Header bidding reports and targeting

What the Header Bidding report, the Traffic Source dimension and the win-rate figures say about header-bidding traffic, and how a Traffic Source targeting rule aims demand at it or keeps it off.

Reference network manager admin Account → Analytics

Once a tag is live, two reports show what header bidding brought in, and a targeting rule aims demand at that traffic or keeps it off. This page covers both; to set a tag up, start from Header bidding.

Who this is for

Network managers and admins who read Analytics or set targeting rules. The Header Bidding report type, the Traffic Source dimension and the Traffic Source targeting rule each need a permission of their own — see Permissions.

Reporting

Two reports read header bidding, and they answer different questions. The Header Bidding report says who filled each slot the page auctioned — us, Google, a partner, nobody. The Traffic Source dimension on the Advanced and log reports tells the impressions and clicks we won through header bidding apart from the same placement’s ordinary ad-tag traffic. Each needs its own permission — see Permissions.

The Header Bidding report

Account → Analytics, report type Header Bidding. It is its own table, filled by a beacon the page tag fires for every render outcome, so it reports rounds and fills rather than impressions — and a fill Google made never touches placement limits, pacing or publisher payouts.

Group by any of Fill Source, Country, Placement, Zone, Site, with a time breakdown from hour to year. Fill Source takes these values:

Fill Source	What filled the slot
Direct campaigns	A campaign booked on this platform won the round — our own bid
Ad server (GAM)	A line item in the publisher’s Google Ad Manager filled it
AdX / AdSense	Google’s own demand filled it — backfill with no line item, the “Google outbid us” case
a partner’s name	A bidder you added under Other bidders won; an alias shows as the alias
Unfilled	Nobody took the round. Without it the shares of the others mean nothing

Columns: Fills, Unfilled, Fill Rate, Gross and eCPM Gross — the last two only with the ordinary Gross column grants. A price is recorded for our own fills and for a partner’s, at the CPM that won; an Ad Manager or AdX / AdSense fill carries 0, because Google never exposes a price. The report has no channel filter and no advertiser tree: it is supply-side and records neither. The site, zone and placement pickers and the country filter apply, and a Fill Source filter of its own narrows it to one or more sources. That filter lists only sources that have actually been recorded — a partner nobody has filled for yet is not in it — and, unless the role holds Inventory View at All, only the ones recorded on sites shared with the viewer, so one network’s demand partners are not shown to another’s users. The report is a console feature: the REST report endpoints do not support the Header Bidding type. For a Google Ad Manager publisher this table is the whole story of the integration: Direct campaigns is what the deal line item is winning, the two Google rows are what Google keeps, and Unfilled is what neither side had.

Traffic Source on the Advanced and log reports

Impressions and clicks won through header bidding are tagged as their own source. Report on them in Account → Analytics → Advanced, grouping by Traffic Source. The header-bidding row is labelled HEADER_BIDDING; the blank row is everything that arrived through an ordinary ad tag, which is deliberately left unmarked so no historical figure moves. The same dimension is a filter, and a column and filter on the Impressions Log and Clicks Log raw reports. It is absent from the General report on purpose: the marker lives only in the ad-server logs the Advanced and raw-log reports read, not in the aggregated tables General is built on. Those report types are granted on the Admin roles page — see Permissions. Reference: Analytics dimensions.

Win rate

Every slot header bidding is asked to price is recorded, whether it produced a bid or not, so group by Traffic Source and read Opportunities (slots we bid on), Direct requests (bids plus no-bids) and Deliveries (bids that won and rendered): win rate is Deliveries ÷ Opportunities, and the report also gives it directly as Lost opportunities, %. That figure is Opportunities minus Deliveries plus any Rejected impressions, over Opportunities, so it is 100% minus the win rate only while nothing was rejected.

These are ad-request records, so they follow the same switch as every other ad-request record: a network that does not log the ad-request event for Advanced reporting gets deliveries and no requests, and a win rate computed from that row reads 100%. That is the event being switched off, not a real figure.

Targeting header-bidding traffic

Header bidding is also a targeting dimension, so demand can be aimed at it or kept off it. Add a Traffic Source rule on an advertiser, campaign or banner and tick Header Bidding: include runs the entity only on header-bidding traffic, exclude keeps it off. The same rule exists on the supply side — site, zone, placement — as pre-targeting, so a placement can refuse or reserve its header-bidding rounds. It is added the way every other rule is: see Add targeting and the targeting dimensions reference.

Because an ordinary ad tag carries no traffic source, include Header Bidding refuses tag traffic and exclude Header Bidding lets it through. Today the only value is Header Bidding, so the two read as “header bidding only” and “everything but header bidding”. Without the Traffic Source permission (one for the supply side, one for the demand side) the dimension is not offered in the rule picker.