Why is my bidder not receiving bid requests?
Answer
Work the path from the exchange inward: confirm the endpoint the exchange has on file matches what you deployed (scheme, host, path), that your endpoint returns a well-formed response or HTTP 204 quickly enough to stay under the exchange's timeout, and that traffic filters on the exchange side (geo, media type, QPS caps, pretargeting) are not excluding you. Exchanges routinely throttle or suspend bidders whose error or timeout rate climbs, so a bidder that once received traffic and stopped usually failed health checks. Ask the exchange for its bidder health report; most expose error and timeout rates per endpoint.
More questions on debugging, no-bids, and validation
- Why is my bid rate low even though I receive requests? Start by separating deliberate no-bids from failures.
- How do I find out why my bids are losing auctions? Ask for loss reasons via the loss notice URL.
- How do I debug a systematic OpenRTB no-bid? If the bidder returns a BidResponse with nbr set, the code tells you where to look: nbr 2 is Invalid Request, which means the bidder could not parse or accept your bid request, so run the request through a validator before anything else.
- What does HTTP 204 mean in OpenRTB, and how is it different from nbr? HTTP 204 No Content is the spec's preferred way for a bidder to say it has no bid: no body, cheapest possible round trip.
- How do I validate an OpenRTB bid request? Paste it into a validator that checks against the actual spec catalog, not just JSON syntax.
- How do I validate OpenRTB payloads in CI? Keep your bid request fixtures in the repo and lint them on every build.
All 93 questions are listed in the OpenRTB FAQ.