User Agent Debugging – BidTheatre

Sometimes it´s desirable to actively choose which campaign ASX should place bids for when you visit a certain site in the RTB inventory. This could come in handy if you wish to generate a screenshot or verify something else regarding a campaign.

This is achievable by extending your browser's user-agent string with "ASXACT1000" where the digits should be replaced with the actual id number of the campaign you wish to place bids for. To alter your User-Agent string you could install a browser plugin allowing you to do this, Chrome do for instance have a plugin called "User-Agent Switcher for Chrome" that provides this functionality.

Example User-Agent string that will force ASX to place bids for the campaign with id 1000.

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/35.0.1916.114 Safari/537.36 ASXACT1000

A couple of things to observe

Do not replace your entire User-Agent string with ASXACT1000, append it to the end of it instead. Some sites and/or SSP´s refuses to send bid requests if the User-Agent string looks incorrect.
All other targeting set on the campaign will still be enforced, so make sure you comply with the targeting such as retargeting etcetera.
You will not be able to choose specific ad dimensions / creatives
The user agent manipulation is not a guarantee to have your ad displayed. Bids are still placed in competition with other demand sources, and the seller applies filtering logic on its end to decide on the winning bid.

How to find your ads using User-Agent Switcher for Chrome.

Find your User agent, either by using https://www.whoishostingthis.com/tools/user-agent/ or similar tool.
Open User-Agent Switcher for Chrome

New User-agent name: Name of campaign
New User-agent String: Your User agent + ASXACTxxxx (xxxx=campaign ID) E.g.Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36 ASXACT2837
Group: Name of Browser or other grouping of your choice
Indicator Flag; ASX
Save by clicking Add

To activate your User agent click the User-agent Switcher icon, select Group and then your User agent.
Open a site that has your ad.
You should now be able to find your ad. If it doesn't show or you want a different ad from the same campaign, refresh the site.