VAST 402 Errors on Android Phones

[André Vollmer]

Dear Support

We have a problem on our website http://www.clubofcooks.de in combination with Android phones. 

Its a Standard JW Player 7.10 Implementation with the IMA3 SDK. According to the guy who is maintaning this, no changes were made. The Player is calling the standard IMA3 SDK.

On Android Phones we see now PreRoll Ads running.

Error code in https://bid.g.doubleclick.net/xbbe/notify/adx?creative_id=56559248&usl_id=0&errorcode=402&asseturi=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.flashtalking.com%2F75090%2FBaByliss_Brush3D_01-2017_online_Amnet_.mp4&ord=15234630&offset=[CONTENTPLAYHEAD]&d=APEucNU_8fDrbSrvLJqsp1i6EF76IkXN6FmbEE3KbdxNYO8yCJ3Tggo3LTnOHWBMkL2GPvdBUJpFz2jQmH6zn6_aqig9tV7rqg

Can you help us with this topic?

best,

André

[DFP User]

André,

As you probably know, VAST 402 errors are media url timeout.  If you are using Google IMA HTML5 SDK, the following change which occurred on 2017-05-08 may be a contributory factor...

Version(s)	Release Date(s)	Notes
3.168.0	5/8/2017	Changes default media load timeout to 8 seconds from 15 seconds.

See SDK... https://developers.google.com/interactive-media-ads/docs/sdks/html5/v3/history

https://developers.google.com/interactive-media-ads/docs/sdks/html5/v3/apis#ima.AdError.ErrorCode.VAST_MEDIA_LOAD_TIMEOUT

I hope this helps

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi André,

Are you using JW's IMA Plugin? If so, you should reach out to their support team as we don't support third party implementations on this forum.

I've done some testing with your page and all that I'm seeing served is empty VAST responses. Regardless, if you're seeing error 402 that is a MediaFile timeout. The DFP documentation has some helpful information about dealing with this error:

This can be caused when the loadVideoTimeout setting in the IMA SDK is set unreasonably low. The default is 15 seconds.

This can be caused by low bandwidth, or poor website implementation with competing requests that delay loading of the media file.

This can occur when a video auto-plays in a mobile environment, since it should be click-to-play (there are some exceptions).

For players that use the HTML5 IMA SDK, video fallback may be helpful to avoid losing impressions.

Also, as noted by the user above me,  the default media load timeout was just updated in the last release. If your files usually take longer than 8 seconds to load, this would be the root of your issue. You can use the loadVideoTimeout property of AdsRenderingSettings to customize your timeout value.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,

Chris Feldman
IMA SDK Team 

[André Vollmer]

Hi Chris

Thx for your Feedback. I know the DFP documentation points. Before the SDK Update, we had 15 seconds as default for VAST Timeout and the Problem was also there. We checked with WIFI connection and at least, there is no autoplay on Mobile Phones. So no points here.

I really guess we have to check the issues with JW Support.

best,

André

[cam...@watchingthat.com]

Andre (for what it's worth) - if you're doing a programmatic ad sell and/or fraud protection (like MOAT / IAS) the 402 can be a result of a bad VPAID unit along the chain. Given that it seems like nothing technically has changed this might be a demand issue.

We've hit this issue a bunch with our publishing clients and it's worth ensuring that any 3rd party ad unit can work on your Android instance (we've had to do some good debugging with some of our demand partners to ensure this).

If you haven't already try using a BrowserStack instance to let you use devtools to follow the ad wrappers and see if one in particular is giving a bad response.

HTH

CC