QA and Going Live

HTL recommends the that you conduct the following QA steps before going live.

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Notify your HTL Technical Account Manager when you plan to go live.

Pre-launch Staging Check

Setup HTL BID on a staging site before launching. This will give you the opportunity to compare staging and production side-by-side to ensure that all ads appear in precisely the correct location, before going live.

Verify the correct htlbid.js stage script is placed on test/staging site
Compare staging and production side-by-side
  • Check each different page type (homepage, articles, etc)
  • Ensure that all ads appear in exactly the right location
  • Ensure that all GAM ad units are the same on staging vs production
Check the HTLBID versionId
  • In the console, type htlbid.versionId to check the version number
  • Verify this number matches the version you expect to be live
    • image
Check that Prebid is working
  • Append ?pbjs_debug=true

    • In the web developer tools console, you should see something like this

    image
  • Check that bid request are sent
  • Check that prebid key-values are set
Check that Amazon is working
Check Ads.txt
  • Check in GAM
  • Check Prebid placement contains ad units
Check targeting is updated (change is_testing=yes for is_testing=no)
Check Ad Units are all set and passing to GAM
Check GAM Network ID
Removing other tech

Launch check

Perform the following checks immediately after launching.

Verify the correct htlbid.js (or Global Variable) production script is placed on live site
Spot check the site for any blank or stacked ads
Confirm targeting was updated to is_testing=no
Check the console for any errors coming from htlbid.js
Check if all SSPs are bidding using HTL Debug

Post-launch Check

Perform the following checks 24 hours after launching. This helps to ensure that nothing was dropped during the migration process.

Run a GAM report to verify all ad units are running across all Prebid orders. For that create a GAM report with the following:

Dimensions

  • Ad Units
  • Orders
  • Date (using the last 7 days)

Metrics

  • Impressions
  • Revenue
  • Requests

The report should show all ad units sending requests across all Prebid orders and other programmatic ad networks (I.e. AdX). If there are any blank, there could be a missing Prebid Group association in the HTL BID UI or another configuration error (I.e. Ads.Txt). It will also let you know if any SSPs could have issues (such as incorrect IDs in the system if no impressions are registering)

Run a GAM report to verify that impressions and revenue have remained constant if updating an ad implementation. To verify this you can check the daily breakdown in a reporting platform like HTL Exec or pull a report in GAM with the breakdown listed above. It's also advised to review activity within individual SSPs and other monetization partner platforms.

Process Best Practice

Perform a new deployment, HTL recommends that you perform a quick spot-check.

If the issue reported is critical, such as:

  • Overlapping/floating ads blocking content
  • Ads freezing the page
  • Security redirects/page takeovers

Do the following:

  1. 1. In Version Control deploy the previous revision that was working to Production
  2. 2. Deploy the revision that caused issues to staging only
  3. 3. Use the staging site to debug the issue
  4. 4. If there is no staging site available, use a proxy such as Charles or the Chrome Dev Tools Sources Override to troubleshoot the problematic revision. If none of these are available, reach out to the HTL Team for assistance at cs@zendesk.hashtaglabs.com
    5. 💡
    The priority is to remove the critical issue from production by deploying the previous working revision. This change goes into effect in a couple of minutes, then the revision with issues can be reviewed.

Common Issues

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Missing ads on the page (no ads or blank spaces)
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No programmatic ads (Prebid or Amazon)
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Programmatic ads running, bidder has low impressions or discrepancies with the SSP UI
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Doubled ads/Stacked ads
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Universal Classes added incorrectly
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Floating ads or layout issues
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Ads load initially and appears on the screen, then disappear
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Single Page Application (SPA) websites with specific structures