How changes are made
There are lots of different ways that you can trigger changes to be sent from the Platform to the publisher, including the following:
- Bulk uploads
- Manual edits in the Platform
- Bidding
- Nightly cost report downloads
To make the process as clear as possible, below is a step-by-step explanation of exactly how the Platform manages changes being sent to the Publisher.
- When changes are made, they are sent to the Platform's Activity Log where they'll be assigned a particular status. Changes can be Held (meaning they're paused until further notice), To be sent (meaning they're pending submission to the publisher), or Queued (meaning the change has already been submitted to the publisher, but is still being processed by the Platform behind the scenes).
- When you use any of the Post buttons in the Platform, or when the Platform does this automatically once-per-day as part of the automatic nightly sync, it updates all To be sent items into the Queued status. It also starts to process all of the Activity Log entries that are Queued.
How to manually push changes
You can manually push changes to the publisher at any time via the Platform's Activity Log. To do so, just follow these steps:
- Click the Admin link in the upper-right of the screen.
- To push one specific change, use the checkboxes on the left to select it, then click Post Now.
- To push all changes at once, click the Post All Now button in the upper-right of the grid.
Note: Held items cannot be posted with the Post All Now button. To post these, you'll need to select the item specifically and use the Post Now button. To speed up this manual process, you can filter the Status column to show only Held items.
How the Platform prioritizes changes
When the Platform pushes changes to the publisher, it does so in a specific order. Below we'll explain how it prioritizes changes. Let's imagine that there are ten outstanding Activity Log entries which are all Queued for a single PCA.
Following is the logic behind how the Platform chooses the order in which it processes tasks:
1. First, the Platform will sort by username (i.e. where the the task originated):
- Top of the list are any scheduled operations, such as pause or resume tasks.
- Next, any action that was created by a Platform user.
- Finally, anything created automatically by the Platform 'system' user (i.e. bidding, nightly sync, etc.).
If the Platform has to choose between two operations that tie on username (both user uploads, for example), it will move to the next form of prioritization:
2. Next, the Platform will sort by the specific object that's being edited, in the following order of priority:
- Entries to edit campaigns
- Entries to edit groups
- Entries to edit creatives
- Entries to edit keywords
- Edits to other publisher objects (shared budget, remarketing list, etc.)
If a tie still exists at this point (i.e. two user uploads to edit creatives, for example), we move to the next form of prioritization:
3. We sort by operation Status (i.e. what is actually being done to the objects) in the following order of priority:
- Entries to sync objects (either hard sync or sync from report) are handled first.
- Entries to create new objects are handled.
- Entries to edit objects, edit their bids, edit their geo targets, modify their status, or delete them, are all handled with the same priority level.
If we still have a tie (i.e. two user uploads to edit creatives: one editing bids, the other deleting them):
4. The Platform sorts from lowest to highest Activity Log ID, which, because of the way these are created, means that the Platform handles the earliest received task first.
If a user sends us a bulk file to delete 100,000 Google ads at 5 a.m., and then a bulk file to edit bids for 1 Google ad at 6 a.m., and the user has chosen to 'Send Immediately' instead of holding and pushing as needed, then the Platform will choose to handle all these items in oldest-to-newest order, meaning that it won't be able to handle the bid edit until all of the delete operations are completed.
