Q4 2024
There were no release notes for November 4, 2024.
User interface
Bidder Declarations: Indicate your Signal Preferences & Data Sharing with Publishers
Bidder Declarations allows buyers to specify the preferred signals they'd like to receive from publishers and how data collection affects bidding strategies. This information is shared with publishers in Ad Manager, increasing transparency and helping them make informed decisions about data sharing. This is important because publishers must first opt-in buyers to gain access to receiving signals in their Demand Channel Settings. Participating in Bidder Declarations increases the chances of receiving valuable signals by making data preferences clear to publishers. To get started, see the "Bidder preferences displayed to publishers’"section available in RTB Settings.
There were no release notes for October 7, 2024.
Q3 2024
Other product or Help Center updates
Data Transfer to sunset
Data Transfer for Authorized Buyers has been sunset on September 6, 2024. Please contact us if you have additional questions.
First-party identifiers for web environments
Ad Manager publishers have started to send first-party identifiers to Authorized Buyers and Open Bidding demand in web environments. For now, first-party identifiers will not be sent on EEA, UK, Swiss, and California traffic. Publisher first-party identifier is available in pretargeting settings. Bidders who filter inventory based on IDs must include this identifier in their pretargeting groups to ensure access to relevant inventory.
Report and Optimize
Smart Throttling for QPS Efficiency
Smart Throttling is a feature to optimize for the best mix of queries to send to a bidder within their QPS thresholds using machine-learning. Smart Throttling will be enabled by default. To opt-out, ensure that you have sufficiency QPS capacity allocated to your endpoint configurations. Learn more about Smart Throttling for Bidders.
Other product or Help Center updates
Google RTB Protocol Deprecation
In addition to continuing to make sure bidders are on track for February, 15 2025 Google RTB Protocol Deprecation, Google RTB protocol has entered maintenance mode and stop receiving non-critical feature updates.
Policy
Increased RTB Timeouts
RTB Timeouts on web traffic have increased from 300ms to 350ms. Please ensure any hard coded limits are updated to reflect the new limit.
IAB Taxonomy Detected Categories in Creatives API
We will now communicate the detected categories of a creative using the IAB Content 1.0 taxonomy in the Creatives API, which is the same taxonomy as the bcat field in the OpenRTB bid request, in addition to what we currently communicate in the Google taxonomy.
Increased RTB Timeouts on mApp
Google has increased tmax on publisher mApp inventory where longer timeouts may be beneficial to RTB bidders to respond to certain bids in the auction.
As best practice, we recommend buyers reference the tmax (OpenRTB protocol) or response_deadline_ms (Google RTB Protocol) in the bid request object to identify the maximum time in milliseconds to submit a bid to avoid a timeout.
Data Transfer to sunset
Data Transfer for Authorized Buyers will sunset on August 30, 2024. Please contact us if you have additional questions.
Other product or Help Center updates
Data Transfer to sunset
Data Transfer for Authorized Buyers will sunset on August 30, 2024. Please contact us if you have additional questions.
Q2 2024
Policy
Updates to Gambling and Games Policy (June 2024)
On July 8, 2024, Google will update its Gambling and Games policy to remove Italy from the list of permitted countries for Social Casino Games. Consequently, advertising of Social Casino Games in Italy will be prohibited effective July 8, 2024.
There were no release notes for June 3, 2024.
There were no release notes for May 20, 2024.
There were no release notes for May 6, 2024.
There were no release notes for April 22, 2024.
Report and Optimize
Real-time bidding update
On April 15, 2024, Google will deprecate video_completion_rate and click_through_rate metrics under the BidRequest.Imp.metric field in OpenRTB bid requests along with BidRequest.AdSlot.video_completion_rate and BidRequest.AdSlot.click_through_rate fields in Google RTB bid requests.
