Protected Audience (formerly known as FLEDGE) Integration Guide for Measurement Providers

As part of the Privacy Sandbox, Chrome proposed Protected Audience API—an in-browser API that lets advertisers and ad tech companies show interest-group targeted ads without relying on third-party cookies, while protecting users from cross-site tracking.

In Protected Audience API, when a remarketing ad wins the auction, the render URL of the ad will be sent to a Fenced Frame for rendering. A fenced frame is a proposed HTML element for embedded content, similar to an iframe. Unlike iframes, a fenced frame restricts communication with its embedding context to allow the frame access to cross-site data without sharing it with the embedding context. For more details, refer to the Fenced Frames use cases explainer.

Display & Video 360 supports a list of macros for measurement provider to use for impression and click tracking. Only a small subset of these macros can be replaced as part of creative rendering, due to lack of contextual and auction signals. For example, ${PUBLISHER_ID} will break without changes to measurement provider tags.

This guide is designed for ad measurement partners that track events for advertisers who use Display & Video 360.

Enrollment

Starting in August 2023, measurement providers may need to follow the steps below to register themselves to use Fenced Frame Reporting APIs in Protected Audience API.

Details on how and who will need to enroll

Integration

Measurement provider impression tags

Setup instructions:

Script tags Example 
<script src='https://tracking.com/a.js'>xxx</script>
Responsibility: Measurement providers to update the script tags to use reportEvent API for impression tracking (see guidance below).
Img tags Example 
<img src='https://tracking.com/'>
Responsibility: Display & Video 360 to update img src tags to use reportEvent API for impression tracking.

reportEvent API

The API was proposed to be used for post-rendering tracking only. The API contains two parts: registerAdMacro and reportEvent.

  • Display & Video 360 owns the registerAdMacro function in reportWin. The function will register macro key-value pairs in the browser before the rendering call.
  • Depending on the tag type, Display & Video 360 or measurement providers own the changes to 3PAT tags to use reportEvent API.

reportEvent takes only 1 input 'destinationURL', which points to measurement provider servers. It can contain any macros listed in Display & Video 360 Help Center. For example:

window.fence.reportEvent({
  'destinationURL': 'https://adtech.example/impression?cid=555&pub_id=${PUBLISHER_ID}&site=${SOURCE_URL_ENC}&t=123'
});

When Chrome fires the URL ping in the function, it will look up registered macros and replace them with the values before sending a HTTP GET request to https://adtech.example.

Steps to update script tags

There will be no change to existing creative tags. Display & Video 360 still renders measurement provider tags without modification as part of the creative payload. When measurement providers receive impression pings from the Protected Audience API context, they need to follow the steps below for impression tracking:

  1. Prepare a measurement provider impression URL to accept the impression pings. For example:

    https://adtech.example/impression?cid=555&pub_id=${PUBLISHER_ID}&site=${SOURCE_URL_ENC}&t=123

  2. Add reportEvent JS when responding to a script from Protected Audience API. For example:

    window.fence.reportEvent({
  'destinationURL': 'https://adtech.example/impression?cid=555&pub_id=${PUBLISHER_ID}&site=${SOURCE_URL_ENC}&t=123'
});

  3. Log impressions when receiving pings from the impression URL configured in step 1.

Measurement provider click tags

Existing measurement provider click tag will continue to work for Protected Audience impressions. Display & Video 360 will use the Fenced Frames Ads Reporting API's reserved.top_navigation beacon to register clicks, and will chain all measurement provider click trackers as redirects. For more details, refer to Chrome's documentation for Fenced Frame Ads Reporting API.