Troubleshooting overview
How to diagnose problems fast — pick your symptom, follow the checks in order, and know what to include when you escalate.
This section is organized by symptom, not by feature. Find the line below that sounds like your problem, open the page, and work through the checks in the order given — each list is sorted from the most common cause to the rarest, and from things you can verify yourself to things that need your network administrator or Epom support.
Before you start
Three habits that shorten every investigation:
- Note what changed last. Most breakage follows an edit — a resized banner, a tightened
targeting rule, a new limit. The account keeps a Recent history of the pages you opened
(clock icon in the top bar), and
GET /rest-api/action-log/mine.do(or the assistant’srecent_changes) lists your own recent changes. - Trust the built-in signals over your memory. Banner and placement edit pages carry a serving-state pill (red Not serving / yellow Rules only / gray Paused / green Serving), approval badges, and — for roles that hold the matching permission — Matched banners / Matched placements cards that show what the ad server’s snapshot actually matched. Start there instead of re-checking settings one by one.
- Separate “no ad” from “no numbers”. An empty slot on a page and a low figure in a report are different problems with different check lists. If the ad visibly serves but the totals look wrong, go straight to Analytics discrepancies.
Symptom index
| Symptom | Go to |
|---|---|
| The ad slot is empty, or the passback/default ad shows instead of my campaign | My ad is not serving |
| A specific banner never appears even though others on the placement do | My ad is not serving |
| A PMP private deal wins nothing, or far less than agreed | My PMP deal is not delivering |
| Requests come in but only some turn into impressions — inventory is going unfilled | My fill rate is low |
| Requests and Fill Rate columns vanished from my report | My fill rate is low |
| The tag is on the page but nothing renders at all — not even a passback | Tags and preview problems |
| Preview shows the ad, the real page doesn’t (or the reverse) | Tags and preview problems |
| There is no Preview button on my placement or banner | Tags and preview problems |
| A Google Ad Manager passback shows once, then the placement reloads into a blank slot | Google (GPT) passback tags in a placement |
| Google returns no ad and the request is lost instead of falling back | Google (GPT) passback tags in a placement |
| A video ad won’t play, the player skips content, or I got a VAST error code | Diagnose video ad playback failures (VAST errors) |
| Clicks aren’t counting, or impressions double-count, on a third-party HTML/JS tag | Fix click tracking on third-party ad tags |
| My numbers don’t match a partner’s / a third-party ad server’s | Analytics discrepancies |
| The dashboard and a report disagree, or yesterday’s numbers changed today | Analytics discrepancies |
| A page, card, button or dropdown option is missing or greyed out | FAQ — permissions and shares answers |
| An entity is shown in italics, or its form is locked | FAQ |
| A banner turned itself off, or got unlinked from placements | FAQ |
| I deleted an advertiser, campaign, banner, site, zone or placement by mistake | Restore something you deleted by accident |
| Demo account questions (expiry, locked overlay, See live) | FAQ and Demo accounts |
When you escalate
If the checks do not resolve it, ask your network manager or Epom support or your account manager — Contact Epom support says who handles what — with:
- the entity IDs involved — placement, banner, campaign (the ID is part of the edit page address, and Account → Preferences → Show entities’ IDs shows them beside names);
- the time window when you observed the problem, and your reporting time zone;
- what the serving pill and Matched cards showed on the entities involved;
- for tag problems: the page URL where the tag is embedded and which tag type you used;
- for analytics problems: the report type, filters, and the two numbers being compared.
Your network administrator can additionally check gates that account users cannot see — consent enforcement, bot and IP filtering, DSP creative-scan verdicts — and Epom support the ad-server snapshot state. The checks that need either are marked as such on each page.
