What to do when your website is showing a wrong ad or is not showing an expected ad? (part 2)
                     What to do when your website is showing a wrong 
ad or is not showing an expected ad? (part 2)
Watson F
Writes on ad serving, involved with Adspeed 
adserver solutions & Adspeed ad server platform
In addition to verifying the ad status and targeting criteria, you need to take 
advantage of tools and utilities provided by your ad serving solution to 
preview ads and test them for errors.
Preview ad before going live
It is always a good idea to check and preview the ad files sent by your 
advertiser even before entering it into your ad server. If you cannot see the 
ad when you initially received it from your ad provider, ask them to double-
check other settings on their end. It might not yet be activated on the 
advertiser’s ad server or might have certain ad targeting criteria that you 
need to follow to see it. Basically, there are many components and vendors 
within the ad supply chain. The more complex the chain, the more things 
that could go wrong. Your goal is to keep things simple in order to isolate 
issues, rule out potential causes, and minimize the possible sources of 
errors.
After entering the ad into your ad server, there should be an ad preview 
area so that you can see if the ad is appearing correctly before going live on 
your site. If you cannot see the preview ad then it’s a good idea to identify 
what is causing that problem before linking it to an active ad placement or 
publishing it online.
It might sound obvious to state but when previewing an ad, you need to 
make sure your browser does not have an active ad blocker or your 
network’s firewall is not blocking the domains that serve these ad files. One 
simple way to check is going to your website and see if you can see other 
ads served by the same ad server.
Utilize ad testing tools
The ad server might have other tools and utilities to test and troubleshoot 
ad issues. It is common for an ad to not show because of a broken, missing 
URL or a syntax error.
For example, if an image banner ad is not showing then the ad server might 
display an error when you create or edit the ad. It is also easy to double-
check it yourself by copying the image URL and pasting it into a browser. The 
image URL should be available to the general public without any login 
requirement. You should see the ad image without any text, login screen, 
HTML content or any error. These steps are similar for video ad serving 
because you expect to see the video ad played when pasting its URL into 
your browser.
If it is an HTML ad then check the browser’s Console for error logs. A 
common problem with HTML ads is missing or broken dependencies like 
supporting components or scripts. That happens when the browser’s 
Network tab displays any HTML errors like “404 Not Found”, “403 
Forbidden” or “500 Internal Server Error”.
Some ad testing tools allow you to simulate different scenarios and 
targeting parameters to identify any potential issues before ads are 
launched to the broader audience. For example, even if the ad targets 
California viewers and you’re in another state, you can enter the target 
location to see if the adserver’s algorithm selects the correct ad result.
 
About Adspeed
AdSpeed ad server is a reliable & powerful ad serving and ad management 
solution that serves your ads, tracks impressions & clicks and reports ad 
statistics in real-time. Driven by the latest ad serving technologies, the goal 
of Adspeed adserver is to provide a reliable platform that can help in 
executing online advertising strategy more efficiently. 
 
 
 
 
Thank you for your time in reading this article.