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Microsoft Invest - Mobile debug auction tips

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In order to run a debug auction on mobile inventory, you must pass additional mobile device parameters in on the ad call. This page describes how to spoof various mobile ad call parameters so that you can successfully run mobile debug auctions.

Call format

Note

All debug auction and browser cookie override calls must use secure HTTPS protocols. Requests made using HTTP will not generate valid results.

Here's an example of an ad call that will run a mobile debug auction:

https://mobile.adnxs.com/mob?id=[TAG_ID]&size=[WIDTH}x[HEIGHT]&ua=[user_agent_string]&carrier=carrier-[carrier_id]&devmake=[dev_make_code]&devmodel=[dev_model_code]&debug_member=[BUYER_MEMBER_ID]&dongle=[PASSWORD]

There are query string parameters that tell the impression bus the user agent, carrier, and device make and model. See the sections below for more information about how to get valid information to pass in via these parameters.

Tip

For documentation on all of the mobile query string parameters we accept, see Mobile Ad Call Reference.

Spoof an operating system

Our ad server uses the device's User Agent to determine the operating system. This gives us two ways to spoof the OS: using query string parameters, or using developer tools.

Using query string parameters

By passing in a different value for the ua query string parameter, we can tell the impression bus what operating system we use, since the impression bus determines the device OS from the User Agent. In this example, we set the User Agent so that we appear to be running an iPhone:

https://mobile..com/mob?id=1280178&size=320x50&debug_member=2048&dongle=DEBUG_AUTH&ua=Mozilla/5.0%20(iPhone;%20CPU%20iPhone%20OS%206_0%20like%20Mac%20OS%20X)%20AppleWebKit/536.26%20(KHTML,%20like%20Gecko)%20Version/6.0%20Mobile/10A5376e%20Safari/8536.25

Using developer tools

Chrome offers the ability to spoof many different devices directly in the header of the HTTP request. To enable it, do the following:

  1. Right click the page, and select Inspect Element.
  2. Follow the instructions from Chrome's documentation to emulate the operating system of your choice.
  3. Verify that the browser is appearing as the OS you chose by checking the results of the Understanding the Debug Auction (search for "Operating System" in the output).

Example output

Based on the information above, the output on the debug auction would look like this:

Browser: Safari (all versions) (9)
Operating System: iPhone (8)
Operating System (Extended): OS 6_0 (72)
Device Make: Apple (26)
Device Model: iPhone (301)

Spoof carrier

In order to spoof the carrier, you will need to add the query string parameter carrier to the mobile ad call, along with a numeric carrier code. For example carrier 80, like this:

&carrier=carrier-80

To find the code that corresponds to the carrier you'd like to spoof, you can use one of the following methods:

Spoof device make and model

The query string parameters for spoofing the device make and model are devmake and devmodel, respectively.

You can use the following read-only API services to see what device makes and models are available in the system:

Mobile Ad Call Reference