Third and fourth party ad tracking is allowed on Edmunds subject to the following guidelines and policies. Clients/agencies must comply with these guidelines and policies in order to serve ads with pixel tracking (tags/beacons) on the Edmunds’ websites.

Tracking Conditions

• Pixels/tags/beacons or analytics scripts are allowed only for monitoring, advertising management, analytics and/or performance tracking (i.e., sales tiebacks).
• Pixels can be utilized to improve creative performance, and data collected outside of Edmunds.com may be used to improve creative performance.
• Client/agency may not associate cookies, web beacons or other tracking mechanisms with personally identifiable information (PII) for behavioral targeting, geo-targeting, retargeting or the creation of segments of the Edmunds audience. Without limiting the foregoing, client/agency agrees not to engage in any behavioral targeting, geo-targeting or retargeting of users of Edmunds’ website(s) outside of Edmunds website(s) using data collected from users of Edmunds website(s).
• The storage of, or attempt to capture referring URL or Edmunds’ URL where the ad unit is placed, is prohibited.

Implementation

• Homepage native ad products only accept one image based tag.
  • Ad verification tracking is not permitted for Native ad products.
• Homepage IAB standard ad products only accept one javascript tag. It can be used for either creative serving or viewability
• For all other products Edmunds will accept a maximum of three tags:
  • 1) Tracking tag/ad serving tag.
  • 2) Ad verification (Viewability pixels must be provided separately to be implemented by Edmunds only.)
  • 3) Additional pixel of the client?s choice (link to approved vendors)
• Pixel trackers that are images are preferred over script and beacon tags

Technical Requirements

• Supported campaign tracking mechanisms are viewability, bot tracking and validating ad safe content.
• Blocking the creative from rendering based on page content, geo-targeting or other criteria is prohibited.
• Ad loading or page performance issues must not be caused.
• Pixel must load after the initial ad load is complete.
• Pixel request must be a direct request. Redirects are not allowed.
• Pixel must be under 1K.
• Pixel must be HTTPS compliant.
• Flash cookies are not permitted.
• Edmunds does not support site-served tracking.

Campaign Requirements

• The pixel will not be used for billing by Edmunds to client.
• Pixel must not add to any ad counting discrepancies.

Vendors

• Third and fourth party vendors must be approved/certified by Edmunds and meet its quality standards for availability, response time, and security of the ad server.¹
• Edmunds will not maintain the relationship with any third and fourth party vendors.
• Edmunds is not responsible for any fees associated with these services.

General

• Pixels may not be added to ad tags without Edmunds' prior approval and acceptance of these guidelines and policies. Specify the following in tracking requests:
  • Measurement vendor
  • Measurement product(s)
  • Pixel or tag type: 1x1, JS tag
  • Associated placements
  • Example of the pixel/tag
• By advertising on an Edmunds website, client/agency is agrees to be bound by the provisions of Section XII of the IAB Standard Terms and Conditions for Internet Advertising for Media Buys of One Year of Less, Version 3.0 (https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IAB_4As-tsandcs-FINAL.pdf), which will control in the event of any conflict with the applicable insertion order or in the IAB Standard Terms and Conditions, Version 2.0 (to the extent that version is applicable to the parties).
• Edmunds reserves the right to add, remove or modify its guidelines and policies, and to reject or remove any advertisement, at any time.

Misc

• We will accept Ad Verification tags as outlined below:
  • We accept monitoring but do not allow ad blocking for our IAB standard advertising
  • We do not use Ad Verification tags for billing purposes
  • We reserve the right to rescind this approval at any time at Edmunds.com discretion. The issues our team will monitor as potential concerns are:
    • Latency issues that impact our ad serving or site performance
  • If Ad Verification vendor flags any issues, we require additional details to allow us to respond. For example, if they say our fraud measures are high then we need the traffic source, date range, etc to help us investigate and respond
  • Issues on "ad collision" as we sell our ads in a manner that will likely lead us to flag high in this area
• We do not cover ad vendor fees and must be agency sponsored
• Edmunds now supports AMP-Ads but will require AMP-Ads compatible tracking and analytics. These should be provided by the client
  • No javascript can be executed in AMP-Ads, so trackers must be image pixels (used with amp-pixel) for static data and am-analytics tags for dynamic data.

1. While there are number of actions not allowed by third and fourth party tracking pixels, if you are interested in learning more about Edmunds Data opportunities, please contact your Account Director for more details. Our qualifying partners will benefit greatly by leveraging Edmunds sanctioned segments as we know our audience best and can offer highly performant data opportunities to our partners.