Discussion Topic: Common User Journeys

Hi all,

In our discussions in previous meetings, we've agreed that it's a valuable exercise to outline important advertising use-cases so that we can consider how to support them in privacy preserving ways.

I just added a page to the github repo that lists a number of use-cases. https://github.com/w3c/web-advertising/blob/master/common-user-flows-in-web-advertising.md

This is in no way a comprehensive list. Instead, I took the approach of focusing on the user experience.

  *   Where do they see the ad? What's the context? A website? A mobile app?
  *   Where does the ad take them if they were to click on it? Another website? A mobile app-store? Deep-linking directly into a mobile app?
  *   Who served the ad? Was it served by the 1st party the user was interacting with? Was it served by a 3rd party ad network?

I've attempted to provide real-world examples for each, and document how conversion attribution is currently achieved in the industry using current techniques.

I believe that the 9 "user journeys" I have outlined here (each with 1st party and 3rd party variants) are very important for us to ensure we support well.

In most of our conversations, we have focused exclusively on the 1st user journey: "Browser => Browser (Same Device)". We now have a number of proposals from both Safari and Chrome that focus on this use-case. I would really like to spend some time thinking together about how to support the other 8 "user journeys".

I would especially like to discuss:

  *   Mobile App => In App Browser
  *   Mobile App => Mobile App Store
  *   Mobile Browser => Desktop Browser (Different Device)
  *   Mobile Browser => Mobile App Store

That said, I recognize that others will have different priorities.

Would this be a good item to discuss tomorrow at our next meeting?

--Ben