AOLs Trust but Verify in SpringServe
Traditional AOL demand tags return VPAID tags effectively 100% of the time. Their VPAID, among other things, calls various third-party verification vendors to determine viewability, IVT, and more before sending a request to the AOL marketplace. TbV is a beta program from AOL that allows bypass of that VPAID call -- they will trust the parameters sent to them by SpringServe on an ad request, and verify these parameters on an impression.
Fewer VPAID calls means quicker response times, higher opportunity fill, and lowered potential for VPAID abuse. TbV should result in speed improvements as well as increased fill rates and revenue.
TbV tags require passing four parameters: height, width, domain, and viewability. Viewability is passed as 0 or 1, depending on detected viewability. A TbV demand tag in SpringServe is formatted as follows:
SpringServe automatically populates the IS_VISIBLE macro; there is no need to get viewability reporting from AOL because we use real-time detected viewability to generate the binary value. Testing has found that the DOMAIN macro works best for the pageUrl query string parameter.
With TbV, AOL trusts what is sent to them. Given this, you may want to send the detected domain and dimensions. There are two ways to do this:
- Enable detected domain and size overrides on your supply
- Use SpringServe's detected macros in your demand tags: DETECTED_DOMAIN, DETECTED_HEIGHT, DETECTED_WIDTH
If you do not want to enable detected domain overrides just for AOL, you may want to use detected macros. Using these macros will give you tags like the following:
Detected macros will give you additional protection without the hassle of supply tag detected settings while running TbV tags on untrusted supply. However, there are potential consequences regarding targeting. If there is a high rate of domain or size mismatch between what is declared and detected, requests will not be passed to your demand tags.
TbV tags work best on JS VPAID desktop and mobile web supply with high viewability. Because there are currently no controls over what type of supply is sent through a DirectConnection, be wary of adding TbV tags to all DC tags when there is a large percentage of Flash VPAID coming through them. Use the Traffic Quality report center to determine which supply tags may be good candidates to align to your TbV demand.