Migrate to the OpenRTB protocol

Since announcing the deprecation of the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol, Google has partnered closely with migrating bidders. We have seen a lot of enthusiasm and progress, as well as significant improvements in bidding performance from migrating to OpenRTB. At the same time, we have decided to extend the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol’s deprecation period to provide additional support and further optimize bidding integrations with the OpenRTB protocol.

The sunset date is now April 30th, 2025. Following this date, bid requests will no longer be sent with the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol. Start dialing up your OpenRTB traffic or A/B experiment today.

Google will migrate from the Authorized Buyers protocol to the OpenRTB protocol to align more closely with industry standards. We have extended the Authorized Buyers Real-time Bidding protocol’s deprecation to April 30th, 2025.

On this page

Mapping Guide

Visit the developer site for the full mapping guide. If you have feedback, visit the Technical Support section or share your feedback with your account manager.

Experimentation

For your accounts, Google can set up an A/B experiment to test the performance between an OpenRTB endpoint and a Google Authorized Buyers Protocol endpoint and provide you with valuable insights as you scale traffic to OpenRTB. Reporting will be available through a cloud bucket. Continue with the following steps to set up an A/B experiment.

Set up an experiment

1. Set up your OpenRTB serving infrastructure and provide the URL to Google by creating a customer ticket or reaching out to your account representative.
2. Google will share an onboarding form for you to indicate preferences, and set up the experiment configuration in the Authorized Buyers user interface within 3 business days.
3. Once the experiment has been set up, the traffic is split at the specified percentage between Google RTB production endpoint and the test OpenRTB endpoint. When Google enables the experiment framework for the bidder, you enable the experiment by simply setting the end-point QPS value to non-zero. Google then controls the experiment percentage. 
4. You receive key metrics and reporting through the publisher settings storage bucket. This should include any major fields or metrics for performance monitoring. If you are unable to solve performance issues yourself, flag them for Google to review.
5. When you are satisfied with performance, you can dial up to 100% OpenRTB traffic. Contact your account representative or update your customer ticket.

Note: Bidders can start experiment traffic as low as 0.1% and go as high as 20%. They can contact Google support to change the percentage of traffic affected by the experiment and when they are ready to launch/dial up the experiment traffic. It can be stopped at any time by setting QPS to 0.

Metrics to monitor	Adverse behavior	Potential root causes
Number of bids	Decrease	Problems with bid request processing on bidder’s end (for example,  unable to ingest specific signals such as category/attribute taxonomies).
Bid values	Decrease
Number of response parsing or processing errors	Increase	Issues with bidder’s response building Examples for some common issues: The creative pertains to categories blocked by the publisher. Note that OpenRTB uses a different category taxonomy than Google RTB. See the new detectedCategories field in the CreativeServingDecision. Ineligible billing ID for deal. See the list of eligible billing IDs in BidRequest.imp.pmp.deal.ext.billing_id. Invalid event notification token, which must be a UTF-8 string, unlike in Google RTB where arbitrary byte strings are supported.
Number of bids filtered	Increase
Latency	Increase	HTTP reconnects given HTTP connection is more likely to expire on experimental endpoint. OpenRTB logic is taking longer than Google RTB logic. Degradation in performance possibly caused by an increase in the time required to process the request and build a response.
Number of timeouts	Increase

Note: If you want to stop or disable the experiment, set the QPS of your experimental endpoint to zero. Once you’re ready to progress past testing, you can move all queries to the OpenRTB endpoint.

Technical Support

For technical support or questions about the process, here are some options:

• Contact your sales representative or raise a customer ticket for help with account configuration, product and UI questions, and some technical support. If you don’t have an assigned point of contact, use the contact form. 
• Access Contact Us to raise a customer ticket.
• Authorized Buyers support forum provides public answers about the RTB protocols or APIs. You can search for similar  questions to find answers to your questions. 
• Use the Technical API email support for answers to private questions about the RTB protocols or APIs. Unlike the support forum, questions here are private and can include details about your account that may assist with investigating your question or issue.