imasdk.googleapis.com shows up in Google Analytics

[othman...@gmail.com]

Hi,

imasdk.googleapis.com shows up in referral traffic in my Google Analytics report.

Can anyone explain to me in layman terms what imasdk.googleapis.com is? Shall i consider is bot, spam or what kind of traffic? Is it real visitors traffic?

Please help explain in simple non-technical terms.

Thanks!

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi,

The IMA SDK is a Google Ads SDK that allows developers and publishers to show interactive and video ads on their websites and mobile apps. If you're advertising your site somewhere, it's likely that you're seeing traffic from ads being shown on pages using the IMA SDK. 

Let me know if you have any further questions. For more information, you can take a look at our documentation.

Regards,

Chris Feldman

IMA SDK Team

[Othman Sarwani]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the reply.

I am still not sure if I understood that correctly.

Yes we are advertising using Adwords and on Facebook and Instagram.

Our ads are a mix of static images, text ads and video ads as well.

So.... is IMA SDK like Google Adsense? (In the sense that Adsense allowed users to show ads on their websites)

I was looking at the ads configured in Adwords by my colleague,... and i see references to many sites in 'Placements'. So my guess is that our ads are being shown on those placements. Those sites might be using IMA SDK and hence it shows up in referral traffic.

But I can look up for placement reports to see how those sites responded.... what additional value does the referral traffic from ima sdk provide me?

Why do I see many people adding imasdk in their 'Exclusion List' ? 

Which brings me back to my original question: I need to create traffic reports for my company and i need to know whether to include imasdk referral traffic to my report or to ignore it.

Thanks for your help.

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[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi,

As this is a support forum for the IMA SDK, I will only be able to answer your questions as they pertain to our SDK. For more information about topics related to AdSense or about what to include in your reports, you'll have to reach out to the support channel for that product.

If it's true that most people put IMA on their 'Exclusions List' then it's probably because knowing that a referral came from 'imasdk.googleapis.com' doesn't tell you anything about how the user got to your site. All that would tell you is that the site your user came from uses the IMA SDK to show ads. That information may or may not be valuable to you.

Regards,

Chris Feldman

IMA SDK Team

[Liam Holmes]

Just getting the same issue. It is hard to report on Google Display performance- as this is now under another source/medium.

It will also affect reporting like conversion tracking, optimisation etc

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Liam,

For reporting issues, you'll have to reach out ad provider or reporting service. From an SDK perspective, it's not possible to change the referrer URL in the request header. We recommend using ad tag parameters to designate the URL of the page a request is being made from.

Regards,

Chris Feldman

IMA SDK Team

[Carson]

Google should really have these servers on a different AS than the traffic it runs it's crawlers, web master tools, etc.

SDK traffic ASN: AS15169

Various legit Google Bot's ASN: AS15169

Google Cloud Platform ASN: AS396982

Since anyone can host bots on google servers, we can block IP's at our discretion from the last network we know it's not official Google traffic. Becomes very difficult to differentiate traffic from a real google products (webmaster, bots, etc) from something spamming your analytics with traffic because some random ad server's link checker runs JS.

[IMA SDK]

Hi Carson,

Thank you for contacting the IMA SDK support team.

Could you please specify if you are facing issues related to IMA SDK? If yes, can you elaborate on the issue in detail along with below details for further investigation: 

• IMA SDK Version being used
• Provide stream details: if it is live or video on demand (VOD). Furthermore, if the content is live, what is the stream format and the asset key? If the content is VOD, what is the stream format, CMS ID, and Video ID?
• If DRM is used, please provide a "clear stream" that has no DRM.

This message is in relation to case "ref:!00D1U01174p.!5004Q02r2Zwu:ref"

Thanks,
 

IMA SDK Team