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Nerve Centre KPIs · Audit Profile · Sentiment Settings The questions every native / discovery advertiser asks at 9am on Monday: did high-engagement publisher placements hold CTR or did the Backstage whitelist quality drift to lower-tier sites, are RPM-based brand-safety filters keeping creatives off questionable content, and is the multi-step native-to-purchase conversion pixel still firing. Cross-references commerce siblings for product-feed OOS findings and website_performance for landing Web Vitals on the cold native click-through.

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What this audit checks

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Authentication & access

  • OAuth2 client_credentials token grant succeeds (Backstage)
  • Account ID resolves to an accessible advertiser account
  • Backstage rate-limit headroom healthy (429 + Retry-After watch)

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Spend & budget pacing

  • Daily cap utilisation per campaign mid-period
  • Spending limit nearing exhaustion before period end
  • Budget pacing ahead of or behind even-burn baseline
  • Wasted spend on RUNNING campaigns with zero conversions

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Campaign performance (ROAS / CTR / CPC)

  • ROAS below native target on campaign-summary report
  • CTR <0.05% on premium publisher placements
  • CPC drift above campaign cpc bid vs delivered cost
  • Marketing objective mismatch vs delivered outcome

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Conversion & attribution

  • Conversion pixel firing-rate decay on multi-step funnel
  • Clicks > 0 but conversions = 0 (tracking broken)
  • Conversion rate below account baseline per campaign
  • Missing UTM parameters on item destination URLs

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Creative & audience health

  • Disapproved or REJECTED items still active in campaigns
  • Item-level CTR collapse vs campaign average (creative mismatch)
  • Publisher placements in blocked categories (brand-safety drift)
  • Branding text mismatch with creative title context

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Cross-channel revenue at risk

  • Active product-feed native ads on out-of-stock SKUs (commerce sibling)
  • Branded sponsored-content clicks cannibalising organic search (GSC sibling)
  • Landing pages with poor Web Vitals on cold native traffic (website_performance)
  • Spend on campaigns with active Feedonomics feed rejections

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Severity thresholds

SignalWarnCritical
roas2-
ctr0.1-
conversion_rate1-
cpc1.53
wasted_spend_pct512
budget_pacing85100

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Data sources

  • POST https://backstage.taboola.com/backstage/oauth/token - OAuth2 client_credentials token grant
  • GET https://backstage.taboola.com/backstage/api/1.0/users/current/account - Auth + account sanity
  • GET https://backstage.taboola.com/backstage/api/1.0/{account_id}/campaigns - Campaign inventory + budgets (cpc, daily_cap, spending_limit)
  • GET https://backstage.taboola.com/backstage/api/1.0/{account_id}/campaigns/{campaign_id}/items - Item-level creative review status + ctr / cpc
  • POST https://backstage.taboola.com/backstage/api/1.0/{account_id}/reports/campaign-summary/dimensions/day - Spend / clicks / conversions / roas aggregates by day