VAST tracking events / Linear
mute VAST tracking event
Short answer: Fires when the user or player mutes ad audio.
When it fires
Ad audio was muted after playback began. Pair it with unmute. Mute is a player-state event, not a quartile, and it is valid on linear creatives across VAST 2.0 through 4.1+.
Mute is a player-state change during linear playback
mute fires when ad audio is turned off after playback has begun. It is a linear event from VAST 2.0 through 4.4. It does not fire because the impression was served silent, and it does not fire for a NonLinear overlay. A CTV placement that starts muted and stays muted can show a full quartile set and an empty mute column. The state never changed.
Pair the URL with unmute. A burst of unmute and an empty mute means the player emitted the wrong name, or the ad started silent and was then turned up, which is unmute without a preceding mute. Count them against each other. Do not count mute against start. Most starts are not mutes.
What an empty mute column does not prove
An empty column on a tag that contains the event means the control was not used, or the URL is in the wrong container, or the name is misspelled. It does not mean the player dropped audio measurement. There is no separate audio-quartile event. If you need to know whether the spot was heard, mute and unmute are the only names in this set, and they only record a change.
event="Mute" does not match mute. The URL under Companion is never called, because a companion has no ad audio playhead of this kind.
When the column stays empty
mute is in the VAST 2.0 set, and the current version still includes it. An empty column on a current player is not a version mismatch.
Each wrapper hop may include its own mute URL. The player requests every one of them when the event happens, so a chain of four hops produces four calls for one playback. An http URL on an https page is dropped by the browser before the ad server sees a miss. The event name can be right and the scheme can still zero the column.
Where it is valid
| 2.0 | 3.0 | 4.0 | 4.1+ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Legal containers: Linear. An event in the wrong container is not a player error. It is a URL nobody calls.
Using it in a tag
Put it in a Linear TrackingEvents block. It is not valid on the other creative types, and a player does not fire a tracker in the wrong container.
<Linear>
<TrackingEvents>
<Tracking event="mute">
<![CDATA[https://track.example.com/mute]]>
</Tracking>
</TrackingEvents>
</Linear>VAST XML fragment only. This excerpt belongs inside a complete VAST document, so standalone validation will fail until it is wrapped in a full <VAST>response.
Related vastlint rules
- VAST-4.1-tracking-event-value: Tracking event attribute not in the valid set for this VAST version
Related events
- unmute: Fires when ad audio is restored after mute.
- pause: Fires when linear playback is paused.
- resume: Fires when linear playback continues after pause.
Check the XML, then confirm the beacons fire
Validate the event names and containers on the document. Test a live URL when the XML is clean and reporting is still empty.