Feedback: VAST Update Proposal for Chrome Privacy Sandbox Attribution Reporting API Support

[jfggit]

For background, the Video Ad Serving Template (VAST) is an interface published by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Tech Lab to facilitate passing metadata associated with video or audio ad serving. It's an XML-based specification that allows advertisers and ad techs to provide a variety of data, including references to ad resource files and tracking URLs for video lifecycle events (e.g. play progress, clicks, impressions), to the publishers and ad SDKs who are responsible for video playback and event reporting.

I've written a proposal to update the VAST specification so that video ad SDKs can support registering VAST events for attribution tracking on behalf of advertisers and ad techs who want to record conversion sources. The idea is a relatively simple translation of the API into the VAST language, as well as some technical support details. The concept of an attribution type has been added to avoid any ambiguity between single-ping and dual-ping attribution registration types, and to potentially provide flexibility when it comes to any future updates or versions. Feedback from the Chrome and the community would be appreciated, particularly to confirm the technical details and examples provided are correct and appropriate.

[csharrison]

Thanks Jon! Would you be willing to present this work at one of our face to face meetings (every other Monday morning, next one is on Jan 9)? I think the group would be interested.

[jfggit]

Sure, sounds good.

[jfggit]

Just to document the one gap in the Attribution Reporting API I noted in the VAST update proposal:

Right now, VAST allows for a single "clickthrough" URL target, but many "click tracker" URLs. So the latter trackers are getting background pings fired to record the click event, but are not directly in the navigation chain. When it comes to registering these events as click event sources, the API doesn't really provide for a mechanism for doing that. At best, if the main clickthrough itself is not registering as a source, we could use the "background" attributionsrc ping in order to properly register a single click tracker. However, this would not be reliably available, and obviously it would only work for a single click tracker out of potentially multiple.

[csharrison]

Hey @jfggit , do you think this issue can be closed given that the open gap we identified (#718) has been addressed?

We can of course re-open if we find more gaps.

[jfggit]

Sounds good.