Prebid Server Event Support - server-side analytics

[bretg]

The next revision of the Prebid Events design is at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ry0X4C2EV-R0pMrm1IQk9BstxaT395UCl3KKqTGa5c8/edit#

The driver for this round of updates is the need to have server-side-only tracking of auctions for the web 'channel'. In the previous iteration, the assumption was that Prebid.js analytics adapters would be responsible for auction events and most bidsWon events.

However, there are two use cases where that's not enough:

• Prebid Server host company doesn't have an analytics adapter on the page
• The server-side analytics system is different from the client-side analytics.

The changes to the doc are:

• Added scenarios for Web/Banner/Server-Side-with-PBS-Analytics and Web/Instream/Server-Side-with-PBS-Analytics
• Fleshed out all the flow diagrams with numbered descriptions
• Added the “int” (integration type) parameter to event URLs (related to Integration Type and Channel #1428)
• Refined the Prebid Server Event Algorithm

This issue tracks the review and implementation of the changes to the Prebid Server Event Algorithm

Specifically, here's what changed:

• New account+channel analytics configuration. e.g account 111 gets AMP/App events, but not web events. Account 222 gets events for all 3 channels: web/AMP/App.
• Server-side analytics adapters need access to this new account-level event config so they can determine what to do.
• Clarified the algorithm around when and how to create the 3 different event URLs. Includes how to deal with Programmatic Guaranteed, which is out of scope for PBS-Go.

[bretg]

As part of this improvement, we realized that the definition of "channel" is quite important to the proper functioning of events and that it really needs to be consistent between PBS-Core that's dropping bidsWon/imp URLs into responses and the analytics adapter.

However in #1428 we defined PBS-core to only set AMP and App. But as defined in the PBS event algorithm, that's not enough to trigger bidsWon for "web". So we need to extend what core does to determine channel. Options:

1. support a configurable default channel (e.g. web)
2. can we assume that the existence of a "site" object is always channel "web"?
3. make channel determination very configurable (e.g. regex map in config)

Another aspect of the account/channel configuration needs to be confirmed as well:

• overall default is suggested to be web:false, app:true, amp:true in order to avoid breaking changes
• should we make this default configurable by the host company

[bretg]

Discussed in PBS committee. We agreed:

• for now, the existence of the "site" object can imply the "web" channel
• we should go ahead and define a more powerful way of mapping to channel
• but no need to implement that more powerful way until driven by an actual use case

We didn't actually discuss the part about default account/channel configuration. For now the default will be coded to "web:false, app:true, amp:true" -- we can make this configurable when driven by a use case.

[bretg]

Released with PBS-Java 1.45

[SyntaxNode]

Revisiting this issue, it's not clear what other development work is need. PBS-Java 1.45 includes the related code changes:

• Fix condition of vast event url generation prebid-server-java#934
• Fix event generation for vast prebid-server-java#932
• Revise event urls creation conditions prebid-server-java#915

There has been a lot of activity since this issue submitted by Pubmatic. Let's check if this issue is already addressed in PBS-Go.

[bretg]

@ShriprasadM - could you review this and help us determine if this is covered by your team's in-progress work?