Delivery Controls

Delivery controls allow you to fine-tune the audience for a creative or an entire campaign. Click on "Delivery Controls" from the campaign interface or the creative interface to define the controls for your ads.

You will see the following interface:

The dropdowns allow you to specify the following:

After adding delivery controls, the interface looks like this:

Delivery controls can be considered as a group of rules for delivering a creative. When the delivery engine is evaluating each creative to determine whether or not to deliver it, it evaluates all the delivery controls for that creative. If a delivery control is satisfied, action is taken based on how you have specified the delivery option for each rule.

A delivery control is satisfied when the filter variable matches one? all? of your patterns (if you have selected "do not match", the control is satisfied when the filter variable does not match).

If a creative's delivery control specifies "Deliver", and it is satisfied, the creative will get preferential weighting. The first creative encountered by the delivery engine with a satisfied "Deliver" control will be delivered to the end user.

If a creative's delivery control specifies "do not deliver", and it is satisfied, the creative will not be delivered at all.

If a creative's delivery control specifies "deliver only", and it is satisfied, the creative will be delivered; if the control is not satisfied, the creative will not be delivered.

Note that a satisfied "do not deliver" control or an unsatisfied "deliver only" control will override a satisfied "deliver" or a satisfied "deliver only" control. In such a situation, the creative will not be delivered.

Let's consider the following example:
Creative 1 DC1-1 Deliver when Language matches String en
DC1-2 Deliver when Language matches String fr
DC1-3 Do not deliver when Domain matches Wildcard *.yahoo.*
Creative 2 DC2-1 Deliver when User agent matches Wildcard Gecko*
DC2-2 Deliver only when IP address matches String 199.72
Creative 3 DC3-1 Deliver only when Keyword matches String beer
Creative 4 DC4-1 Deliver when Language does not match String fr
Creative 5 DC5-1 Deliver when Keyword matches Wildcard win*2000

Now consider the following series of requests:

IP address 204.66.101.92
Domain www.foo.com
Language en-us
User agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Keyword -

The delivery controls for Creative 1 are checked; DC1-1 is satisfied while DC1-2 and DC1-3 are not. Creative 1 will get preferential delivery. Creative 2's delivery controls are checked; DC2-1 is not satisfied, and neither is DC2-2. Since DC2-2 stipulates "deliver only when", Creative 2 will not be considered for delivery. Creative 3's delivery controls are checked; DC3-1 is not satisfied; because it stipulates "deliver only when", it will not be considered for delivery. Creative 4's delivery controls are checked; DC4-1 is satisfied, so Creative 4 will get preferential delivery. Finally, Creative 5's delivery controls are checked; DC5-1 is not satisfied, so Creative 5 gets normal priority for delivery.

Creatives 1 and 4 get preferential delivery, so one of the two will be selected arbitrarily for delivery. As soon as one of them has reached its impression target, the other will be selected for all such future impressions.

IP address 199.72.8.96
Domain www.bar.com
Language en-us
User agent Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.01; Windows NT 5.0)
Keyword windows 2000

DC1-1 is satisifed, DC1-2 and DC1-3 are not. Creative 1 will get preferential delivery. DC2-1 is not satisifed; DC2-2 is. Creative 2 will also get preferential delivery. DC3-1 is not satisfied, so Creative 3 will not be considered. DC4-1 is satisfied, so Creative 4 will get preferential delivery. DC5-1 is satisfied, so Creative 5 will get preferential delivery; since this is a keyword delivery control, it will take priority over the other delivery controls, and Creative 5 will be selected.