Pushing an ad through the API - doesn't start until I manually save through the UI?

[phil_renaud]

Hi – this is starting to become a really pressing priority for us and we’re still unable to get ads going through just the API. Any ideas what I’m doing wrong w/ unpausing?

[JBabichJapan]

accounts/18ce53vvrko/line_items/2whrm

Hi Phil,

Sorry for delays in following up with this - I took a quick look at the line item info and the first thing that pops out to me is that it’s an Auto Bid campaign but I’m not sure if the UI (ads.twitter.com) is recognizing it as one, so one thing I might ask you to try is to set bid_amount_local_micro= as an empty string when you do the PUT to ensure that we “unset” any bid that is on the line item. Are all of the campaigns you are trying to get impressions from set up as auto-bid? If there is a case which is not auto please let us know.

Thanks,

John

[phil_renaud]

Hi @JBabichJapan – thanks for the feedback. I’ve tried setting the bid_amount_local_micro as an empty string on PUT as you suggested, but after an hour, still no dice.

I’ve since tried to see what else I could do to make this work; tried doing max bid to no avail for example:

            "endpoint": "accounts/18ce53vvrko/line_items/2whrm",
            "args": {
"paused": "false",
"automatically_select_bid": "false",
"bid_amount_local_micro": "1000000",
            }

returns:

which seems to be okay, but still no impressions rolling in.

Any idea what else might be going on? I’d be very happy to screenshare and walk anybody through this as well.

[phil_renaud]

I’m apprehensive about going into the ads UI and simply opening/saving this to see what changes, though I’m sure it’ll cause the ad to start garnering impressions, but if you wanted to go into the UI and start it to see what actually changed on your end, that would be more than fine! Anything to come to a solution.

Thanks!

[phil_renaud]

Hi @JBabichJapan – if you have any time coming up, I’d love to walk through the problem with you via screenshare or otherwise. Let me know if you have any ideas or time to take a look – thanks!

[JBabichJapan]

Hi Phil,

Sorry I haven’t had time to look into this in much great detail - but please know that I can’t actually click Save on your campaigns to do what you said about seeing what has changed from API perspective.

I reviewed the line item settings pretty closely and nothing pops out at me as being incorrect for serving. The next logical thing is actually reach and checking reach_estimate endpoint. It’s theoretically possible that the campaign for whatever reason is not currently set up with enough reach to actually serve (either bid being too low, or tailored audience too restricted, something like that), it would be great if you can investigate from that angle and try to figure out if there is something that changes regarding to targeting.

If you do save those later campaigns and see spikes of impressions - please let me know and I will try to check if I see anything in internal audit log, but I am thinking the issue is likely more to do with how the campaign is set up because we have no other reports of this sort of issue.

Thanks,

John

[phil_renaud]

Hi @JBabichJapan - thanks for looking into this. I’ll have a look at the reach_estimate endpoint, but the campaigns in question (which are still untouched but running) have a Reach Estimate in the endpoint of 49,000:

So, I’ll keep taking a look at what might be happening here but I’m still a bit stuck.

[JBabichJapan]

Hi Phil,

Did you have any luck here? I might have to get you to save one of those old test campaigns in ads.twitter.com if you haven’t figured out anything (and I can try to check audit log for what changes)

Thanks and sorry for so many delays in resolving your issue here,

John

[phil_renaud]

Hi @JBabichJapan ! Still no luck with the campaign. Happy to save an older test campaign through the ads.twitter.com UI. Let me know and I can provide the ID then make the save.

[JBabichJapan]

Yes please go ahead and save the campaign and include the # of impressions you see before and after when you report the ID.

[phil_renaud]

Okay! Just opened both campaigns -> “Edit Campaign” -> “Save and exit” without making any other changes on the following:

• 2uysj / 4804003 (2 previous impressions)
• 2uysk / 4804004 (91 previous impressions)

Will report back in an hour or two with updated impression #s!

[phil_renaud]

Just 21 minutes later, the campaigns (with 2 and 91 impressions since launch on august 5th) now have 229 and 1,120 apiece:

Any advice on why the simple save causes this would be much appreciated, thanks!

[phil_renaud]

Hi @JBabichJapan – sorry, but it looks like someone on my team unknowingly deleted the tweets in question this morning. Hopefully any data about what was happening was garnered, otherwise I’d be very happy to walk you through the problem over a screenshare at some point.

Thanks!

[JBabichJapan]

Hi Phil

Sorry this is a taking a long time to get to the bottom, from our audit logs it’s difficult to determine what the problem is but it’s a little suspicious that some things are listed (like adding an audience) only upon September 8.

Could you please to create a campaign in servable state one more time (from your tool) and send us the campaign ID and we will go ahead and check the settings. Please create it in a way that you are sure will get impressions (the starting bid of .10 is definitely not high enough and it’s possible that it would have only gotten impressions after being raised to 1.00)

Thanks,

John

[phil_renaud]

Hi @JBabichJapan - launched one for $50/day: 5178603 / campaign 32zu3 / line item 34x30

Haven’t edited it through the UI yet, but will do so in a couple hours.

Thanks!
-Phil Renaud

[JBabichJapan]

Hi Phil,

Sorry again that this took a long time to get to the bottom of.

I think I found what the problem was, please check around this area of your implementation and confirm if what I have found makes sense:

Your tailored audience tailored_audience_id=v7kj was created via CSV or uploaded directly to twitter.com.

However in your campaign, line_item and targeting_criteria calls, you set up the id of v7kj as a WEB tailored_audience_type instead of CRM type. The tailored audience is not an appropriate one for WEB and we should actually block this with validation on our end (I will probably follow up as a bug here if I can confirm this is what’s happening). There seems to be a situation where API is saying it’s a WEB and UI is saying it’s CRM, so probably when you save in UI it’s setting the type back to the proper one (CRM).

Please let us know if this fixes your issue

Thanks,

John

[phil_renaud]

Hi @JBabichJapan - launched a new pair of them with CRM type for tailored audience, still no impressions a few hours later. IDs:

34zix
34ziw

line item IDs:
3750e
3750f

Anything else it could be?

[JBabichJapan]

Hi Phil,

I pulled targeting criteria for 3750e but this still shows WEB type:

  "line_item_id": "3750e",.."tailored_audience_type": "WEB",

I think this in particular needs to be CRM - or one or the other is not matching! We noticed a situation where API was showing CRM and ads.twitter.com was showing WEB, this is a really strange behavior and probably caused by settings mismatch (it shouldn’t be possible to get account into that state in the first place so there must be a loophole in validations)

It might be a pain but I would carefully start from scratch with CRM and Web and make sure you can set up either via twurl and then if you can, start to diff the commands that your tool makes vs twurl.

Thanks,

John

[phil_renaud]

@JBabichJapan: Thanks so much, looks like that was the issue all along! Considering this resolved.

[andypiper]