This guide provides troubleshooting steps to diagnose and solve common performance and settings issues for agency-managed campaigns running on Moloco Ads Manager.

Changes in Budget and Bidding Strategy

Changes in your budget size or bid priority settings can directly cause unexpected fluctuations in performance.

• Budget Changes: When the daily budget is altered, campaign performance can temporarily destabilize while adjusting to the new threshold. It is necessary to wait until the model stabilizes. To help reduce the likelihood of disruption during budget transitions, consider making incremental adjustments rather than large one-time changes. Smaller step changes generally give the optimization model more time to adapt.
• Target CPI or Target CPC Adjustments: If your campaign's bid control priority relies on target CPI or target CPC, you must ensure the targets reflect a realistic market price for the specific app category. If changed, the machine learning model requires a learning period to catch up with the goals. Setting a target cost that is significantly below the market average may completely halt your spending. If you are unsure of the appropriate target cost, switch the bid control priority back to Budget first to accumulate actual cost baselines.

Managing and Tracking Creative Performance

The introduction or removal of creatives can drastically alter a campaign's operational state.

• Recent Creative Additions: Adding new creatives forces the machine learning model to distribute a portion of the campaign budget toward exploratory testing to gauge asset performance. This can cause a temporary drop in short-term overall campaign KPIs. It is recommended to introduce new creatives gradually rather than uploading large batches simultaneously. Always allow adequate data collection time for the assets to stabilize.
• Excluding Top-Performing Assets: If top-performing creatives have been removed—due to promotion schedules or asset expiration—the overall performance metrics of the campaign will likely decrease or shift heavily. If the same assets cannot be re-enabled, prioritize building new creatives that utilize similar messaging, design layouts, and visual concepts to the top performers.
• Inactive Status due to Creative Scheduling: Creative groups can utilize start and end dates. If your top assets are missing, check to verify if an automatic scheduling rule has turned them inactive.

Audience and Location Targeting Misconfigurations

Targeting rules act as filters; applying multiple settings incorrectly can constrain your delivery.

• Over-filtering with Target Parameters: When using multiple targets or criteria within a single ad group, remember that Moloco processes multiple target filters using AND conditions. This means a user must fulfill every single condition simultaneously to qualify for an ad impression, often reducing the target audience pool to a critically low number. If you intend to target users who meet either condition A or condition B, you should split them into separate ad groups with one target condition each, or utilize the "Users who meet Any of the following criteria" selection in the Custom Audience rules.
• Existing Target Shifts: Any modifications made to live target settings will require the optimization system to adjust, impacting immediate ad delivery efficiency.
• iOS Re-engagement Constraints: Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework minimizes tracking availability. If running an iOS re-engagement campaign based on previously captured IDFAs, campaign scale and efficiency can decline naturally over time as users change their devices, opt out, or upgrade to newer iOS versions.

Data Feed and MMP Postback Status

Machine learning relies on clear and consistent historical postback data.

• Attribution Settings Alignment: Maximizing optimization requires passing quality data stream to Moloco. It is highly recommended to include a view-through tracking link, enable probabilistic matching within your MMP, and match your attribution windows with other media channels to prevent performance misattribution.
• Postback Health Monitoring: If event transmissions from your Mobile Measurement Partner (MMP) are interrupted, misconfigured, or degraded following a technical update, optimization data drops instantly. Routinely check the live reporting metrics on the Moloco postback dashboard to ensure all required down-funnel app events are logging correctly.