This document is an explainer for a potential new web platform feature which allows for measuring and reporting ad click conversions.
(Name probably needs bikeshedding)
See the explainer on aggregate measurement for a potential extension on top of this.
Table of Contents
- Glossary
- Motivation
- Prior Art
- Overview
- Sample Usage
- Privacy Considerations
- Open Questions
-
Publisher: Page that shows ads, sells ad slots
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Advertiser: Purchaser of ad slots, conversions happen on advertiser sites
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Impression: View of an ad
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Conversion: The completion of a meaningful (advertiser specified) user action on the advertiser's web site by a user who has previously interacted with an ad from that advertiser.
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Event-level data: Data that can be tied back to a specific low-level event; not aggregated
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Click-through-conversion (CTC): A conversion credit attributed to an impression that was clicked
Currently, the web ad industry measures conversions via identifiers they can associate across sites. These identifiers tie information about which ads were clicked to information about activity on the advertiser's site (the conversion). This allows advertisers to measure ROI, and for the entire ads ecosystem to understand how well ads perform.
Since the ads industry today uses common identifiers across advertiser and publisher sites to track conversions, these common identifiers can be used to enable other forms of cross-site tracking.
This doesn’t have to be the case, though, especially in cases where identifiers like third party cookies are either unavailable or undesirable. A new API surface can be added to the web platform to satisfy this use-case without them, in a way that provides better privacy to users.
This API alone will not be able to support all conversion measurement use cases, such as view conversions, or even click conversion reporting with richer / more accurate conversion metadata. We envision this API as one of potentially many new API’s that will seek to reproduce valid advertising use cases in the web platform in a privacy preserving way. In particular, we think this API could be extended by using server side aggregation to provide richer data, which we are continuing to explore.
There is an alternative Ad Click Attribution draft spec in the WICG. See this WebKit blog post for more details.
Brave has published and implemented an Ads Confirmation Protocol.
An impression is an anchor tag with special attributes:
<a addestination=”[eTLD+1]” impressiondata=”[string]” impressionexpiry=[unsigned long long] reportingdomain=”[eTLD+1]”>
Impression attributes:
-
addestination: is the intended eTLD+1 destination of the ad click -
impressiondata: is the event-level data associated with this impression. This will be limited to 64 bits of information, encoded as a hexadecimal string. This value can vary by UA. -
impressionexpiry: (optional) expiry in milliseconds for when the impression should be deleted. Default will be 7 days, with a max value of 30 days. -
reportingdomain: (optional) is the desired eTLD+1 endpoint that the conversion report for this impression should go to. Default will be the top level domain (eTLD+1) of the page.
Clicking on an anchor tag that specifies these attributes will log a click impression event to storage if the resulting document being navigated to ends up sharing the ad destination eTLD+1. A clicked impression logs <impressiondata, addestination, reportingdomain, impressionexpiry> to a new browser storage area.
When an impression is logged for <reportingdomain, addestination>, existing impressions matching this pair will be looked up in storage. If the matching impressions have converted at least once (i.e. have scheduled a report), they will be removed from browser storage and will not be eligible for further reporting. Any pending conversion reports for these impressions will still be sent.
An impression will be eligible for reporting if any page on the addestination domain (advertiser site) registers a conversion to the associated reporting domain.
In order to prevent arbitrary third parties from registering impressions without the publisher’s knowledge, the Conversion Measurement API will need to be enabled in child contexts by a new Feature Policy:
<iframe src=”https://advertiser.test” allow=”conversion-measurement ‘src’)”>
<a … id=”impressionTag” reportingdomain=”https://ad-tech.com”></a>
</iframe>
The API will be enabled by default in the top-level context and in same-origin children. Any script running in these contexts can declare an impression with any reporting domain. Publishers who wish to explicitly disable the API for all parties can do so via an HTTP header.
Without a Feature Policy, a top-level document and cooperating iframe could recreate this functionality. This is possible by using postMessage to send impression data, reporting domain, and ad destination to the top level document who can then wrap the iframe in an anchor tag (with some additional complexities behind handling clicks on the iframe). Using Feature Policy prevents the need for these hacks. This is inline with the classification of powerful features as discussed on this issue.
This API will use a similar mechanism for conversion registration as the Ad Click Attribution Proposal.
