one sneaky little trick to LOSE $500 in 5min with AVAZU mDSP (13)
Certain DSPs have a programmatic approach to campaign management which present the user with opportunities to do serious harm to themselves. One such platform uses check boxes on the reporting pages to create white/black lists.
This all seems pretty standard and unmoving, but when you are dealing with multiple exchanges and a programmatically unintuitive system, disaster looms. Let’s start with an example. Say you are testing a campaign on a few exchanges, and you’ve reached a point where you are ready to do some serious optimization. So, naturally, you move through the report and tick off exclude boxes for all the tanking placements.
That’s all fine, and it works as you’d imagine. But wait, there’s more. Let’s say that after a few more days you decide to scrap the black list and start ticking include boxes. Now your ROI is rising as spend drops and things are looking great.
Here’s the kicker. Let’s say that, on one of the exchanges, you only found a single worthwhile placement. In the above image Pubmatic has only one active placement included. Here’s what the inventory tab looks like in the campaign setup after such a white list:
What if, after a few days of that white list, that placement starts to underperform? What do you do? The logical step would be to uncheck that include box right?
Wrong! Once the final include box is unchecked for that exchange, the system will then remove all lists and RON the entire exchange again. Here’s another screen of the inventory tab after unchecking that box:
Funny that, I elected to stop receiving traffic by unchecking an include box, and what I got instead was not only continued traffic from that placement, but the “Select All” of the entire exchange.
But, you might ask, didn’t you RON the whole exchange a couple days ago? Sure, but after moving to a white list, placement and campaign budget caps go out the window and scaling becomes the concern at hand. What do you think RONning an entire exchange with unlimited budgets does to your campaign? It spends $500 in 5 minutes without a single conversion to show for it. I’m sad to report that I’ve made this mistake twice in a short while. The first time was a net loss of $350, the second was $500 as advertised. Both happened in the blink of an eye, buying millions of impressions I wanted nothing to do with at a premium rate.
So, lesson learned, and we now have a specific work flow just for this one DSP to prevent these kinds of errors.
Hopefully no one else makes this mistakes in the future.
Ps. If you’re running multiple countries in a campaign, it is also possible to RON the whole world with this sneaky little trick.
RoN the whole world?? Live dangerously haha.
Do we have an Avazu rep here amogst STM members? We really should let them know about this (just in case this is a design flaw and not a deliberate set-up...oops! I didn't just say that!)
Amy
i told them about it. they said i shouldn't set my budget to unlimited.
chinese......
On the other hand - it IS a good reminder. I once forgot to specify my geo so I was targetting all countries and burnt through $100 in 2 minutes. Fortunately I set the daily budget to that amount!
Amy
its hard to lose money on these little mistakes but its also part of the game.
as long as you learned the lesson as you said you can also see it as a "Tuition" and lucky for you catching this on time. it could have hurt a lot more.
looking forward reading your future success posts 
Good afternoon @hlyghst,
I am Dina Humairo, Head of Avazu mDSP International, nice to e-meet you! :-)
First of all, thank you for your valuable feedback from using Avazu mDSP. We are fully aware about the comments above and carefully analyze your campaign’s optimization on your account.
As you may be aware, campaign optimization is crucial in running a self-serve DSP. Avazu Mobile DSP system is designed to have the most user-friendly interface and high performance to support your campaigns. We are continue to add more features, such as: Apps/Sites Automation, City targeting, and Banner ads sizes. It is in our best interest to help all of our partners to achieve the highest possible ROI.
However, we are taking your case seriously and if you need further advice on running our self-serve mDSP, please directly contact me or your Account Manager as she will continue to support and monitor your campaigns on a daily basis. Let’s have a call or discussion on how to increase your performance in the future asap.Thank you to add my skype at dina.avazu or email at dina.humairo@avazu.net.
Kind regards,
Dina
Hi dina, thanks for your response. let's speak further on skype.
Keep us updated hot to work around this when you learn! 
Thanks for the share
This is what I call good customer service! Thanks Dina for the feedback. I take back my jests - will try your network the next time I run a mobile campaign. Thank-you!
Regards,
Amy
Hi Amy,
Thank you! Looking forward to have you try in. if you need the link, http://mdsp.avazutracking.net/advertiser/pages/signup/
please select me as your sales person for future correspondence. :-)
Have a good day!
Dina
Thanks for the share. I was just getting some campaigns set up on Avazu mDSP and this post will probably save me some money.
This looks like a design flaw to me.
There's absolutely no reason a campaign should default back to RON just from un-ticking a placement, especially if you have a whitelist/blacklist already in place.
Also Avazu, "don't set your budgets to unlimited" is not a worthy excuse. You guys should address this.
I've done something similar before and last night I set up a campaign with an open budget but forgot to select the GEO which cost me over $200
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