, this will be counted as a conversion attributed to both Line Items, appearing as 2 conversions on the Campaign when aggregated.

If you would like to see unique conversions under an advertiser or campaign, you can run a custom ‘IP Conversion Rate’ report without selecting the ‘Line ID’ dimension. These are uniques on the selected date/s. For uniques across a campaign flight, run an ‘IP Path to Conversion Report’ and de-duplicate the hashed IP address across all dates.

Query String Parameters

Client IP is a parameter that can be used to pass the IP address seen by your website for the visitor when the pixel loads. This parameter should be used when the pixel is placed in a container or in any case where the IP that would be registered by the pixel would be inaccurate. For loads where Client IP is present, this will be used in attribution and reporting.

To track Order ID, Order Value, and Customer ID using this pixel, select the boxes for these values once the pixel has generated. This will add the parameters and placeholders for the values to the pixel. Work with your web developer to dynamically replace these placeholders with the intended values. These values can then be pulled in Custom Reporting to gather additional insight about conversions driven by your campaigns & optimize towards ROAS.

Google Privacy Sandbox: Chrome Conversions

Through integration with the Google Privacy Sandbox, Pontiac pixels can also be used to track cookieless conversions that occur in Chrome browsers for online video campaigns. To activate with the Google Privacy Sandbox, the advertiser in the Pontiac platform will need to be created with the website where conversions will be tracked in the ‘Advertiser Domain’ field. On the Pontiac pixel, check the ‘Track Chrome Conversions’ check box. This pixel should then be placed on the Advertiser’s website where the conversion event will take place. For example, this could be the ‘thank you’ page the user will land on after a purchase.

Setting up Foot Traffic Reporting

Foot Traffic Attribution is a type of Conversion reporting powered by OnSpot, that allows advertisers to track how many users were served an ad unit through Pontiac and then visited a commercial location. Utilizing Mobile Advertising IDs and the GPS systems of these mobile devices, OnSpot registers the users who were served your ad and their mobile device subsequently is seen at the location that you are tracking. Foot Traffic Reporting is only available in the United States at this time.

When ads are served across CTV inventory, a household extension that utilizes the IP addresses is used to connect the TVs, Desktops, Laptops etc., with the mobile devices from the same household. The GPS systems of mobile devices from that household will then be used to register users from a household that saw your ad, then subsequently visited the location that you are tracking. Each line can track up to 200 locations.

In the Pontiac platform you can opt to receive Foot Traffic Attribution reporting when setting up a Line Item. Check the ‘Enable Foot Traffic’ box then proceed to the section below under ‘Foot Traffic Reporting’ and select the ‘Add Location’ button to start adding the locations you would like to track.

A $4.00 fee is added to the CTV Line Items with Foot Traffic enabled.

Adding Locations for Foot Traffic

There are 4 methods by which you can add locations to a Line Item for Foot Traffic Attribution. Once you have enabled Foot Traffic Attribution and set the lookback window, click the ‘Add Location’ button that appears under the Foot Traffic section of the menu.

The location can be added through one of these methods:

Address
Lat Long
Geofence
Bulk Address Upload

Address

Enter a commercial address that you would like to monitor for Foot Traffic Conversions and include a custom radius in meters. The Address based method will convert the commercial address to a lat/long coordinate, then utilize this radius to create an area around that coordinate that will be utilized to track Foot Traffic. Once you save, the address will be validated by Google Maps. If the validation status appears as ‘Invalid’, try using one of the other methods to add the location.

The Address method is best for Foot Traffic Areas that are defined by a single commercial address. In commercially dense locations, or to track a ‘unit’ within a larger building this method is not recommended. The Geofence method will allow for more accurate definition and control of the desired area. This will ensure that other buildings, or sections of the building in proximity to the desired location are not captured in the Foot Traffic Area.

If an Address is showing 0 ‘Average Daily Visitors’ after several days on the Line, this may indicate that the address is invalid, and Foot Traffic cannot be registered via the Address method. It is recommended to de-activate this location and to add the location via Geofence.

Lat Long

Use the map to find the desired location, then click to drop the pin on the map. Give the location a name and enter a custom radius in meters. This radius will be used to create an area around that coordinate to track Foot Traffic.

Geofence

The Geofence method enables maximum customization of the area to be tracked for Foot Traffic Studies. Give the location a name. Enter the address in the search bar, or navigate on the map to find the desired location. The area to be tracked can then be drawn as a polygon. Click on the map to create each end point of the polygon and define the area to be tracked. This is great for buildings with odd shapes, or in cases where the location cannot be defined by the building. For example, a car dealership with an extra-large parking lot can create a custom geofence that includes both the building and all their car lots to ensure that all relevant traffic is captured.

If you make a mistake in drawing the polygon, use the ‘Reset Map Shape’ button to erase any points drawn on the map.

Bulk Address Upload

Bulk Upload is available to enter locations as commercial addresses. This method is recommended for Line Items with many locations that can each be defined by a commercial address. Up to 200 addresses can be uploaded through the Bulk Upload at one time.

