In December 2018 AAM engineers sampled all on-boarded data being sent to Audience Manager. The sample was collected over 19 days and checked the format of the IDs being used to send the data in. They found high volumes of incorrectly formatted mobile IDs being sent to Audience Manager's GAID (20914) and IDFA (20915) data sources across many data feeds.
Customer Impact - If incorrectly formatted IDs are being sent to a data source, customers may see inflated trait and segment populations which do not match those in their downstream destinations.
Issue - The biggest error type we are seeing is the casing. IDFA must be uppercase and GAID lowercase.
Action taken - As of January 2019 AAM began filtering out incorrectly formatted IDs and the onboarding status report was updated to provide visibility into what IDs are being rejected and why. This has had little downstream impact since destination partners are already rejecting incorrectly formatted IDs but trait populations in Audience Manager can be impacted—customers may see a decrease in population sizes for traits and segments with a significant number of incorrectly formatted IDs compared to pre-2018 levels. Please investigate your feeds to ensure that IDs being sent to the GAID (20914) and IDFA (20915) data sources match the formats described below so your feeds are properly ingested. This will ensure the IDs are recognized correctly in all downstream destinations. Audience Manager’s format requirements are outlined below:
- Device Advertising ID - IDFA - iOS devices: The format strictly consists of 32 uppercase hexadecimal digits, displayed in five groups and separated by hyphens, in the form 8-4-4-4-12, for a total of 36 characters. For example:
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AEBE52E7-03EE-455A-B3C4-E57283966239
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- Device Advertising ID - GAID - Android devices: The format strictly consists of 32 lowercase hexadecimal digits, displayed in five groups and separated by hyphens, in the form 8-4-4-4-12, for a total of 36 characters. For example:
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e4fe9bde-caa0-47b6-908d-ffba3fa184f2
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