A private deal is active but not spending. Where is delivery stopping?

“Active” confirms a status. It does not confirm that a private marketplace deal has eligible inventory, a usable creative, or a buyer willing to bid.

A private deal connects a buyer and seller under agreed trading conditions. The deal identifier helps route the opportunity, but delivery still depends on the settings and inventory on both sides. Troubleshooting works best when both teams examine the same part of that process.

Start by recording the deal ID, buyer seat, seller, exchange, campaign dates, currency, agreed price, and supported formats. Use identifiers rather than display names in the support request. Two deals can have similar names and completely different routing.

Follow the delivery sequence

The practical question is where opportunities disappear.

Observation	First investigation
No incoming requests	Seller activation, routing, inventory availability, dates
Requests arrive but are ineligible	Targeting, geography, format, creative approval, quality filters
Eligible requests receive no bids	Budget, pacing, frequency limits, bidding constraints
Bids are submitted but rarely win	Price, competition, auction conditions, seller rejection
Wins appear but delivery looks wrong	Reporting cutoff, rendering evidence, creative or player failures

These are starting points, not exclusive diagnoses. Platform labels and available logs differ. Google’s deal troubleshooter documentation illustrates the distinction between requests, bid responses, and won impressions, along with filtering reasons.

Ask which denominator a loss percentage uses. “Ninety percent filtered” means little until you know whether it refers to all requests or only a later subset.

Use a shared example

Suppose the seller records 100,000 requests for a deal over a completed day. The buyer sees those requests, but only 4,000 pass the campaign’s geography and format requirements. The buyer bids on 3,000 and wins 900.

Raising the bid addresses only the competitive part of this example. It does not make the other 96,000 requests eligible. First determine whether the seller intended to send that broader inventory or whether the buyer’s targeting differs from the booking.

If the buyer sees zero requests instead, a pricing discussion is premature. Confirm the buyer seat and deal ID, then have the seller check whether requests are routed to the intended buyer.

Compare the booking with the saved settings

Read back the actual configuration on both sides. A planning sheet can be correct while a copied line item carries an old device restriction or an excluded domain list.

Check creative duration, dimensions, skippability, device support, and approval state against the inventory. Review quality controls without casually removing them to make a graph move.

Google’s deal setup guidance emphasizes coordination with the publisher. Ask for the constraints that apply to this deal, including anything inherited from a parent campaign or account.

For the wider launch process, use the campaign launch checklist.

Make the escalation reproducible

Send a compact evidence record: deal ID, exact date range and time zone, observed request and bid counts, leading rejection reason, affected creative IDs, and the last relevant change.

State the question explicitly: “Are requests for this buyer seat being sent?” is easier to resolve than “Please optimize delivery.”

After a correction, leave a reasonable observation window based on the platform’s reporting delay. Change one material constraint at a time where possible. Confirm that delivery resumed for the intended inventory, not simply that spend increased somewhere else.