Verify your SDK Bidding setup

SDK Bidding allows bidders to send their own signals and use their own adapter to render ads. You can review this article for advice on how to verify your SDK Bidding setup using Google’s tools.

Requirements overview

To verify your SDK Bidding setup is correct, review the following requirements:

• Enable SDK Bidding
• Verify the SDK integration
• Ensure configuration of Ad Exchange line item or yield group matches SDK Bidding inventory
• Enable and share Secure Signals
• Add ad unit mappings for targeted inventory
• Confirm no blocks are targeting the inventory

Verification procedures

Enable SDK Bidding

First, you must enable SDK Bidding under “Bidders.” For details, visit Allow SDK Bidding.

Verify the SDK is correctly integrated

To ensure there are minimal issues, we recommend following the instructions in the Google Mobile Ads SDK for Android and iOS. Often, issues that appear are because a step was accidently skipped, so it is important to carefully read all of the instructions. To validate whether your adapter is found or properly initialized, you can use the Ad Inspector tool. “Adapter not found” indicates the adapter wasn’t added to the app. “Adapter did not initialize” usually indicates the app is not waiting for initialization to complete before making an ad request. Ensure your code waits for app initialization to complete before making ad requests. For more details, visit Understand SDK adapter issues. 

Ensure there’s an Ad Exchange line item or yield group configured

An ad request must either match a yield group (that includes Ad Exchange by default) or it must match an Ad Exchange line item. You can use Delivery Tools to validate whether an Ad Exchange line item or yield group matches the ad request. 

Please make sure accounts trying to troubleshoot have the correct permissions to see ad requests. If the ad requests do not match a yield group or an Ad Exchange line item, then you will either need to add one or validate that targeting matches the parameters in the ad request. For example, if the Ad Exchange line item uses key value targeting but the ad request doesn’t match the key values, the line item will not match.

Enable Secure Signals and verify signals are being shared correctly

First, make sure you have enabled Secure Signals for your bidder. To check:

1. Sign in to Google Ad Manager.
2. Click Delivery and then Bidders.
3. Click SDK Bidders, and then click the bidder you’re verifying.

4. Under “Secure signal sharing (required),” confirm the required steps show “Enabled.” You can review incorrect and correct examples in the following images. Note the “Disabled” labels in the incorrect example, which would prevent your app from sending Secure Signals.

   Incorrect setup	Correct setup

If anything is marked “Disabled,” as shown in the example above, you can click on each link to enable the library and the sharing of signals to the bidder. Then, you can verify signals are being passed using either Delivery Tools or Ad Inspector. If secure signals are still missing, make sure that the ad units coded into the map exactly match the ad units in Google Ad Manager because they are case sensitive. For example, if you had ad unit /1234/sample/one configured in Google Ad Manager but the developers used /1234/Sample/One, the ad request would still happen but secure signals would not be sent.

When you open Ad Inspector, you will be shown all of the ad units that are configured and basic information about the fill status. To verify each of your ad units:

1. Select the first ad unit.

2. Click  and select Third-party bidding parameter.

   

3. Review the “Buyer generated data” field. The “characters” number should be large.

   

   • If the buyer generated data is missing or zero characters, you may not have waited for the app to initialize the GMA SDK and your adapters. 
   • If the buyer generated data is empty or zero, you can determine if it’s due to the app making an ad request before initialization completion by requesting another test ad in Ad Inspector. To do so, on the Ad unit, click Request test ad. 
   • If buyer generated data shows after requesting another test ad, that’s an indication the app needs to update its logic to wait for initialization to complete. Continue the process to validate all of the ad unit mappings.

Add Ad Unit Mappings for all targeted inventory  

Make sure you add ad unit mapping for each SDK Bidder configured to your inventory. You can validate this using Ad Inspector. When you open Ad Inspector, it will list out all of the ad unit mappings configured for your app. If you are missing any, add the missing ad unit mappings. 

Confirm protections that block data or cookie sharing aren’t targeting the inventory

Validate in demand channel settings and Protections that you haven’t applied a protection that could block an SDK Bidder. For example, in Protections, there’s a protection that can be applied called “Cookies and data uses (non-Google demand).” If you enable all options in that protection, it will block AdID and IDFA from being shared. This block would prevent bidders, such as Meta, from bidding.

Next steps

If you have gone through all of these steps and you still aren’t getting ads in your application, you can start an interaction with publisher support. Complete these steps:

1. To export the ad request/response pair, on the line item in Ad Inspector, click  and select Share ad request and response.
2. Share the information with yourself so you can then share it with publisher support over email.