Statuses & indicators

Everything the UI tells you about an entity’s state without opening it — the glyph strip in status columns and tree rows, text styling, the serving-state pill on banner and placement editors, approval badges, and traffic-quality levels.

Status glyph strip

The Status column in the leveled grids and the icon strip on tree rows are the same component, so a row reads identically wherever you meet it. Hovering a glyph shows its name.

Only the glyphs that apply are drawn — a row is not six icons wide. An advertiser that is switched on and has seen no traffic shows exactly two: the activity pulse and the power symbol.

Six axes cover ten glyphs in total. Four of them have a positive and a negative form; Paused and Finished have only one form each and simply appear when they apply:

Axis	Glyph & colour	Tooltip	Meaning
On/off	Power, green	On	The entity’s own Active switch is on
	Power-off, grey	Off	The entity’s own Active switch is off
Traffic	Pulse, green	Active (getting traffic)	The entity has received traffic recently
	Pulse, amber	Inactive (no traffic)	It has not
Linking	Chain link, green	Linked	Banner ↔ placement wiring exists
	Broken link, grey	Not Linked	It does not
Limits	Gauge, amber	Paused	A limit or cap currently pauses delivery
Schedule	Flag, grey	Finished	The campaign or banner passed its end date or filled a cap
Rules	Sliders, green	Rules active	Automatic matching rules are on
	Sliders, grey	Rules inactive	They are off

Note that the on/off and linking axes swap the icon, not just its colour — an off entity draws a power symbol with a slash, an unlinked one a broken chain. Colour alone is never the only signal.

Note: the glyphs are read-only. There is no click-to-toggle inside the status column — switching an entity on or off from a grid is done with the Turn on / Turn off buttons in the toolbar after selecting rows. Those skip read-only shares; see UI navigation.

Name styling in trees and grids

Style	Where	Meaning
Link colour (accent)	Everywhere a name is clickable	Normal entity you can open. This is the default in both trees and grids
Italic muted text	Both entity trees, and the Advertiser / Campaign / Banner grids	Masked share: the owner shares delivery but hides the identity. You cannot open or edit masked rows, and bulk actions skip them
ID:n sub-line	Grids	Shown under the name when your ID-display preference is on
Faded row icon	Trees	The entity — or the placement type it derives from — is off

Corner case: an entity with no traffic is not greyed out. The amber activity glyph is the only signal for it.

Corner case: the supply grids do not show the masked style, though the supply tree does. Sites / Zones / Placements rows know which of them are masked — they are excluded from bulk actions — but are not marked visually, so in grid mode a read-only shared site looks like any other row until an action skips it.

Serving-state pill

The header of every banner and placement editor carries a pill saying whether the entity can actually deliver. It is computed from three inputs: how many entities are linked on the other side, how many of those are switched on, and whether selection Rules are enabled.

Pill	Meaning	What to do
🔴 Not serving	Nothing is linked and rules are off — nothing will serve	Link at least one banner/placement, or enable Rules
🟡 Rules only	Nothing is linked directly; impressions happen only where matching rules pick it	Link explicitly for a predictable setup, or review the rules
⚪ Paused · N	The wiring exists but nothing serves — either this entity is off, or all N linked entities are	Resume this entity, or resume/link an active one on the other side
⚪ Paused	Same, with no count: this entity is off and its only route to serving was rules	Turn the entity back on
🟢 Serving · N	N linked entities on the other side are on	—
🟢 Serving · A/T	A of T linked entities are on — a partly paused wiring never hides behind a plain green pill	Review the paused links if that is not intended

Clicking the pill always scrolls to the linking card.

The setup banner

In the red, amber and grey states — never the green one — a banner appears above the cards that names the consequence and offers the fixes. Which buttons you get depends on the state:

State	Actions offered
Not serving	Link banners / Link placements, plus Enable Rules if you may switch rules on, plus a Create placement / Create banner shortcut
Rules only	Link banners / Link placements and Review rules
Paused, because linked entities are off	Review linked banners / Review linked placements
Paused, because this entity is off	Go to Active switch — which jumps to Basic info, not to the linking card

Corner case: the pill reads the entity’s saved Active state. Flipping the Active switch in the form without saving does not move the pill.

Corner case: an entity that is switched off and has no wiring at all reads Not serving, not Paused. The missing link is treated as the more fundamental problem.

Corner case: the pill counts links with its own unfiltered probe, so searching inside the linking card and matching nothing does not flip the pill to “Not serving”.

The pill renders only once the linked summary has loaded, so it never flashes a wrong state. Pausing or resuming from any surface — the tree hover card, the Active switch, a grid bulk action — refreshes the pill on an open edit page of the other side.

Setup nudge

A separate amber card with a rocket icon appears on a site, zone, advertiser or campaign that has no children yet and that you may create children for. It marks an unfinished chain, not an error, and never appears on a banner or placement.

Approval badges

Where moderation is switched on, the banner and site editors show an approval badge next to the Banner / Site eyebrow above the entity name.

Banner approval has four values and site approval three — there is no NEW for sites, and the two number the shared names differently, so never compare their raw ids.

Status	Banner	Site	Badge shown in the editor
New	id 1	—	No badge
Pending	id 2	id 2	Amber Pending
Approved	id 3	id 1	No badge
Rejected	id 4	id 3	Red Rejected

Note: the absence of a badge means Approved or New — the editor deliberately badges only the two states that explain why something is not live. Use the approval queues when you need to tell those two apart.

Gating differs between the two:

• Banners — the badge needs one of BANNERS_APPROVAL, SOFT_BANNERS_MODERATION or BANNERS_MODERATION_WITH_DEACTIVATION to be enabled for you. Without any of them no badge appears whatever the status.
• Sites — the badge is drawn only on a site you can edit. On a read-only or masked site there is no badge regardless of the site’s approval state.

In the queues themselves the same words appear as a sortable column with a coloured pill, and the status filter offers four options on Pending banners (Pending, Rejected, Approved, New) but only three on Pending sites.

Traffic-quality levels

The Traffic Quality report scores inventory into four levels. The enum names are internal — these are the words the screen shows:

Level	Shown as	Tone
GREEN	Clean	Green
YELLOW	Suspicious	Amber
RED	Fraudulent	Red
BLOCKED	Blocked	Grey

The report opens filtered to Fraudulent + Blocked, the two levels worth acting on.

Warning: Blocked is a verdict, not an enforcement. Nothing in the ad-serving stack reads the traffic-quality score, so a placement marked Blocked keeps serving exactly as before. Acting on the verdict — pausing the placement, dropping the zone — is manual.

For the score bands behind each level and how to act on them, see Moderation & traffic quality.

Other signals

Indicator	Where	Meaning
Notifications bell badge	Top bar	Number of notifications, tinted by the worst severity present: red for Critical, amber for Warnings, accent for Info
Row hover card	Entity trees	A popover beside the row: name and id, the same status glyphs, a traffic line such as “No traffic in the last 7 days” (or the last-7-days and today figures), and Open / Analytics / Pause links — Enable instead of Pause on an entity that is off, plus a Copy ad tag button on placements that have a tag
Not served mark	The Linked banners and Linked placements trees and grids	A video creative linked to a placement whose publisher’s video requirements it misses: it is linked but not served there. Hover it for the file’s values against the required ones. Not the same signal as the serving-state pill above. See Video creative requirements
Toasts	Everywhere	Green success, red error, or blue info. An info toast is what reports skipped read-only rows after a bulk action; some toasts carry an undo-style action button

Related

• Serving state — why an entity may not serve even when green
• UI navigation, grids & trees
• Sharing & permission model — masked and read-only shares
• Ad not serving