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Acting on Findings

Applies to: All users · needs the matching permission on your account

What this is#

The Ad Scanner finds and reports; it never blocks, pauses or removes anything on its own. A wrong block on a shared domain silently costs revenue, so every action is a decision you or your network take by hand. This article walks through what you can do once a scan has found something, depending on where the bad ad came from.

When you'll use this#

  • An alert from a scan task has just arrived.
  • Most flagged items on the Overview keeps showing the same item.
  • A visitor complained and a report confirms it.

Step by step#

1. Check the finding#

Open the report and check three things before you act:

  1. How serious is it? A bad domain, malware, a forced redirect (top_redirect), a pop-up or a push prompt are serious. Alerts, fingerprinting or obfuscated code are worth knowing but rarely urgent. See Reading Scan Reports.
  2. How strong is the evidence? For a Malicious Domain, expand it: several engines calling it malicious is strong evidence, one engine calling it suspicious is weak. See Domain Reputation & Domain Check.
  3. Is it repeated? Filter Reports on the task with Scan Status With Issues. One finding in a hundred scans may be one bad advertiser at the network; every scan is the tag itself.

2. Find where it ran#

  • Smart zone scans name the website, ad zone and smart zone in Scanned Item.
  • Domain Check shows every one of your ad zones where the scanner has seen a domain.
  • Manual items are what you added: you know where they run.

3. Act at the source#

The bad ad came from What you can do
A network in one of your smart zones Switch that smart zone off, or lower its share, until the network has fixed it. Send the network the report link.
An ad tag or VAST tag you placed yourself Take the tag off your site, or ask the partner who gave it to you to fix it. Send them the report link.
An outside buyer on a Selling RTB campaign Only your network can block the bid source, by hand. Send them the report link; see below.
A campaign on this platform Send the report link to your network. They can review or stop the campaign.

4. Share the evidence#

The report link opens without a login, so you can send it as is. Say in your message which finding you mean, and give the Country, Device, Browser and time from the report's context: a network can only find an ad aimed at one country if it knows the country.

5. Confirm the fix#

Leave the task running. When the source says it has fixed the problem, watch Reports for that item: a few clean runs from the same countries and devices are your confirmation.

Options reference#

Blocking RTB bids#

For RTB landing pages there is one control, and only your network can use it:
What is blocked The bid source: the buyer's tracking address that the bid came through.
Effect Every bid whose address contains it is refused, live on the ad servers within about five minutes. That is all traffic from that source, not one landing page.
What can't be blocked A domain that only appears further down the redirect chain. The ad servers never see it, so a block on it would refuse nothing.
Undo Your network can lift the block again.

See Scanning RTB Landing Pages.

Getting told in time#

Notify me about this task in the task editor sends an alert when a scan finds something: Serious findings only or Any finding, to your notification channels or one channel you pick. A task alerts at most once every six hours. See Setting Up Scan Tasks and Notifications.

Example#

Jonas gets an alert: forced redirect on his task "Smart zones, Tier 1". The report shows top_redirect from a network's banner tag, seen from France on mobile. Reports filtered on the task shows it in six of forty scans that day, all on mobile. He opens Smart Zones, switches that network's smart zone on his mobile zone off, and sends the network the report link with "France, mobile, since this morning". Two days later the network writes back; he switches the smart zone on again and watches Reports stay clean.

Tips#

  • Act on the source, not the symptom: switching a smart zone off stops the bad ad on your site today; the report link makes the network remove it for everyone.
  • Keep the task that found it running until the fix is confirmed.
  • Before you ask for an RTB bid source to be blocked, check its share of your revenue in your RTB stats: a block stops all of it.

Troubleshooting#

Symptom Likely cause Fix
The finding is gone in the next scan The bad ad only rotates in now and then, or only for some countries and devices Keep scanning; look at the reports with issues for their common country or device.
The network can't reproduce it They checked from another country or device Give them the context from the report: Country, Device, Browser, Referrer and time.
A finding you consider harmless keeps coming back A reputation engine lists a domain you trust See Domain Reputation & Domain Check for ignoring a domain.
You expected the scanner to stop the ad Nothing is blocked automatically Act at the source as described above.