Unable to track viewable impression

[Lorenzo Cinque]

Hi guys,

We have a problem with viewability tracking. We have IMA HTML5 integrated into our HTML5 player and it seems that for some reason IMA doesn't call viewable_impression and other viewability events. Here is a demo of our player with IMA (ima3_debug). The VAST is taken from https://developers.google.com/interactive-media-ads/docs/sdks/html5/tags .

I also built a demo with videojs-ima (same VAST, you can see the code here)

Both integrations follow this actions https://developers.google.com/interactive-media-ads/docs/sdks/html5/sdk-player#actions

You can see in the console that in the videojs-ima demo there are these lines:

[  4.376s] [ima.vast.VideoAdEventTracker] dispatching event viewable_impression
[  4.379s] [ima.vast.VastAdServerReporter] Reporting urls for event : viewable_impression

[  7.722s] [ima.vast.VideoAdEventTracker] dispatching event fully_viewable_audible_half_duration_impression

[  7.724s] [ima.vast.VastAdServerReporter] Reporting urls for event : fully_viewable_audible_half_duration_impression

In our case, there aren't. I can't spot the difference between the two players.

Are there any guidelines we should be following for proper tracking?

The only events that are missing are the viewability ones.

Thanks 

Lorenzo Cinque

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Lorenzo,

The fact that the source for your player is obfuscated makes this difficult for me to debug directly. However, the most common reason for a viewable_impression pixel to not fire would be if another HTML element is obscuring the adDisplayContainer. Even if an element is not literally visible, if it's being displayed on top of the adDisplayContainer it can block the SDK from detecting that an ad is visible. And if the SDK can't tell that an ad is visible it won't fire the viewable_impression pixel. 

I would suggest making sure that there's nothing in your DOM that could obscure the ad. A good thing to check is the z-index of the various elements on your page.

Please let me know if you continue to have issues. I'll be happy to answer any further questions you might have.

Regards,

Chris Feldman

IMA SDK Team

[Lorenzo Cinque]

Hi Chris, thanks for the reply. I checked and it doesn't seem that there are any elements in the DOM that obscure the adDisplayContainer.

You can check for yourself here with the inspector :) Is there anything else I could be doing wrong?

Lorenzo

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Lorenzo,

Your implementation is especially difficult to debug because your code related to the SDK is obfuscated and your SDK components are added dynamically. But one thing I can see is that you're toggling the display state of your adDisplayContainer when the ad starts and when the ad ends. If the adContainer is still hidden when the viewable_impression is measured, that would cause the pixel not to fire. I also noticed that you're setting the z-index on your DOM elements. From what I could tell, there was nothing above your adDisplayContainer, but that's another thing worth keeping an eye on.

If you're able to share an unobfuscated version of your page, I may be able to provide more assistance.

Regards,
Chris Feldman

IMA SDK Team

[Maurizio Sambati]

Hi Chris,

unluckily we can't share publicly the code of our player due to the internal policy of the company. We may share it privately if this could help sort the problem out. In case we can't move the conversation in a private channel, Lorenzo is going to share another demo with much less elements around but still with the minified code.

I feel like this is a bug of the implementation of the viewability in IMA as the video is clearly visible but it's not correctly detected.

Please note the viewability used to work before, so I guess it is due to a recent change in the SDK. :-/

> If the adContainer is still hidden when the viewable_impression is measured, that would cause the pixel not to fire.

Is viewable impression tracking the IAB viewability? The measurement should be done continuously in this case as 2 seconds of viewable video can happen until the video finishes.

Thanks,

Maurizio

[Lorenzo Cinque]

Hi Chris,

I've updated the demo with our player at https://mulder90.github.io/viralize/

Thanks,

Lorenzo

[Shawn Busolits (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Lorenzo,

As Chris noted earlier, this is going to be very difficult to debug without seeing the implementation. We do have a private channel you could use to message us, ima-sdk...@google.com. Would you be able to share code if we opened up an email exchange there?

In the meantime, we've seen a similar issue in the past when the AdsLoader was being destroyed prematurely. Are you destroying the AdsLoader at any point, and if so, when are you doing that?

Thanks,

Shawn Busolits

IMA SDK Team

[Lorenzo Cinque]

Hi Shawn,

thanks for your reply :) We have fixed the problem. We were calling adsLoader.destroy() when the ADS_MANAGER_LOADED event was dispatched because we thought that, after that event, the adsLoader wasn’t needed anymore.

Lorenzo

[Shawn Busolits (IMA SDK Team)]

Aha, glad to hear it's fixed :)

Thanks,

Shawn Busolits

IMA SDK Team

[Matias Pulla]

Hi Shown,

Please, take a look for this simple demo:

https://codepen.io/macpol/pen/LdGZXy

There are some ima event logs in the console.

I think, something wrong is with "viewable_impression" event.

I mean, in most cases there is no viewable_impression when we destroy first ima instance (adsLoader, adDisplayContainer, adsManager) and create a new one.

There are two buttons to easy destroy and reinit ima api.

Could You debug, confirm and eventually explain above situation?

Thanks for any help.

Best Regards

Matias

[Matias Pulla]

Hi Shawn,
I found one more issue on safari browser, IMA doesn't call viewable_impression even one time.

I checked it on my imac and macbook (OSX 10.11.6, Safari 11)

demo:

https://codepen.io/macpol/pen/LdGZXy

Thanks,
Matias

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Matias,

Thank you for reaching out to support. At this time, the SDK is known to have intermittent issues with the viewable_impression ping when IMA is initialized more than once on a single page. We are working towards a resolution. In the meantime, I would suggest re-using your SDK components rather than destroying and completely re-initializing each time. You should be able to achieve the functionality that you're looking for by destroying your adsManager and calling contentComplete on your adsLoader before making a new ad request.

Please let me know if there's anything else you need. If you have any further questions, please open a new thread. Doing so helps us to track responses and keep the forum organized.

Thank you,

Chris Feldman

IMA SDK Team

[Matias Pulla]

Thank You for info.

I understand so keeping one IMA instance without destroying and reinitializing is the best solution right now.

But this way is possible only with one Player and one IMA instance.

What can I do with two players, both with initialized IMA components?

Thanks.

Matias

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Matias,

If you want to utilize two IMA players on a single page, it will 'work' insofar as it will play ads. However, you'll only be able to get a viewable_impression pixel on the player that was initialized first. This is something that our team has been working to fix. We are currently testing solutions and hope to have this working in an upcoming SDK release. I can follow-up on this thread when I have more information that I'm able to share.

Regards,

Chris Feldman
IMA SDK Team

[Chris Feldman (IMA SDK Team)]

Hi Matias,

The issue involving viewable_impression pings on pages with more than one IMA integration has now been resolved. Please let me know if you continue to have issues.

Regards,
Chris Feldman
IMA SDK Team