About Creative Auditing
In digital advertising, the Creative is the image, video, and/or text of your advertisement – in other words, the ad itself. Across all forms of digital advertising, creatives go through some sort of audit or verification process before it can run on any given digital platform. These audits are conducted in order to ensure that the ad isn't overtly misleading, offensive, or malicious, keeping the digital ecosystem safer for all users.
Creative Audits via found.ee
Whenever you run ads via found.ee, an audit fee of $1 USD is charged per creative at the time your campaign is booked. These audit fees are a fixed cost from our ad serving partner. Here's an overview of creative audit fees by ad type:
Web & Mobile Display (including Remarketing): $1 audit fee per creative
Note: Interactive HTML5 Banners also incur the same $1 audit fee.
Connected TV (CTV): $1 audit fee per creative (1 creative max)
Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH): $1 audit fee per creative (1 creative max)
Streaming Audio Ads: $1 audit fee per creative (both audio and companion image)
Pro Tip: Use creatives from previous campaigns to avoid audit fees! To do this, select 'Use Existing Creatives' in the Upload Creatives section and select the ad creative(s) you'd like to re-use. However, for this you must keep the destination URL the same as before – if you change the associated destination URL, the creative will need to be reaudited, and you will be charged the associated audit fee.
When creating ad campaigns via found.ee, these creative audit fees are displayed in the Summary section towards the top right of your screen, under Creative Cost (the example below is for a Web & Mobile Display campaign with 3 banner creatives):
Additionally, these creative audit fees are displayed as a separate column in Ads Reporting, as well as on the invoices for your advertising campaigns.
Creative Audit Failures
In rare cases, creatives may fail the creative audit process. If one of your creatives fail audit, you will receive an email notifying you of the creative audit failure, as well as the audit failure reason.
Here are some common creative audit failure reasons, and how to fix them:
Creative Does Not Click Through Properly
This error indicates one or more of the following are happening when a user clicks an ad: The landing page doesn't open
The landing page opens but contains no content
The landing page opens, but has an error that keeps the content from loading
The landing page opens in the same window and does not prompt a new tab or window to open
To fix this, verify your destination URL, re-upload your creative and click Update on the top of the page to resubmit.
Creative Does Not Display Properly
This error will trigger if there are specific, technical issues with your creative (eg. failing to load, only partially loading).
To fix this, double-check your creative, then re-upload your creative and click Update on the top of the page to resubmit.
Creative Brand Does Not Match Creative Landing Page
This error occurs when the brand on your creative does not match the landing page. To fix this, the creative and landing page will need to contain the same brand name, logo or URL. Once you've verified this, re-upload your creative and click Update on the top of the page to resubmit.
Sensitive and/or Prohibited Content
In order to keep users safe, certain types of content are prohibited for use in ad creatives. This includes a wide variety of categories, including but not limited to deceptive content, fake errors or warnings, adult content, piracy, and promoting the sale of illegal drugs or paraphernalia.
Additionally, political messaging may be limited and/or rejected, particularly if it promotes an individual political party or candidate.
To fix this, remove any sensitive and/or prohibited content from your ad creative, and if applicable, resubmit your campaign accordingly.
If you receive a creative audit failure notice that you believe to be in error, please contact us at info@thefoundgroup.com, and we will help you as soon as possible.
By failing the audit process, the affected creative(s) cannot be advertised until the issue is resolved. Depending on the number of creatives associated with your campaign, this may negatively impact the spend and/or performance of your ad campaign, so it's important to address these issues as quickly as possible once they arise.
With that said, we're always here to help. If you have any questions about creative audits, please contact us at info@thefoundgroup.com, and we would be happy to assist.