To Bulk upload addresses you will need to create a CSV file. The addresses must be entered in the following format with no column headers:

Location Name, Building Number, Street Address, City, State, Postal Code, Active Status

If you would like the location to be Active the ‘Active Status’ column should have a 1. If you would like the location to be Inactive the ‘Active Status’ should have a 0. In this example shown below, all of the addresses will be active except ‘The Shops NYC’.

Save the file as a CSV with no column headers and upload it by clicking the ‘Bulk Upload’ button under ‘Foot Traffic Reporting’. Double check before submitting the Line Item that all the addresses look correct.

If an Address is showing 0 ‘Average Daily Visitors’ after several days on the Line, this may indicate that the address is invalid, and Foot Traffic cannot be registered via the Address method. It is recommended to de-activate this location and to add the location via Geofence.

Editing & De-activating Locations

Foot Traffic Addresses cannot be edited once the Line Item has been submitted. If you need to change the details of the address you will need to deactivate the address and enter the new address as a separate entry.
To deactivate a location previously entered for Foot Traffic Reporting, open the Line Item and expand the ‘Foot Traffic Reporting’ section to view the entered addresses. The ‘Location Name’ should appear as a hyperlink. Click on the Location Name to open the Location Settings window and un-check the ‘Active’ box, then click ‘Save’ and ‘Submit Changes’ to the Line Item.

Foot Traffic Metrics

At the Line Item & Campaign levels the Foot Traffic reporting section will display two metrics, ‘Attributed Visitors’ and ‘Average Daily Visits’.

Attributed Visitors will display the number of users who were served an ad from this campaign and subsequently visited this location during the selected reporting interval. These are Foot Traffic Conversion driven by this campaign. The ‘Foot Traffic Lookback’ is 30 days and metrics are updated on a 3-day delay. The visitor count displayed in these reports is ‘unique’ visitors. Multiple visits by the same Device ID will only be registered once on a given day, but may be registered if they return on a different day.

Average Daily Visitors will display the average number of total visitors recorded at this location per day within selected reporting interval. This is used to indicate if the address entered is correct and tracking visitors and will be displayed as a range. In the above example this metric indicates that in the last 30 days there were on average 50-500 visitors at this location each day. If 0 visitors are seen at this location, there may be an issue with tracking devices at this address. If this location was added using the ‘Address’ method, it is recommended to try adding this location as a Lat/Long coordinate or custom Geofence.

If the location was added as a Lat/Long coordinate or custom Geofence and the location is registering 0 ‘Average Daily Visitors’, reach out through the Help Center for assistance in troubleshooting this issue.

Standard Custom Reports

Custom reporting allows you to customize all the dimensions and metrics you wish to evaluate, providing an exportable csv with all the data from your campaigns. Select the advertisers, campaigns or line items, dimensions, metrics & date range to generate a custom report. All custom reports created will be in UTC time zone.

Custom reports are limited to 500,000 rows. If your report exceeds the maximum number of returnable records, there will be a yellow caution symbol next to the name of the report with an error stating that the data is incomplete. The report will still run and will return the first 500,000 rows, but the data will not be complete for the selected dates & parameters. If you need to receive additional data, you can reach out through the Help Center, separate the report into multiple reports, or limit the dimensions selected to decrease the number of rows.

Custom Reports will remain downloadable in the platform for 30 days. Expired reports must be ‘Rerun’ at a later date, however and it is possible that certain data points will no longer be available.

IP Conversion Pixel: Path to Conversion

The ‘Path to Conversion’ report provides data on the IP conversions registered as well as on the impressions served through Pontiac campaigns to those users that converted. This report can be utilized to see the entire pathway to conversion from each impression the user viewed to the action they completed on your website.

The column ‘imp_time’ will indicate when the impression was served through Pontiac to a user that visited or converted on the site where the pixel is placed. The total number of ‘imp_times’ indicates the number of impressions that were served to users that then converted, this will correspond to the ‘Attributed Imps’ field in the IP Conversion Pixel metrics under the Advertiser.

The ‘conv_time’ column will indicate the time the action or conversion took place on the site. The total number of unique ‘conv_times’ is the total number of unique conversions or visits that were driven by your campaign. This will correspond to the ‘Total Convs’ field in the IP Conversion Pixel metrics under the Advertiser.

IP conversion pixels have a standard lookback of 30 days in the metrics that are displayed under the Advertiser. This means that the user must complete the desired action within 30 days of seeing the ad for it to count as a conversion. If you would like to pull reporting with a custom lookback window, this can be done in this report. Select from ‘5’, ‘7’, ’15’ or ’30’ from the ‘Lookback window’ dropdown .

Report Dimensions:

Pontiac pixel Id
Conversion time
Imp Time
IP Address
Zip Code
Site Domain
Exchange
Region/State
Auction id
User id
Advertiser
Line
Device Type
Date
Creative Id
Order ID*
Order Value*
Deal Name
Publisher Name
Content Network
Content Channel
Content Series
Content Title
Content Genre

*work with your web developer to dynamically pass these values on IP pixel

IP Conversion Pixel: Page Visits

The ‘Page visits’ report will only provide data on ALL page visits or loads for this pixel. ‘Visit Time’ indicates the time of the page visit. This is not a Conversion event attributed to your campaign, it is total page visits independent of media served.

