All purpose and vendor consents off by default in UMP = NO ADS

[OP]

Hi,

After implementing Funding Choices with Google's User Messaging Platform (UMP) we noticed that ads will not be served if the user taps "Manage options" in the UMP consent message.

Firstly, the ads will stop serving because the consent for Purpose 1 (the consent to store and/or access information on a device) is off by default in UMP. Again, if there is no consent for Purpose 1, Google's documentation says the following:

"If consent is missing for Google for Purpose 1 in the TC string, Google will drop the ad request and no ads will be served." 

https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/9805023?hl=en

It hardly makes sense to have this consent toggled off by default in UMP when an user taps Manage options, as it will disable all ads and would be a critical hit to ad revenue.

Secondly, when the user taps Manage options, not only are all of the purpose consents off by default, ALL of the vendor specific consents buried at the bottom of the UMP form are also off. This means, that even if the user would manually agree to all of the purpose consents, the resulting TC string created with UMP would still not have vendor consents on. 

In more technical terms the stored values 

- IABTCF_VendorConsents

- IABTCF_PurposeConsents

that are used in the TC string in the ad request are both "0".

This is not a developer implementation issue — this is an issue with the User Messaging Platform SDK. Also, this is not an ad serving issue, so I would ask not to be redirected to AdMob/AdManager support.

Regards,

OP

[Pyron Apps]

This is exactly the same problem me and a lot of other developers have. It's so weird!
May I ask, how are you able to get the TC string? For Android and iOS I don't know where to find it.

Pyron Apps

[OP]

The TC string is stored in NSUserDefaults on iOS or SharedPreferences on Android. You can observe the TC string and the other values there. The encoded value "IABTCF_TCString" is also picked up by the Google Mobile Ads SDK and sent with the ad request if you observe those.

[Bastiaan van den Berg]

Thanks for your clarification OP, finally some useful formation on this issue. I would also like to urge the team to have a look at this, this is a serious issue.

All consent toggles are off by default, which does not make any sense. When I was setting up the consent form on Funding Choices, I already noticed that and spent a few minutes toggling them all on before saving the form, but the toggle settings were not persisted.., so there is no way to change this behavior.

In the app where I have UMP integrated, I now managed to get ads when switching on the very first toggle, and, in the vendor preferences, the "Google Advertising Products" toggle (which requires a bit of scrolling to find it..). Again, this does not make any sense.

Also, when I open the form again (the one where I just switched on two toggles, which took me  a few minutes), everything is switched off again!?! If a user opens the consent form, should she/he not be presented with the settings that are stored for this?? Again, this does not make any sense. Has this product been (integration) tested at all?

[Pyron Apps]

Support told me that the form is always the simple and same one, so it doesn't take in consideration of previously saved settings (I opened an issue here on google groups yesterday).

Thanks OP for the clarification, I think it's just insane to think of not displaying ads at all if users decides to not check any checkbox; what would be the purpose of making paying money to disable ads in the app? In 2 months everyone would fail and no apps will be developed anymore!

[Mobile Ads SDK Forum Advisor Prod]

Hi ,

Thank you to all that have posted comments and concerns on this issue Based on what I have read, OP is correct on how to find where the consents are being done. And this is how we are at the moment advising people to get the consent that we need. 

At the same time I will be bringing this to my teams attention. Once we have some feedback regarding this we will be certain to pass this along.

Regards,

William Pescherine Mobile Ads SDK Team

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[Frank]

Hi  William 

but you already know since 1 month about all the problems with the new UMP SDK and there is no feedback from you yet. Nothing changed, no improvements etc.

I mean you "must" understand that these are very critical problems for us developers and we do not want to loose all of our income !!! 

So many people have reported you detailed problems with UMP (me too).  Only hitting the Send button without changing anything in options from UMP turns all ads off. Thats impossible for us all. 

Europe has the most traffic. Then we all must stop the development of applications for android and ios because we do not make any money anymore. 

Nobody here knows what to do at the moment with all the problems and it feels like you leave us completely alone with these problems. 

Frank

[OP]

Thank you for the response.

However, the discussion on "where to find the consent information" was just a side note, and not the issue described in my initial post. The issue is that the UMP form by default disables all ads whenever the user taps "Manage options". UMP also disables the ads so thoroughly by toggling off purpose and vendor consents that the user could not with reasonable effort re-enable ads, even if they wanted to.

OP

[Mobile Ads SDK Forum Advisor Prod]

Hello,

To provide some closure here, we hear your feedback around the user experience of the form when reopening the form and are thinking about ways to improve the UI to drive higher consent rates. However, the UMP SDK must also comply with the IAB Europe Transparency & Consent Framework policies (more information here).

Thanks,
Eric, Mobile Ads SDK Team

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