The Attribution Reporting API is a proposal from the Chrome team for the Privacy Sandbox initiative that supports conversion measurement while providing improved user privacy. The API helps advertisers measure and optimize campaign performance without requiring third-party cookies.
Ad Manager is supporting the Attribution Reporting API as part of its commitment to invest in privacy-preserving alternatives that enable the ads ecosystem. By ensuring that conversion actions are successfully attributed to our partners' properties, we're allowing advertisers to better understand performance and find value in publisher inventory.
How it works
For the Attribution Reporting API to function, advertisers and/or buyside ad tech companies must add the appropriate tracking information to their creatives. When these creatives are served on a publisher site, any view or click events associated with that ad impression will be recorded by the browser. If the user who viewed or clicked on that ad also makes a conversion action on an advertiser's site (for example, a purchase), the web browser will record that event and match that activity with the prior view or click to provide appropriate attribution.
This Attribution Reporting API proposal maintains a privacy-safe experience for the user by leveraging the browser for matching, rather than using personally identifiable information (PII) and it employs a number of privacy enhancing practices (such as differential privacy, encryption, introducing noise, and adding a time delay).
What to know
For programmatic ads served by Ad Manager, there is no action required from publishers, provided the sites are using the HTTPS protocol. The required tagging should be handled by the advertiser and their ad tech providers.
For non-programmatic ads, the creatives you include in your line items would need to include an attributionsrc parameter for an advertiser to use the Attribution Reporting API for campaign measurement. This is the attribute that registers an event with the buyer so that an eventual conversion can be attributed to the ad served on your site. If these creative tags are shared as HTML tags (vs URL tags), you can use the HTML5 method to traffic the ads.
Example
<IMG SRC="https://example.adserver.com/trackingid=1234” attributionsrc BORDER="0" HEIGHT="1" WIDTH="1" BORDER="0" HEIGHT="1" WIDTH="1" ALT="Advertisement">
There's no anticipated impact to publisher revenue during this testing period. At this time, native traffic is not included, although there are plans to support native inventory in the future.
Final thoughts
Ad Manager is encouraged by the potential for the Attribution Reporting API to help support a critical use case for the ads ecosystem. We'll continue to test and provide feedback to the Chrome team to ensure this solution best supports our partners' needs. For details on this proposal, visit the Chrome Developer site.