Conversions are meant to occur on ad destination pages. A conversion will be registered for a given reporting domain through an HTTP GET to the reporting domain that redirects to a .well-known location. It is required to be the result of a redirect so that the reporting domain can make server-side decisions about when attribution reports should trigger. Conversions can only be registered in the main document.
Today, conversion pixels are frequently used to register conversions on advertiser pages. These can be repurposed to register conversions in this API:
<img src="https://ad-tech.test/conversiontracker"/>
https://ad-tech.test/conversiontracker can be redirected to https://ad-tech.test/.well-known/register-conversion
to trigger a conversion event.
The browser will treat redirects to a url of the form:
https://<reportingdomain>/.well-known/register-conversion[?conversion-metadata=<metadata>]
as a special request, where optional metadata associated with the conversion is specified via a query parameter.
When the special redirect is detected, the user agent will schedule a conversion report as detailed in Register a conversion algorithm.
Impression metadata will be limited to 64 bits of information to enable uniquely identifying an ad click.
Conversion metadata must therefore be limited quite strictly, both in the amount of data, and in noise we apply to the data. Our strawman initial proposal is to allow 3 bits of conversion data, with 5% noise applied (that is, with 5% chance, we send a random 3 bits). See privacy considerations for more information. These values should be allowed to vary by UA.
Disclaimer: Adding or removing a single bit of metadata has large trade-offs in terms of user privacy and usability to advertisers. Browsers should concretely evaluate the trade-offs from these two perspectives before setting a limit. As such, this number is subject to change based on community feedback. Our encoding scheme should also support fractions of bits, as it’s possible to limit metadata to values from 0-5 (~2.6 bits of information)
When the user agent receives a conversion registration on a URL matching the addestination eTLD+1, it looks up all impressions in storage that match <reporting-domain, addestination>.
The most recent matching impression is given an attibution-credit of value 100. All other matching impressions are given an attibution-credit of value of 0.
For each matching impression, schedule a report. To schedule a report, the browser will store the {reporting domain, addestination domain, impression data, decoded conversion-metadata, attribution-credit} for the impression. Scheduled reports will be sent as detailed in Sending scheduled reports.
Each impression is only allowed to schedule a maximum of three reports (see Multiple conversions for the same impression). Once reports are scheduled for a given conversion registration, the browser will delete all impressions that have scheduled three reports.
If there are multiple impressions that were clicked and lead to a single conversion, send conversion reports for all of them.
To provide additional utility, the user-agent can choose to provide additional annotations to each of these reports, attributing credits for the conversion to them individually. Attribution models allow for more sophisticated, accurate conversion measurement.
The default attribution model will be last-click attribution, giving the last-clicked impression for a given conversion event all of the credit.
To remain flexible, the user-agent sends an attribution-credit of value 0 to 100 for all conversion reports associated with a single conversion event. This represents the percent of attribution an impression received for a conversion. The sum of credits across a set of reports for one conversion event should equal 100.
There are many possible alternatives to this, like providing a choice of rules-based attribution models. However, it isn’t clear the benefits outweigh the additional complexity. Additionally, models other than last-click potentially leak more cross-site information if impressions are clicked across different sites.
Many ad clicks end up converting multiple times, for instance if a user goes through a checkout and a purchase flow. To support this in a privacy preserving way, we need to make sure that subsequent conversions do not leak too much data.
One possible solution, outlined in this document, is for UAs to specify a maximum number of conversion registrations per click. In this document our initial proposal is 3.
Note that subsequent conversions for the same impression do not refresh the reporting windows (see Sending Scheduled Reports).
Note that from a usability perspective, it is important that all conversion reports for the same impression are allowed the same amount of metadata. Otherwise, it becomes quite difficult for advertisers to efficiently use the space of possible metadata values.
After the initial impression click between a publisher and advertiser, a schedule of reporting windows and deadlines associated with that impression begins. The time between the click and impression expiry can be split into multiple reporting windows, at the end of which the browser will send scheduled reports for that impression.
