You should certify a specific publisher or ad format to proactively test ad serving and reporting functionality for AAScreatives before launching a campaign. This will help prevent issues with creative displays and discrepancies in reporting. However, not every publisher and ad format you work with needs to be certified. The majority of setups will perform without issue - especially for conventional sites and standard formats.
So then what do you need to certify? Certification is highly recommended for complex environments (mobile apps, programmatic delivery & use of SSAI) or for complex formats (see advanced formats).
We provide this guide for agencies, advertisers, and publishers who are interested in certifying AAS ad formats. It provides for test tags, testing guidelines and walks the publisher through the steps of the certification process. We encourage you to perform these tests ahead of the campaign launch to allow our customer support teams enough time for troubleshooting and resolving potential issues. Certification is always for a specific publisher and a specific ad format. All test ads available in this guide follow IAB guidelines.
Publisher Certification is two-fold:
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Simple Certification: Verifying the ad (format) displays correctly on a given site. Generic test tags for all common ad formats and sizes are available for download. Visit Simple Certification for more information.
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Assisted Certification: Verifying measurement compatibility by comparing reporting data from the publisher ad server and from AAS. Visit Assisted Certification for more information. Data comparison is generally optional, except for the following environments, for which Assisted Certification is mandatory:
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In-App serving
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Programmatic serving
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OTT Serving
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SSAI
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In order to certify, you need test tags. Simple Certifications are readily available. For Assisted Certifications, we will generate individual test tags if you send us a "Request tags for Data Comparison" ticket via the publisher form. As a next step, we need you to place the test tag on your site and follow the steps in the testing documentation. If there are no technical problems or you want to submit the reports for your test campaign, please send a "Submit Results" ticket via the publisher ticket form and the Publisher Care team will confirm your certification. If you encounter problems, with the setup or the displaying of the ad, please submit an Assistance required ticket via the publisher ticket form and the Publisher Care team will support you until you can finalize your certification.
During the certification process, we document Publishers' specific creative and technical requirements in our system. This ensures all future live ads are created according to the correct ad specs and that ad tags can be trafficked without issues. This database is part of our Media Plan Evaluation service.
Certification is NOT bulletproof, as both the template and the website we test are subject to change. This is why after some time (in case of a re-design of the webpage directly - otherwise every 2-3 years) it is useful to re-certify, depending on the complexity of the format and the website.
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