Retiring support for v201108, v201111, and v201201 of the DFP API

Today, we are announcing the deprecation of versions v201108, v201111, and v201201 of the DFP API. In roughly 3 months, on Dec 10th, these versions will be turned off. Turning off older versions allows us to make sure that everyone can benefit from the improvements in more recent releases and to focus on releasing new features.

Although we are not announcing the deprecation of any other versions at this time, we would still like to give our developers using v201203, v201204, and v201206 notice that those versions will most likely be deprecated next. Upgrading to v201208 now will reduce any future development time needed for an upgrade later.

As mentioned in previous deprecation announcements, we will always give at least 3 months notice before turning off a version. Our release notes page also contains changelogs for each version, which will help you migrate to a newer version. If you aren’t using one of our client libraries, now would be a great time to start as well. If you have any feedback or comments about this deprecation, or the API in general, please feel free to leave them on our forum.

 - Adam Rogal, DFP API Team

Upcoming extended AdWords API/Scripts, Ad Exchange, and DFP API Downtime

Update: Ad Exchange will be affected by the downtime as well. Please see below for details.



As previously mentioned, we have an upcoming AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP service outage. This will occur on Saturday, September 22 -- AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP systems will be unavailable from approximately 10:00 am to 8:00 pm Pacific Time (17:00 Saturday to 03:00 Sunday GMT) due to system maintenance.



AdWords

During this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual (with the settings you established as of 10am PST), but you won’t be able to make SOAP API calls or download reports. Requests to the AdWords API will fail with an HTTP 50x error during the maintenance window. Please also keep in mind that any automated rules scheduled during this time will not run and AdWords scripts will not execute during this period. We encourage you to verify your campaign settings prior to the outage.



Ad Exchange

During this time, your ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to downtime period, but you will not be able to make API calls to Ad Exchange Buyer SOAP API. On Ad Exchange Buyer REST API, only the Direct Deals related API calls will be affected. For the Ad Exchange Real-Time Bidding Protocol, you will not be able to make changes to pre-targeting settings, everything else should continue to run as usual.



DFP

As mentioned above, ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to the downtime period. If you use the audience feature in your network, any API call to the AudienceSegmentService service will fail with a SegmentError.UNEXPECTED_ERROR error. Also, if you target any audience segments in your line items, any calls to LineItemService, ForecastService, or LineItemCreativeAssociationService that involve those line items will fail.



We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as our engineers work to keep AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP running smoothly.



 - Kevin Winter, Ads Developer Relations Team

Upcoming AdWords API/Scripts and DFP API Downtime

On Saturday, September 8, AdWords and DFP systems will be unavailable from approximately 10:00am to 11:00am Pacific Time (17:00 to 18:00 GMT) due to system maintenance. A longer downtime will also be scheduled in the next few weeks -- please stay tuned for another blog post with more specific details.



AdWords

During this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual (with the settings you established as of 10am PST), but you won’t be able to sign into your account or make changes. Requests to the AdWords API will fail with an HTTP 50x error during the maintenance window. Please also keep in mind that any automated rules scheduled during this time will not run and AdWords scripts will not execute during this period. We encourage you to verify your campaign settings prior to the outage.



DFP

As mentioned above, ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to the downtime period. If you use the audience feature in your network, any API call to the AudienceSegmentService service will fail with a SegmentError.UNEXPECTED_ERROR error. Also, if you target any audience segments in your line items, any calls to LineItemService, ForecastService, or LineItemCreativeAssociationService that involve those line items will fail.



We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as our engineers work to keep AdWords and DFP running smoothly.



 - Kevin Winter, Ads Developer Relations Team

Docs Grow Ears: Google Feedback now in Google Ads Developer Documentation

If you've recently visited any of the Google Ads Developer documentation, you may have noticed a "Feedback on this document" link at the top right corner of a page. That's right—you can now use that link to report errors, comment on existing content, or request further clarification for any of the Google Ads Developer docs:

• Google AdMob Ads SDK


• AdSense APIs


• AdWords API


• DoubleClick Ad Exchange APIs


• DoubleClick for Advertisers API


• DoubleClick for Publishers API


• Interactive Media Ads SDK

In addition to this new channel, you can continue to reach out to us through the developer forums or Google Developers Live events.

Quang Nguyen, Ads Developer Relations Team

Announcing v201208 of the DFP API

At Google, we enjoy hearing from you, the developer community, and working with you to ensure that progress is being made. We think the latest DFP API release reflects positively on how we work better together and we're excited to announce version v201208. This release adds new types of creatives, support for optimization, rich media, and video interaction report columns, along with new options for downloading reports. A full list of improvements from this release can be found on our release notes page. We also want to remind you that we host virtual office hours via Google+ hangouts in order to make sure your voice is heard. Stay tuned to our Google Developers Live calendar to catch the next one on September 18th.

Reporting improvements

In v201208, we’ve added 64 new columns which enable you to pull metrics for optimization, rich media, and video. Using these new columns, you’ll now be able to better track performance of your network including determining the interaction time of your rich media (e.g. RICH_MEDIA_INTERACTION_TIME), locating videos which complete the most (e.g. VIDEO_INTERACTION_COMPLETE), or analyzing the revenue resulting from optimized impressions (e.g. OPTIMIZATION_OPTIMIZED_REVENUE). In addition to these columns, we’ve added the CREATIVE_TYPE dimension and the ability to include custom fields to help you better break down your reports.

