Advertisers are calling for full URL-level campaign reporting, and DSPs are responding in different ways

Since then, the industry debate has been intense, with a growing chorus calling for more vendor transparency. And with that has come some confusion as to how the industry’s leading demand-side platforms will respond.

IAB CEO David Cohen made his philosophy clear on how the industry should move ahead. “Instead of pointing fingers, it may make sense to talk about the misalignment of incentives … move the conversation from efficiency at all costs to effectiveness and starve bad actors from monetization,” he said in a LinkedIn statement.

Refunds and product updates

In recent weeks, sources told Digiday that the fallout from the report amounted to an “emperor has no clothes” moment for the big brand safety vendors. But, for their part, DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science (the hegemonies of the ad verification space) also made vows to improve their services in the run-up to their respective earnings calls last month.

Related Insights

Brand Safety

Amazon Ads to change URL transparency and reporting after high-profile CSAM report from Adalytics Read More

Following the initial Feb. 7 report, Digiday revealed how Amazon — the fastest-growing DSP in the space, per researchers — plans to add more transparency tools to its platform, introducing new page-level reporting through its Traffic Events API. This is in addition to refunds it issued to advertisers impacted by the evidence contained in the Adalytics report.

Elsewhere, Google, whose DSP was similarly implicated in the study, hasn’t publicly confirmed plans to overhaul the granularity of DV 360 — it’s worth noting that Google’s ad stack is still undergoing antitrust scrutiny with a trial verdict expected within weeks, if not days. Although, it has publicly stated that it demonetized the offending sites featured in Adalytics’ findings and has reportedly issued refunds in recent weeks.

Confusion over The Trade Desk

Meanwhile, there appears to be some confusion as to how The Trade Desk, which was not implicated in the Adalytics report, intends to offer granular campaign reporting.

In the weeks after Adalytics’ report was published, separate sources told Digiday that The Trade Desk planned new page-level reporting, similar to Amazon’s update, with technical aspects involving media buying teams appending software code, known as a “macro,” to an ad campaign’s creatives. From here, The Trade Desk’s clients can then pull in the full page-level URL (up to 2,000 characters per web page), according to two sources.

However, when Digiday put these claims to a spokesperson for the industry’s largest independent DSP, they responded, “We are not planning on building URL-level reporting.”

As sources pointed out to Digiday, The Trade Desk’s Raw Event Data Stream unit — a team more commonly known as “REDS” that collects raw, log-level bidding events from won auctions and pixels on webpages — can theoretically grant the DSPs’ clients URL-level reporting. The problem is that few advertisers have the resources necessary to do so.

“Only a select few people who want full URL data have the resources and expertise to do anything in particular with it,” said Rocky Moss, CEO of DeepSee.io, a company that works with The Trade Desk to assess the suitability of publisher content.

Moss further pointed out that advertisers would have to deploy a huge number of web crawlers and invest a sizable amount of man hours in order to use such granular reporting effectively.

“So it’s not like URL-level reporting is made available, and then everything is okay from that point on … there’s a huge amount of legwork that goes from there to flagging things like CSMA at the URL level,” he said.