The IAB published version 2.6 of the OpenRTB specification in April 2022. The updated document now addresses the landscape changes brought about by Google’s User-Agent Client Hints (UA-CH) proposal. With this update, the OpenRTB specification now explicitly defines how to populate the ua attribute and the sua attribute in the case where a browser supports User-Agent Client Hints:
For backwards compatibility, exchanges are recommended to always populate ua with the User-Agent string, when available from the end user’s device, even if an alternative representation, such as the User-Agent Client-Hints, is available and is used to populate sua. No inferred or approximated user agents are expected in this field.
If a client supports User-Agent Client Hints, and sua field is present, bidders are recommended to rely on sua for detecting device type, browser type and version and other purposes that rely on the user agent information, and ignore ua field. This is because the ua may contain a frozen or reduced user agent string.
To assist our customers, DeviceAtlas is making the following code samples available to aid the processing of UA-CH data in different OpenRTB contexts.
Demand Side Platform (DSP) CLI example
Demand Side Platform CLI example of how the OpenRTB SUA (Structured User Agent) object can be read and parsed to standard HTTP header format.
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Supply Side Platform (SSP) Javascript example
Supply Side Platform example of how Javascript userAgentData can be parsed to the OpenRTB SUA object according to the OpenRTB 2.6 specification SUA (Structured User Agent).
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Supply Side Platform (SSP) CLI example
CLI example of how HTTP headers can be parsed to the OpenRTB SUA object according to the OpenRTB 2.6 specification SUA (Structured User Agent).
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