MAX | Ad Review | User Journey

User Journey allows you to query a specific user’s impressions in the MAX UI. This allows you to review the ad flow that served to that user. You can use this tool to find ad-related issues linked to a user complaint or a support ticket. This way you can improve the user experience.

To use User Journey, you need to set your proprietary user ID in MAX. Both the app and user must be on a supported SDK. See the prerequisites below for more information.

After you input the user ID into the User Journey tool, you can view a timeline of impressions. This timeline contains all ad creatives served to that user over the past 30 days. You can view this timeline in the UI or you can download it in the form of a CSV file. You can also escalate problematic creatives directly to certain networks from the User Journey timeline. See this table of supported networks and formats;

Learn more about the prerequisites, how to view User Journey reports, how to create new user journeys, and how to inspect user journey timelines in the sections below:

Prerequisites

Ad review enablement : You must enable Ad Review in the SDK by following the instructions for your platform at SDK integration guides > Platform > Overview > Integration > “Enable ad review”.

User ID : User Journey reports are based on the user ID that you set in MAX. Note that the user ID is neither the user’s IDFA nor the device ID, but your own proprietary user identifier.

User journey reports

Access User Journey reports in the MAX dashboard by selecting Ad Review > Analyze > User Journey.

In the main User Journey Reports page, you can see all user journey reports from the last 30 days. This includes both complete reports and those that are in progress. You can choose either to download the report as a CSV file or to view the User Journey timeline in the MAX dashboard.

User Journey Reports

Create new report

To generate a new User Journey, click + Create New Report at the top right corner of the User Journey Reports page. Enter a User ID and a timeframe to see the user’s impressions. The time frame of the report is a maximum of 24 hours and must be in the last 30 days. Give your reports meaningful names so you can associate each report with its corresponding user complaint or support ticket.

Create New Report. Fill in the user id, the app, and the time range. The time range is limited to 24 hours per report but it’s recommended to narrow down the hours as much as you can to get more precise results. All events are stored in UTC.

User journey timeline

User Journey timeline is a visual representation of a user’s ad flow. It shows reverse chronological details of the user’s ad impressions, including network, creative end card, video, playable, and other significant details.

After you identify the problematic creative you can view its full details. To do so, click the ⋮ next to the network name and then click See Creative Details. Then you can report the creative to the network by clicking the send icon. You can also set Risky Content rules so that Ad Review will catch similar creatives in the future.

User Journey

The following code snippets show how to tag users with your own internal User ID. The maximum size of the User ID string is 8192 characters.