Losing bids aggregated reporting for sellers

[suprajasekhar]

FLEDGE mentions a mechanism for losing bidders to learn about auction outcomes in aggregate. Would a similar mechanism be available for sellers to learn about lost bids?

Some sellers may require ads to be scanned before they are allowed to participate in on-device auctions. Sellers might find it useful to know information about the ads that were disqualified from the auction (in scoreAd()) due to signals from their ads scanning system being unavailable. Aggregated reporting for sellers on renderUrls of lost bids along with the interest group owner and the reasons for losing the auctions could support this use case. The reason a bid lost the auction could be determined by the seller within scoreAd() and made available by FLEDGE API for aggregated reporting.

Scanning interest group creatives from aggregated reporting of lost bids may be preferred over the alternative wherein sellers provide a creative scanning API for buyers to pre-submit their ads due to the following reasons:

• For buyers working with multiple sellers, having to integrate with each of the seller’s creative scanning APIs could add non-trivial complexity.

• For sellers, it may be technically challenging to scan the entire catalog of ads and products that a buyer may or may not use in the in-browser auction.

Aggregated reporting on lost bids with the seller-determined loss reason as a potential dimension may have other use cases too, such as buyer-facing reporting and troubleshooting of bid filtering due to non-compliance with publisher control or policy standards. In addition to loss reasons, aggregating losing bid information on other dimensions including contextual signals such as publisher domain, coarse user geo, etc may be useful.

[suprajasekhar]

Gentle ping on this issue. reportLoss is key for designing and building seller's creative scanning capability among other seller-provided functionalities. Can you please provide technical specifications regarding what mechanism will be available for sellers to learn about losing bids? In particular, how can sellers access the renderUrls and adComponentUrls of losing bids?

Thanks!

[suprajasekhar]

During WICG FLEDGE call on 12/08 we discussed the criticality of the use cases highlighted above and the possibility of temporarily supporting event-level loss reporting for sellers during the FLEDGE origin trials.

Seller's Javascript (loaded from decisionLogicUrl) could expose another function (e.g. reportLosingBids) to learn limited information about losing bids that participated in an auction - care must be taken to avoid creating the risks of tracking.

If this sounds acceptable, I am happy to submit a pull request with an API spec for the losing bids seller reporting using which we can iterate on further.