Attribution Reporting

# Who is this article for?

This article covers the basics of Attribution Reporting, and explains some underlying concepts, but doesn't go into much technical detail.

• If you work in advertising or ad tech, Use cases and How does Attribution Reporting work? should be useful.
• If you're a developer or software engineer, head over to the Attribution Reporting: experiment and participate.

# Changes

Keep track of the API changes.

Learn why we plan to ship the Attribution Reporting API in the first half of 2023.

# What is the Attribution Reporting API?

Today, ad conversion measurement often relies on third-party cookies.

Browsers are restricting access to third-party cookies because these can be used to track users across sites and hinder user privacy.

The Attribution Reporting API enables those measurements in a privacy-preserving way, without third-party cookies.

This API enables advertisers and ad tech providers to measure conversions in the following cases:

• Ad clicks and views.
• Ads in a third-party iframe, such as ads on a publisher site that uses a third-party ad tech provider.
• Ads in a first-party context, such as ads on a social network or a search engine results page, or a publisher serving their own ads.

# Who needs to know about this API?

• Ad tech platforms such as demand-side platforms (DSP) or data management platforms (DMP) may use this API to support functionality that currently relies on third-party cookies.
• Advertisers and publishers relying on custom code for advertising or conversion measurement may use this API to replace existing techniques.
• Advertisers and publishers relying on ad tech platforms for conversion measurement don't need to use the API directly, but may be interested in understanding it if they're working with ad tech platforms that may integrate the API.

# Try the API

• The Attribution Reporting API is available for experiments in the ads relevance and measurement origin trial.
  • Multiple rounds of origin trials are run to improve and adjust APIs based on ecosystem feedback.
• You can test locally in your browser. Set a flag, which tells the Chrome browser to enable specific experimental features.

If you're interested in experimenting with the API, head over to Attribution Reporting: experiment and participate.

# Status

# Use cases and features

The Attribution Reporting API gives access to different types of insights via two types of reports that can be sent to an advertiser or a third-party ad tech provider. These two types of reports can be used simultaneously and are complementary.

• Event-level reports associate a particular ad click or view (on the ad side) with data on the conversion side. To preserve user privacy by preventing the joining of user identity across sites, conversion-side data is very limited, and the data is noised (meaning that for a small percentage of cases, random data is sent instead of real reports). As an extra privacy protection, reports are not sent immediately.
• Summary reports are not tied to a specific event on the ad side. These reports provide richer, higher-fidelity conversion data than event-level reports. A combination of privacy techniques help reduce the risk of identity joining across sites.

Both report types can be used simultaneously. They're complementary.

# Event-level reports

Event-level reports associate an ad click or view with coarse conversion data.

Event-level reports are suited for:

• Optimization. Event-level reports help answer questions like "How can I improve my return on investment?". In particular, these reports can be used to optimize for ad placement, since a unique ID for the ad side can be made available in the reports. Event-level reports can provide training data for machine learning models.
• Coarse reporting, where very little information is needed about the conversion. The current limitation is 3 bits of conversion data for clicks⏤this means a conversion can be assigned one of eight categories⏤and 1 bit for views. Encoding of granular conversion-side data, such as a specific price or conversion time is not supported in event-level reports.
• Fraud detection. The data in some reports can be useful for ad fraud detection and analysis, by allowing you to understand patterns that can be used to identify spammy or invalid activity.

# Summary reports

Summary reports (formerly known as aggregate reports) offer more detailed conversion data and more flexibility for joining click/view data and conversion data.

Learn more about summary reports.

Summary reports are best suited for reporting use cases. These reports help answer questions such as: "What is my return on investment?"

Usage of summary reports for optimization—for example, to optimize for a purchase value, which is not supported by event-level reports (because the conversion data is too coarse)—is an area of active research.

# Other features

Other features proposed in this API include:

• App-to-web attribution: see or click an ad in an app and convert on the web.
• Cross-device attribution: see or click an ad on mobile and convert on desktop.

# Browser support

• Firefox and Edge haven't shared signals.
• Safari/Webkit is negative and proposed a different API to measure ad conversions, called Private Click Measurement.

# What browser configuration is available?

• Users can opt out of the API via the user settings at chrome://settings/privacySandbox.
• The API is not active in Incognito mode.
• The API is not active when third-party cookies are disabled.

# How can sites control access?

If the API is available in a given browser, it's available by default in any given site, both in top-level documents and scripts, and in same-origin iframes.

Arbitrary third-parties—for example, cross-origin ad iframes that were not added to the page via a script that has top-level access—can't use the API without a publisher's or advertiser's knowledge: in these iframes, the Attribution Reporting API needs to be explicitly enabled via a Permissions policy.

<iframe src="..." allow="attribution-reporting"></iframe>

Third parties with top-level access that add cross-origin iframes to a page can enable the Attribution Reporting API via this Permissions policy as well.

A site can disable the Attribution Reporting API for all parties—including scripts with top-level access—by sending the HTTP response header:

Permissions-Policy: attribution-reporting=()

# How does the Attribution Reporting API work?

The Attribution Reporting API enables the measurement of two events that are linked together: an event on a publisher's website, such as a user viewing or clicking an ad, with a subsequent conversion on an advertiser site.

# Event-level reports

# Summary reports

Summary reports are generated as follows:

• When the user clicks or sees a specially configured ad, the browser—on the user's local device—records this event, alongside the attribution configuration data that was specified.
  
• Later on, when the user converts, the browser matches this detailed clicks or views event ("attribution source event") with detailed conversion data ("attribution trigger data") defined by an ad tech company, following a specific logic that is defined by the ad tech. The output of this process is an aggregatable report.
  
• Aggregatable reports are encrypted by the browser and sent to the ad tech server. From the ad tech server, the aggregatable reports are sent to the aggregation service to produce a summary report.
  
• Summary reports are then made available to the ad tech. Note that summary reports are not delayed to the same extent as event-level reports.

# Privacy

# Overview

Let's take a person named Bob. Bob sees an ad while reading the news on news.example. One week later, Bob buys shoes on shoes.example.

Today, this conversion would be tracked by a third-party cookie used as a cross-site identifier. With third-party cookies, an ad tech company can access a lot of details on Bob's activity on news.example and on shoes.example. The ad tech can merge these pieces of information together to build a detailed profile of Bob, including Bob's location, browsing habits and preferred reads on news.example. This profile could also include purchases, activity, and credit card information on shoes.example. This cross-site joint is useful to measure ad conversions. But it hinders user privacy: Bob's activity is tracked across sites with a high level of detail.

Unlike third-party cookies, the Attribution Reporting API allows advertising companies to gain insights into conversions without tracking an individual's activity across sites. A small amount of information is joined across sites—enough to measure conversions, but not enough to track Bob's activity across sites in detail. Bob's activity on news.example and on shoes.example remains separate.

# In detail

Event-level reports link an ad-side identifier with a small amount of conversion-side data. While they do provide cross-site information about a conversion, but the conversion-side information is too coarse to join user identity across sites.

Summary reports provide detailed insights, but only at an aggregated level; because the contents of these aggregatable reports are encrypted when they are sent to the ad tech, the ad tech cannot get any information from the reports without using an aggregation service. The aggregation service only provides access to noisy aggregates.

Additional privacy protections such as rate limitations are imposed on both event-level and aggregate reports.

# Engage and share feedback

• For questions about the proposal: create an issue on the proposal repo.
• If you're an origin trial participant and have technical questions, join the Attribution Reporting mailing list for developers and ask questions there, or file a Chromium bug.
• For implementation, integration, and general best practice questions: create an issue on the Privacy Sandbox developer support repo.