Each reporting window has a deadline, and only conversions registered before that deadline can be sent in that window. An example of deadlines and windows a browser could choose are:
2 days minus 1 hour: Conversions will be reported 2 days from impression time
7 days minus 1 hour: Conversions will be reported 7 days from impression time
impressionexpiry: Conversions will be reported impressionexpiry
milliseconds plus one hour from impression time
If impressionexpiry occurs before the 7 day window deadline it will be used as the next reporting window. For example, if impressionexpiry is 3 days, there will be two deadlines, 2 days minus one hour and impressionexpiry. If impressionexpiry is before the 2 day deadline, the 2 day deadline will still be used.
When a conversion report is scheduled, it will be delayed until the next applicable reporting window for the associated impression. Once the window has finished, the report will be sent out of band.
If there are multiple reports for an impression scheduled within the same window, the reports will be sent at the same time but in a random order.
The report may be sent at a later date if the browser was not running when the window finished. In this case, reports will be sent on startup. The user agent may also decide to delay some of these reports for a short random time on startup, so that they cannot be joined together easily by a given reporting domain.
Note that to improve utility, it might be possible to randomly send reports throughout each reporting window.
To send a report, the user agent will make a non-credentialed secure HTTP POST request to:
https://reportingdomain/.well-known/register-conversion?impression-data=&conversion-data=&attribution-credit=
The conversion report data is included as query params as they represent non-hierarchical data (URI RFC):
-
impression-data: 64 bit metadata set on the impression -
conversion-metadata: 3 bit metadata set in the conversion redirect -
attribution-credit: integer in range [0, 100], denotes the percentage of credit this impression received for the given conversion. If a conversion only had one matching impression, this will be 100.
The advertiser site’s eTLD+1 will be added as the Referrer. Note that it might be useful to advertise which metadata limits were used in the report, but it isn’t included here.
It also may be beneficial to send reports as JSON instead of in the report URL. JSON reports could allow this API to leverage the Reporting API in the future should it be desirable.
Impression metadata and conversion metadata should be encoded the same way, and in a way that is amenable to any privacy level a browser would want to choose (i.e. the number of distinct metadata states supported).
Our proposal is to encode the metadata via hexadecimal numbers, and interpret them modulo the maximum metadata value. That is, the algorithm takes as input a string and performs the equivalent of:
function getMetadata(str, max_value) {
return (parseInt(str, 16) % max_value).toString(16);
}
The benefit of this method over using a fixed bit mask is that it allows browsers to implement max_values that aren’t multiples of 2.
publisher.com wants to show ads on their site, so they contract out to
ad-tech.com. ad-tech.com script in the main document creates a
cross-origin iframe to host the third party advertisement for
toasters.com, and sets ad-tech.com to be an allowed reporting domain.
Within the iframe, toasters.com code annotates their anchor tags to use
the ad-tech.com reporting domain, and uses impression data that allows
ad-tech.com to identify the ad click (0x12345678)
<iframe src=”https://ad-tech-3p.test/show-some-ad” allow=”conversion-reporting ‘src’ (https://ad-tech.com)”>
...
<a
href=”https://toasters.com/purchase”
addestination=”https://toasters.com”
impressiondata=”0x12345678”
reportingdomain=”https://ad-tech.com”
impressionexpiry=604800000>
...
</iframe>
A user clicks on the ad and has a window open that lands on a URL to
toasters.com/purchase. An impression event is logged to browser storage
since the landing page matches the ad destination. The following data is
stored:
{
impression-data: 0x12345678,
ad-destination: https://toasters.com,
reporting-domain: https://ad-tech.com,
impression-expiry: <now() + 604800>
}
2 days later, the user buys something on toasters.com. toasters.com
registers conversions on the few different ad-tech companies it buys
impressions on, including ad-tech.com, by adding conversion pixels:
<img src=”https://ad-tech.com/conversion?model=toastmaster3000&price=$49.99&...” />
ad-tech.com receives this request, and decides to trigger a conversion
on toasters.com. They must compress all of the conversion metadata into
3 bits, so ad-tech.com chooses to encode the value as “2” (e.g. some
bucketed version of the purchase value). They respond with a 302
redirect to:
https://ad-tech.com/.well-known/register-conversion?conversion-metadata=0x2
The browser sees this request, and schedules a conversion report to be
sent. The conversion report is associated with the 7 day deadline as the
2 day deadline has passed. Roughly 5 days later, ad-tech.com receives
the following HTTP POST:
https://ad-tech.com/.well-known/register-conversion?impression-data=12345678&conversion-metadata=2&attribution-credit=100
The main privacy goal of the API is to make linking identity between two different top-level sites difficult. This happens when either a request or a Javascript environment has two user IDs from two different sites simultaneously.