IP Conversion Pixel: Conversion Rate

Analyze conversion rate day over day to track the effectiveness of your ads with the ‘Conversion Rate Report’. To calculate conversion rate for each day, divide ‘Conversions’ by ‘Imps’.

NOTE: The conversion metric in this report will match the metrics in the UI when the ‘Line’ dimension is included. When this dimension is included, conversions are NOT de-duplicated across line items. For example, if a user sees an ad from 2 lines under a campaign and then completes one purchase, this will be counted as a conversion attributed to both Line Items. This will also appear as 2 conversions on the Campaign in the interface as the associated line metrics are aggregated.

If you would like to see unique conversions under an advertiser or campaign, you can run a custom ‘IP Conversion Rate’ report without selecting the ‘Line ID’ dimension. These are uniques on the selected date/s. For uniques across a campaign flight, run an ‘IP Path to Conversion Report’ and de-duplicate the hashed IP address across all dates.

Reach/Frequency Report

The Reach/Frequency report is designed to provide data on the number of unique users that were reached by a campaign. Select the Advertiser/s, Campaign/s, Line Item/s, and date range, then run the report to view the following metrics:
Unique Device IDs (IFAs)
Unique IP Addresses
Impressions served

Frequency can be estimated by dividing total impressions served by either device id or IP.

Log Level Reporting

Log level reporting provides advertisers with every piece of necessary information available in the bid requests for inventory that they have purchased. For privacy reasons, IP addresses and IFAs are encrypted in log level reports. Log level reports are delivered daily for the previous day’s activity. To receive log level reports you must have either an AWS account and have a scheduled report configured for delivery to S3, or set up delivery via FTP. Download the CTV log level report schema to see every field that is passed:

ctv-log-level-report-schema Download

Various fields in the bid request contain a numerical value that can be mapped to a description. The tables below provide the mappings for device type, geo type, video protocol and livestream values. Additional information can be found regarding the fields required or utilized in the bid requests & bid responses in the Open RTB specs.

Device Type

Video Protocol

Geo Type

Livestream

Automated Reporting

Custom reports can be automatically delivered to your email, FTP or S3 bucket, or Google Cloud Storage on the schedule of your choice. When creating a custom report, select the ‘Schedule Automated Report’ box, then open the ‘Scheduled Reports’ tab to choose the schedule and configure the delivery method.

Custom Report Delivery by S3

Setting up Pontiac Scheduled reports delivery in AWS S3 requires:

Creating a bucket in AWS S3:

In AWS S3 click Create Bucket
Chose a bucket name that is available and the desired AWS Region.
Change Object Ownership to ACLs enabled.
Uncheck Block all public access field and check “I acknowledge that the current settings might result in this bucket and the objects within becoming public”.
Click Create bucket.
Navigate to the newly created bucket and click Create folder with the output path that we chose in Pontiac (“output-path”). Confirm to create the folder.

Setting up the report in Pontiac:

Go to Reporting tab and then click New Custom Report.
Select Log Level Report from the Report Type Drop Down
Go to Scheduled Reports tab and check Deliver by S3 box.
In the expandable section fill out the Bucket field with the AWS S3 Bucket name. Example: S3-test-bucket.
Fill out the Path field with a desired output path location and file name (To include the date macro use dateInt (YYYYMMDD) like xxx/filename-%dateInt% otherwise your file will be overwritten each day). Example: output-path/Pontiac-reports.csv or output-path/Pontiac-reports-%dateInt%.csv
Click View security policy and copy the full text area.
Go to Amazon AWS S3 and modify permissions for the bucket we chose earlier. In the Permissions tab click Edit and paste the policy text from earlier and Save.
Back in Pontiac reports screen click Verify and wait for a successful confirmation message.

Reporting Time Zone

Seat Time Zone

The time zone for your account can be configured under the ‘Admin’ section of the platform in ‘Seat Settings’ under ‘Preferences’. This time zone setting will adjust the metrics in the advertiser tab (advertisers, campaign and line item metrics) as well as the reporting dashboard. Note: this does not apply to billing metrics in the account balance or the pacing and dayparts on campaigns or lines. All billing metrics and transactions are for account activity in UTC. Pacing and dayparting time zones can be configured on each campaign or line.

Custom Reporting Time Zone

The time zone for custom reports can be configured on each individual report. Note, metrics will only match billing if the report is pulled in UTC. Custom reports may not match the metrics shown in the platform if they are not pulled in the seat time zone.

User time zone will use the ‘user time zone offset’ from the bid request to adjust report metrics for each impression to the time zone where that impression was served. When the user’s time zone offset is not present in the bid request, it will be defaulted to UTC.

Billing Time Zone

All platform activity appears in the account balance and is billed in UTC time zone.