Tag Archives: openrtb

Migration to OpenRTB, deprecation of the Authorized Buyers Real-time Bidding Protocol

To align more closely with industry practices and embrace OpenRTB as the standard protocol, Authorized Buyers Real-time Bidding protocol will sunset February 15th, 2025. Following this date, bid requests will no longer be sent to endpoints configured to use the Authorized Buyers RTB protocol. After this time we will support the OpenRTB protocol only. We strongly recommend that you transition to either the JSON or Protobuf formats of the Authorized Buyers OpenRTB protocol implementation as early as possible to avoid interruptions to your bidding integration.

As a first step in migrating to OpenRTB, we suggest that you read through the OpenRTB migration guide. The guide highlights differences between the Google RTB protocol and the supported OpenRTB formats, identifies how Google RTB protocol fields map to OpenRTB, and provides instructions for complex mappings. We will continue updating our developer content as we approach February 2025 to provide additional guidance, and to ensure a smooth migration.

For any questions or feedback you have concerning the transition to OpenRTB, please contact us using the Authorized Buyers support forum, or [email protected].

- Mark Saniscalchi, Authorized Buyers Developer Relations

Removing support for old OpenRTB versions

Starting today, Google’s OpenRTB implementation will be updated to only include fields and messages for the latest supported version, OpenRTB 2.5. This will affect the OpenRTB protocol and any APIs or tools used to configure bidder endpoints.

OpenRTB protocol changes
As a result of supporting only the latest version, the following fields are deprecated and will no longer be populated:
  • BidRequest.imp[].banner.hmax
  • BidRequest.imp[].banner.hmin
  • BidRequest.imp[].banner.wmax
  • BidRequest.imp[].banner.wmin
Additionally, the following fields may now be populated for all bidders:
  • BidRequest.device.ext.user_agent_data
  • BidRequest.device.geo.accuracy
  • BidRequest.device.geo.utcoffset
  • BidRequest.imp[].banner.api: This will support the value MRAID_3.
  • BidRequest.imp[].banner.format
  • BidRequest.imp[].banner.vcm
  • BidRequest.imp[].metric
  • BidRequest.imp[].native.api: This will support the value MRAID_3.
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.api: This will support the value MRAID_3.
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.companionad.api
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.companionad.format
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.companionad.vcm
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.linearity
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.maxduration
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.placement
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.playbackend
  • BidRequest.imp[].video.skip
  • BidRequest.site.mobile
  • BidRequest.test
  • BidRequest.wlang
If a newer OpenRTB specification is published, Google may upgrade the current supported version to match it. Previously deprecated fields that are removed from the specification will also be removed from the protocol. Non-deprecated fields that are removed will be marked as deprecated in the protocol, and eventually removed following a brief deprecation period.

Authorized Buyers Real-time Bidding API changes
The behavior of the bidders.endpoints resource will change. The following enum values for bidProtocol will be deprecated:
  • OPENRTB_2_2
  • OPENRTB_2_3
  • OPENRTB_PROTOBUF_2_3
  • OPENRTB_2_4
  • OPENRTB_PROTOBUF_2_4
  • OPENRTB_2_5
  • OPENRTB_PROTOBUF_2_5
New enum values for bidProtocol will be added to represent the latest supported OpenRTB version in either JSON or Protobuf formats:
  • OPENRTB_JSON
  • OPENRTB_PROTOBUF
If you have existing endpoints with their bidProtocol set to any of the deprecated values above, they will automatically be migrated to either OPENRTB_JSON or OPENRTB_PROTOBUF depending on the format specified by the original value. Additionally, any modifications to your endpoints that would set bidProtocol to the deprecated values will instead set it to OPENRTB_JSON or OPENRTB_PROTOBUF.

Feel free to reach out to us via the Authorized Buyers API support forum with any feedback or questions you may have related to these changes.
- Mark Saniscalchi, Authorized Buyers Developer Relations

Real-time Bidding with OpenRTB and DoubleClick Ad Exchange

Working with multiple exchanges is a key pain point for those developing real-time bidders. To-date, individual exchanges have used their own distinct protocols requiring the time-consuming development of a separate model for each exchange. In response, the OpenRTB consortium introduced standards for communication in real-time bidding that greatly simplifies the process of adding support for new exchanges. That’s why we are pleased to announce two new open source libraries that implement the OpenRTB specification and are now available on GitHub—google/openrtb and google/openrtb-doubleclick.

The openrtb library provides support for the core OpenRTB model and was designed with extensibility in mind to support the development of libraries for other exchanges. The openrtb-doubleclick library is an extension of openrtb for DoubleClick Ad Exchange that provides interoperability between the OpenRTB model and DoubleClick's Real-Time Bidding protocol. The library also includes DoubleClick-specific utilities. In summary, these libraries provide the following:
  • The model - The RTB model, as seen in the OpenRTB specification.
  • The mapper - Translates DoubleClick’s native model to/from OpenRTB.
  • The serializer - Translates JSON to/from the OpenRTB model.
  • DoubleClick Ad Exchange utilities - Utilities to handle bid validation, DoubleClick crypto and metadata.
For more information about the OpenRTB specification, check out the documentation on their Github page.

 - , Ad Exchange Team