Publisher Variable Ad Load (VAL)

Overview

A common use case within MFA is to have a light ad load when you visit the URL directly (“organically”) and a punishing ad load when referred from other locations, like Facebook, Taboola or Outbrain. This table logs whether or not a publisher is varying the ad load (as measured by A2CR) based on the source of the traffic (filter the table for is_variable: true to see publishers that engage in this practice).

Dataset

Field	Type	Description
id	integer	unique identifier that applies to specific VAL module row.
publisher_id	integer	Maps to the `publisher_id` primary key in the publishers dataset.
page_id	integer	Unique identifier for the specific publisher page asset where VAL is detected, joinable to the `id` field of the pages dataset.
clean_url	string	Organic landing URL of the domain being scanned.
fanged_url	string	Referred landing URL of the domain that increases the ad slots called on page.
is_variable	boolean	Flag that indicates whether the given publisher page is engaging in VAL.
details	jsonb	JSON blob with details related to A2CR and ad counts for both clean and fanged URLs.
last_detected	date	The date associated with the record.
created_at	datetime	Date the record was created.
updated_at	datetime	The last time the record was updated.
using_synthetic_params	boolean	Indicates whether module run includes synthetic user parameters.
fanged_url_hash	string	Hashed output of fanged URL.
module_errors	string	Indicates which errors occurred on each VAL module run.