Other product or Help Center updates
Google RTB Protocol Sunset
Google will sunset the Google Authorized Buyers protocol on February 15, 2025 to more closely align with the industry. Bidders should migrate to OpenRTB protocol prior to this time. More information will be provided to assist with migration.
Publisher Provided ID for RTB
Publisher Provided Identifiers (PPIDs), now in open beta, allow publishers to send an identifier for frequency capping and interest-based ads personalization across devices. Publishers manage which Authorized Buyers, Open Bidders, and SDK bidders receive PPIDs. Only Authorized Buyers, Open Bidders, and SDK bidders opted-in by a given publisher will receive PPID from that publisher. Publisher Provided ID (PPID) is not available with 3P user ids, such as google_user_id, hosted_match_data, device ids, and is not available in the EEA. See the Developer release notes for proto specs.
SKOverlay now supported across all full screen mApp formats
We now support SKOverlay across all mApp full-screen formats on iOS.
To determine SKOverlay eligibility, bidders can reference skadn.skoverlay in the bid request. To use this feature, bidders will need to first set a value for skadn.itunesitem in the SKAdNetworkResponse object back to Google. Bidders also need to set the skadn.skoverlay object in the bid response back to Google with the below.
Q1 2024
Policy
Updates to Personalization & Tracking on Mobile Devices
Beginning March 21, 2024, bid requests will no longer disallow ad personalization based on a user not consenting to App Tracking Transparency (ATT) on iOS 14.5+ or deleting their Advertising ID on Android. The below fields should continue to be used to understand a user’s personalization and tracking settings:
-
We will continue to populate the non_personalized_ads_reason field with the appropriate reason for other situations where personalization is not permitted. This field will no longer be set on the basis of a user not consenting to App Tracking Transparency (ATT) on iOS 14.5+ or deleting their Advertising ID on Android.
-
When a user has not consented to ATT on iOS 14.5+ or has deleted their Advertising ID on Android, we will continue to set
limit_ad_tracking = true / lmt = 1. For granular ATT status information, continue to refer to theapp_tracking_authorization / attsfields.
Other product or Help Center updates
Provide Consent for Cookie Matching Requests from EEA+UK
Partner-initiated requests to Google's real-time cookie matching flows from the EEA+UK must provide end-user consent, in accordance with Google's EU User Consent Policy, through one of two mechanisms:
- A TCFv2 string in the
gdpr_consentURL parameter - The
process_consent=TURL parameter, after gathering affirmative consent
Starting March 6, 2024, requests that are subject to the EU User Consent Policy and fail to provide affirmative consent signals will receive an error response.
Removing Seller Network ID from Google Proto
Seller Network ID was removed from the Google Proto in February 2024. To receive the similar information to identify a publisher, please begin using the publisher ID field (BidRequest.publisher_id). Learn more about the existing publisher ID.
There were no release notes for February 26, 2024.
There were no release notes for February 12, 2024.
There were no release notes for January 29, 2024.
Troubleshoot
VAST Error reasons displaying in Creatives UI
More information is provided within the Creatives UI to troubleshoot error reasons. Learn more about each of these errors and how to resolve them.
Policy
Bulk Uploader API
Partners should obtain end-user consent, in accordance with Google's EU User Consent Policy, before adding a user to a user list. Ad tech partners using the Bulk Upload API must indicate that they have gathered the proper legal consent using the process_consent flag.
Starting January 2024, requests without process_consent=true will return a missing consent error but continue to be processed without change. Starting March 2024, requests without process_consent=true will be dropped entirely.
Cookie Matching
Partner-initiated requests to Google's real-time cookie matching flows from the EEA+UK must provide end-user consent, in accordance with Google's EU User Consent Policy, through one of two mechanisms:
- A TCFv2 string in the gdpr_consent URL parameter
- The
process_consent=TURL parameter, after gathering affirmative consent
Starting March 2024, requests that are subject to the EU User Consent Policy and fail to provide affirmative consent signals will receive an error response.