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January 2026 - Active Delivery Items With No Creative

January 2026 - Active Delivery Items With No Creative

🔍 What This Validation Monitor Does

This month’s Validation Monitor of the Month highlights a simple but critical check: identifying active delivery items that have no creatives assigned.

Whether it’s a live line item in GAM or an active placement in Freewheel, this monitor flags anything that’s technically live but has nothing to serve. These issues are easy to miss, especially during busy trafficking periods, but can quietly block delivery and impact revenue.

While this example was inspired by common GAM customer setups, the concept is universal and applies just as easily across Freewheel and other ad servers.

💡 Why It Matters

Active delivery items without creatives are one of the most common — and most avoidable — causes of missed delivery. Everything can look correct at a glance: the campaign is live, targeting is set, and dates are valid. But without a creative attached, nothing will ever serve.

Manually checking for this across multiple campaigns doesn’t scale. This monitor removes that risk by automatically flagging issues as soon as they appear, helping teams catch mistakes early and resolve them before delivery is impacted.

It’s a straightforward check that delivers immediate value, making it an ideal “always-on” monitor for any ad ops team.

🧩 Deployment by Ad Server

Freewheel

  1. Go to the Monitoring Module in the top hand rail of the Watching That interface

  2. Select the ‘Validation’ tab within the Monitoring Module

  3. Click the pink + Add Validation Monitor button at the top right

Monitoring 2025-11-05 13-07-23.png

 

  1. In the ‘From DataSource’ dropdown, select your Freewheel source

  2. In ‘Dimension’, select ‘Placement'

  3. In the first filter select ‘Status’ from the Field name dropdown. When you select ‘Status’ the filters change and the next field shows ‘exists’. Change ‘exists’ to ‘one of’ This adds a third filter option, from this drop down select ‘Active’

  4. After setting the first filter row, click the blue ‘Add Filter’ button with the funnel icon at the bottom left. This adds another filter row

  5. In the new filter row, search for ‘creative’ and click on the AdCreatives dropdown in the options. From there you want to select id. once select the filter will appear as ‘AdUnits.AdCreatives.id’. Like before, change the middle filter from ‘exists’ to ‘ doesn’t exist’.

VM editing 1.png

  1. Name your Monitor on the right-hand side

  2. Optionally, add a description for your Monitor

  3. There is a notification channel option, but instant alerts are not currently available for Validation Monitors (VMs), so leave this blank for now

  4. Click Save to finish

Your monitor should look like the below:

Screenshot 2026-01-14 at 11.41.27.png

Google Ad Manager (GAM)

  1. Go to the Monitoring Module in the top hand rail of the Watching That interface

  2. Select the 'Validation' tab within the Monitoring Module

  3. Click the pink + Add Validation Monitor button at the top right

Monitoring 2025-11-05 13-07-23 copy.png

 

  1. In the 'From DataSource' dropdown, select your GAM source

  2. In 'Dimension', select 'GAM: Line Item'

  3. In the first filter select ‘Status’ from the Field name dropdown. When you select ‘Status’ the filters change and the next field shows ‘exists’. Change ‘exists’ to ‘one of’ This adds a third filter option, from this drop down select either ‘Ready’, ‘Delivering’ ‘Delivery Extended’, ‘Pending’ or ‘Pending Approval’ or any status that signifies that Line item is ready to go live or already live

VM GAM 1.png

  1. In the second Filter, select ‘isMissingCreatives’ from the Field name dropdown. When you select ‘isMissingCreatives’ like with step 6, the filters change and the next field shows ‘exists'. Change the 'exists’ to 'is true’

  2. Name your Monitor on the right-hand side

  3. Optionally, add a description for your Monitor

  4. There is a notification channel option, but instant alerts are not currently available for Validation Monitors (VMs), so leave this blank

  5. Click Save to finish

Your monitor should look like the below:

Screenshot 2026-01-14 at 11.35.26.png

🚀 Best Practice Tips

  • Run continuously: This monitor is most effective when always running in the background

  • Pair with status filters: Including only active items helps reduce noise

  • Extend the logic: You can duplicate this monitor to check for missing creatives by region, advertiser, or campaign type

  • Validation Monitor email digest - After creating your monitor, contact support@watchingthat.com to set up a daily digest that delivers monitor status updates to your inbox