In this API, the 64-bit impression ID can encode a user ID from the publisher’s top level site, but the low entropy, noisy conversion metadata could only encode a small part of a user ID from the advertiser’s top-level site. The impression ID and the conversion metadata are never exposed to a Javascript environment together, and the request that includes both of them is sent without credentials and at a different time from either event, so the request adds little new information linkable to these events.
While this API does allow you to learn "which ad clicks converted", it isn’t enough to link publisher and advertiser identity, unless there is serious abuse of the API, i.e. abusers are using error correcting codes and many clicks to slowly and probabilistically learn advertiser IDs associated with publisher ones. We explore some mitigations to this attack below.
Conversion metadata is extremely important for critical use-cases like reporting the value of a conversion. However, too much conversion metadata could be used to link advertiser identity with publisher identity.
Mitigations against this are to provide only coarse information (only a few bits at a time), and introduce some noise to the conversion. Even sophisticated attackers will therefore need to invoke the API many times (through many clicks) to join identity between sites with high confidence.
By bucketing reports within a small number reporting deadlines, it becomes harder to associate a conversion report with the identity of the user on the advertiser’s site via timing side channels.
Conversions within the same reporting window occur within an anonymity set with all others during that time period. For example, if we didn’t bucket conversion reports, the reports (which contain publisher ids) could be easily joined up with the advertiser’s first party information via correlating timestamps.
Note that the delay windows / deadlines chosen represent a trade-off with utility, since it becomes harder to properly assign credit to a click if the time from click to conversion is not known. That is, time-to-conversion is an important signal for proper conversion attribution. Browsers should make sure that this trade-off is concretely evaluated for both privacy and utility before deciding on a delay.
If the advertiser is allowed to cycle through many possible reporting
domains (via injecting many <img> tags on the page), then the
publisher and advertiser don’t necessarily have to agree apriori on what
reporting domains to use, and which domain actually ends up getting used
reveals some extra information.
To prevent abuse, it makes sense for UAs to add limits here, potentially on a per-page load or per-reporting epoch basis.
Impressions / conversions in browser storage should be clearable using existing “clear browsing data” functionality offered by UAs.
To limit the amount of user identity leakage between a <publisher, advertiser> pair, the browser should throttle the amount of total information sent through this API in a given time period for a user. The browser should set a maximum number of conversion reports per <publisher, advertiser, user> tuple per time period. If this threshold is hit, the browser will disable the conversion API for the rest of the time period for that user.
The longer the cooldown windows are, the harder it is to abuse the API and join identity. Ideally report thresholds should be low enough to avoid leaking too much sensitive information, with cooldown windows as long as practically possible.
It’s an open question what specific limits are possible here.
Another mitigation on joining identity across publisher and advertiser sites is to limit the number of conversion reports for any given <publisher, advertiser> pair until the advertiser clears their site data. This could occur via the Clear-Site-Data header or by explicit user action.
To prevent linking across deletions, we might need to introduce new options to the Clear-Site-Data header to only clear data after the page has unloaded.
Another way to add privacy to this system is to not only add noise to the conversion metadata, but to whether the conversion occurred in the first place. That is:
-
With some probability p, true conversions will be dropped
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With some probability q, impressions that have not converted will be marked as converted, and given random conversion metadata.
The biggest problem with this scheme is that conversion events are, in general, rare. Additionally, different advertisers can have wildly different conversion rates. These two facts make it very hard to pick a q that works reliably without drowning out the signal with noise. We’re still thinking of solutions here.
Additionally, sending conversion reports for impressions that never actually converted could have real monetary impact on advertisers that pay per conversion. Tight bounds on error estimation will be crucial for correct billing in these cases.
An advertiser may want to send reports to multiple reporting partners at the same time. This is very tricky to get right without revealing any extra information. Allowing different conversion metadata for different reporting endpoints makes things even more difficult.
This problem becomes a bit easier if reporting partners mutually trust each other, and can share reporting server-to-server.
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