Best Practices: Creative Rejections

Quantcast sources the inventory for ad campaigns through publisher and exchange integrations. Individual inventory sources will have different guidelines for ad creative, and if your creative does not meet those guidelines, then the creative may be rejected by the inventory source. The performance of your ad campaign will be impacted if your creative cannot serve on all available inventory sources. In this article:

For information on creative guidelines:

• Creative Specifications (Display)

• Creative Specifications (Native)

• Creative Specifications (Video)

Identifying Rejected Creatives

Google and Xandr (AppNexus) will want to review the creative units that are attached to live ad sets before allowing them to be delivered, while other exchanges will have different (often less strict) rejection policies that will apply after the bidding activity has commenced. If one of these two exchanges rejects the creative, this will be visible in the Creatives section of the Quantcast Platform.

A yellow circle with an exclamation mark icon will populate next to the creative preview image to indicate that the creative has experienced a rejection. Hover over the rejection icon to get details about which exchange has rejected your creative.

To see the reason for the rejection, click the icon to open the Audits Info modal. 

 The Audits Info modal includes:

• Exchange: Inventory partners (Google and Xandr - AppNexus)

• Status: Pending, Approved, Rejected, or Expired

• Feedback: The rejection reason

• Resubmit: Once you are ready, click this to resubmit your creative to the exchange

Things to note:

• Google is divided into 2 policies

  • Network Policy: Creative compliance policy when bidding in open or private auctions, or auction packages (outside of Russia and China).

  • Deals Policy: Creative compliance policy when bidding on Programmatic Guaranteed and Preferred Deals.

• Google network policy (open market policy) rejections are typically due to sensitive categories (i.e., online gambling). The creative can be served if you have an active Deal (Programmatic Guaranteed or Preferred Deal) with Google and the creative has been approved under the deals policy.

• After 30 days, an unused creative will have an Expired status. The creative will need to be re-audited before use. Click Resubmit. Note: Our system will automatically resubmit the creative for auditing when a campaign is scheduled to start.

Reasons for Rejection

For more information on the creative rejection reason listed in the platform, you can review the creative guidelines from our inventory partners. These resources also include information on how to adjust the creative to comply with their guidelines. The rejection reason listed in the platform should correlate with the policies listed below.

• Google Ad Exchange

• Xandr (AppNexus) Ad Exchange

Fixing Rejected Creatives

Once you have identified the reason for the rejection, you will need to update the creative to fix the underlying issue.  If you do not, campaign performance may be negatively impacted. 

• For Quantcast-hosted creative, you will need to create a new creative that has fixed the underlying issues that caused the rejection. Once the new creative is attached to a live ad set, it will be sent to the exchanges for another audit. The guide here walks through the process for uploading new creative. 

• For third-party hosted creative, you will need to fix the underlying issue in your ad server and save the creative. From there, reach out to the Quantcast team ([email protected]) to have the creative manually resubmitted to the inventory source.