Prebid has marked version 10 as legacy, so the project’s attention (new adapters, fixes and module work) has moved on to 11. If you run your own wrapper and you don’t upgrade, you’ll soon start to notice adapters no longer being supported and features falling away.
We moved every Tradecore publisher to Prebid 11 in September. In this article, let’s lay out what’s changed, some of the niggles we had to deal with and what I’d recommend you check on any setup before making the switch.
WHAT PREBID 11 CHANGES
Most of 11 is housekeeping. There are a bunch of obsolete modules has are toast (including Adpod, PAAPI and both Quantcast modules), three events have been removed, a couple of defaults are now stricter and the way viewability is measured and signalled has been reworked a touch.
The full list is in Prebid’s own 11.0 release notes. The checklist below is what we went through on our own wrapper, written up so you can run it against yours.
THE CHECKLIST
Add element to your ad units.
Ad units now take an element property pointing at the container on the page, which bidders use to work out position and viewability. If you leave it out, Prebid looks for an element whose ID matches the ad unit code. Wrappers often use codes that don’t match a div id, so set it explicitly.
Rebuild and trim your bundle.
Build from the current 11.x release and only include the modules and adapters you use. The removed modules take some weight out on their own and an upgrade is a good time to reflect on whether a bidder is truly sparking joy. We went through and binned every bidder that wasn’t washing it’s face and our builds came out smaller, which gets the developers hyped and means a faster download on every page.
Take Quantcast out.
Quantcast has withdrawn its Prebid support, so quantcastBidAdapter and quantcastIdSystem no longer exist. If either is still in your build list or your userIds config, the build will fail.
Check anything listening to removed events.
addAdUnits, bidAccepted and seatNonBid no longer fire. Custom analytics hooked to bidAccepted should move to bidResponse. Anything reading seatNonBid should move to pbsAnalytics.
Watch for bids rejected on media type.
A bid that declares a mediaType not listed in its ad unit’s mediaTypes is now rejected as invalid. If one bidder’s bid rate drops after the upgrade, start here. You can switch the check off with auctionOptions.rejectInvalidMediaTypes, but in our view it’s better to fix the ad unit config.
Read the docs for every adapter you run.
Bidder parameters change between major versions. TripleLift, for example, asked us to add a new account-level parentId parameter as part of the move. Go through each adapter’s page on prebid.org and check with your account managers.
HOW WE MOVED EVERY CLIENT IN ONE RELEASE
Every Tradecore publisher runs a custom Prebid build served from our wrapper, so a major version upgrade is something we do once, centrally, rather than something each publisher has to get through their own development queue. We worked through the checklist above, tested it and shipped Prebid 11 to every client in a single release on 23 September.
We made one change of our own along the way. Prebid’s priceFloors module came out of our builds, because floors in Tradecore are set by our own floor price orchestration and delivered ahead of the auction, so the module wasn’t doing anything for us.
The question everyone asks after an upgrade is whether revenue moved. We’ve been watching auction performance closely since the switch and Prebid 11 is performing pretty much on par with 10. For a major version, that’s the result you want.
If you’re running your own wrapper and want to talk through the upgrade (or what it would look like to hand the wrapper over to us), we’re at hello@tradehouse.media.