Environments who do not support third party cookies are challenging for advertisers to operate in for many reasons. Many advertisers choose to simply not spend in such environments and thus the need for browsers who do not support third parties to implement specialized APIs to support third party cookie use cases. These emerging APIs are experimental and cutting edge and have a strong possibility of being adopted as official standards. Currently, these experimental APIs focus mostly on Attribution. The primary example of these new emerging API standards is the W3C’s Attribution API.
With the goal of helping the developers of these emerging APIs create viable solutions for the industry, IAB’s Private Advertising Task Force has put together a set of important use cases focused on attribution.
The use cases fall into the following important pillars:
- Flexible Extensive Reporting Dimensions
- Flexible Custom Attribution Models
- IVT/Fraud Detection
- Novel Features
Flexible Extensive Reporting Dimensions
It is important for advertisers to slice and dice their reports to help them make better decisions with their spending budgets. Advertisers are used to having powerful drill-down dashboards and analytics. They are currently able to view reports by campaign, creative, publisher, date/time, device type, etc. This helps them determine which creatives are performing better in any given inventory, get a high level view of their campaign’s performance, and more.
To this end, it is important for advertisers to be able to tag their conversions with various reporting labels and pull those reports using one or more of those labels.
Flexible Custom Attribution Models
Another important aspect of tracking and reporting attributions is to give advertisers, and their agencies, the ability to define their own custom attribution models. Often, these APIs have just the simple last-touch/last-click models which are great starts, but often advertisers need more powerful models. These include multi-touch attribution, and tracking conversions for multiple brands, and other proprietary models.
To this end, it is important to give advertisers the power of event-level processing. This is a core requirement to be able to program custom attribution models. The power comes from being able to combine conversion and exposure events and implement the attribution logic.
IVT/Fraud Detection
Moving attribution processing to on-device agents opens up the door to potential fraud vectors. It is important for these agents to give assurance to the advertisers that the attributions were computed correctly, fairly, and not driven by bots or fraudulent means.
Novel Features
Lastly, by having these agents natively support attribution via these emerging APIs there is an opportunity to provide brand new features not previously available. For this release, we focused on the novel use case of tracking app-to-web and web-to-app attributions. This would require co-operation with OS makers, but would give advertisers the ability to track and report attributions across web and mobile applications.
The Task Force
The Private Advertising Task Force is composed of experts across the advertising industry. Its previous work focused on Privacy Sandbox, but has since shifted to a wider set of technologies across different browsers and operating systems. Joins us to help shape the future of advertising technology within browsers and operating systems.
Miguel Morales
Director, Addressability & PETs
IAB Tech Lab