How the ad decides which county name or variant to show
- When the impression is served, the ad request already contains a non-identifiable geo hint (typically city, county, or ZIP) that the DSP/SSP derives from the user’s IP address—the same signal Google DV360 and MSAN use for standard geo-targeting.
- Our HTML5 file carries a lightweight rules map (key-value pairs). Example: if
county = "Robeson"then show “Robeson County” headline + retirement-benefit frame.
- The logic runs inside the creative; no call is made to an external database or pixel for additional look-ups.
- After launch, the creative counts clicks on each variant. A nightly rules update (delivered as a new JSON attached to the ad tag) shifts impression weight toward the best-performing variants—that’s the “self-optimization.” No personal data is stored; only aggregated performance totals (e.g., “Variant 3 → 1 420 clicks”).
Standards & policy alignment
IAB Dynamic Ad Standard: We follow the IAB’s Dynamic Content Ad framework (key/value triggering + polite load), ensuring tag weight and request structure meet specs accepted by Google Ads, DV360, and all MSAN exchanges.
Platform compliance: Google and Microsoft explicitly allow creative-side geo personalisation as long as no PII is passed and file size ≤ 150 KB. Our triple-QA check enforces both.
Privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, CPRA):
We never store or transmit IP addresses, device IDs, or cookie IDs.
Geo granularity never goes below city/ZIP, well above the “less than 20 households” threshold regulators flag as re-identifiable.
Users can’t be profiled or retargeted by name, age, or sensitive traits; only by the same anonymous geo data already present in the bid request.
Bottom line
- No new data collection. We simply make smarter use of the location hint already provided in the ad call.
- No PII. All optimisation is statistical, not user-level.
- 100 % within Google, MSAN, IAB, GDPR, and CCPA rules.
- If legal needs a deeper dive, we can supply our technical spec sheet and the IAB dynamic-ad compliance reference on request.