For applications which cannot process gzip files, you can now download reports already deflated using the new ReportService.getReportDownloadUrlWithOptions method. If you choose to not use gzip compression, we still highly recommend that you set the HTTP header Accept-Encoding: gzip to speed up downloads. We’ve also added the ability to include report properties (e.g. network, user, generation date, etc...) and remove the totals row. If there are any other types of report download options you’d like to see, we’d love to hear about them on the forum.

Creative additions

For publishers who are using the cutting edge features of DFP, we’ve added support for four new creative types: AdSenseCreative, AdExchangeCreative, RichMediaStudioCreative, and AspectRatioImageCreative. AdSense and Ad Exchange creatives allow you to traffic line item level dynamic allocation ads by serving ad slot code snippets as the creative asset. Rich media studio creatives allow you to fetch creatives created using the DoubleClick rich media studio. Although these creatives are mostly used in a read-only manner (since they are created in the rich media studio and not DFP), some fields are mutable, such as the duration, any CSS overrides, and URLs. Finally, aspect ratio image creatives let you upload multiple image assets of the same aspect ratio to give you control of how images should be scaled; these creatives are mostly used in a mobile environment given the variety of screen sizes and resolution of today’s devices.

Last but not least

In our ongoing effort to bring the API up to parity with the UI, we’ve also added a number of smaller features. These include additional company partner types, the ability to set the mobile platform type on ad units, a friendly display string for inventory sizes, the option to associate line items with creative sets , and support for the recently released device category targeting criteria.

Our API and outreach efforts are constantly growing, but we can't do it without you. If there is anything you'd like to see us do better, please let us know or introduce yourself in the next Google+ hangout on September 18th.

 - Adam Rogal, DFP API Team

OAuth in Ads APIs

Authorization is an important concern when writing software that interacts with Google’s Ads APIs. We’ve recently improved our documentation and published resources documenting how to use OAuth2 with many of our Ads APIs.



OAuth2 is an authorization flow that allows you to direct a user to a specially crafted Google URL where they grant permissions to your software to make changes to their account. With an authorized access token, you can make requests to Ads APIs on the user’s behalf. Benefits include:

• Users don’t need to provide a username and password - they just log into Google.


• No CAPTCHA challenges.


• Limited scope - the user will only be prompted to grant access to a specific part of their account. For example, they could grant access to AdWords without the application being able to see their email or calendar.

OAuth2 is supported by:

• AdWords API


• DoubleClick for Advertisers Reporting API


• DoubleClick for Advertisers Trafficking API


• AdSense Host API (v4)


• AdSense Management API


• DoubleClick for Publishers API


• DoubleClick Ad Exchange Buyer REST API

The Ads API client libraries supported by Google have built-in support for OAuth2. We’ve included examples demonstrating how to use this feature in all client libraries. See your respective product and language product sites for more information on OAuth2.



We’re also hosting a Google Developers Live event covering how to use OAuth2 on August 23rd. This will be recorded if you can’t make it. If you have any questions about OAuth2, please post on the respective product API forums.

 - Kevin Winter, AdWords API Team

Introducing the new Ads Developers Google+ Page

Today we are excited to introduce a new channel for communication - Ads Developers Google+ Page. It's a place to stay informed, engaged and connected on Ads products and developer tools.

Add our Google+ page to your circles for the latest product and feature announcements, best practices, case studies, as well as opportunities to interact with and learn from Google's Ads Developer Relations team and other members of the developer community.

We look forward to having one place to bring timely updates, concise announcements, and to share information in multimedia formats across all Ads products, as well as to listen and respond to your comments.

 - Danial Klimkin, Ads Developer Relations Team.

Next round of Google Ads Developers Live events

Interested in more Google Ads Developers Live (Office Hours) events? We know you are because attendance has been great!



We've scheduled another round of events for AdWords, AdMob, DFP and AdSense APIs. You can view the newly scheduled live events on the Google Ads Developers Live page. Please add the events you are interested in to your calendar. You can follow our schedule by subscribing to the Google Ads Developers Office Hours calendar, which is also linked on this blog’s sidebar.



Just like in previous live events, you can join these hangouts to ask us questions or provide feedback about our products. In response to your request we will be adding AdWords API sessions for the Asia Pacific region and Japan. If you are from Asia Pacific countries or Australia and couldn’t join the hangouts before due to timezone inconvenience, we hope you will find these additional sessions more convenient. The live events in Japan will be in Japanese.



Events will rotate throughout the week to accommodate more people. We are also planning to make some of these events topic-based, where we will introduce you to a new feature of our product and then answer your questions on that topic. The dates and topics for these sessions will be announced in advance in separate blog posts.

In case you haven’t joined us before, you will need 3 things to join the hangout:

• A Google+ account (sign up here)


• The Google voice and video plugin installed on your computer


• A quiet place to hangout so we can hear you

These hangouts are informal and conversational, which make them a great place to ask questions or give us feedback. If you have questions about our office hours, reach out to us on the forums.



 - Anash P. Oommen, Ads Developer Relations Team

Announcing v201206 of the DFP API

Today we’ve released the newest version of the DFP API, v201206, which adds a significant number of reporting improvements. The new release also fully supports OAuth 2.0 as the authentication mechanism of choice and we encourage you to switch to OAuth 2.0 from ClientLogin or OAuth 1.0a. A full list of improvements from today’s release can be found on our release notes page.

Reporting improvements



In a few of our recent hangouts, we received the feedback that while our reports were great for generating important performance metrics, the CSV files that you downloaded were not always easily machine readable. To make it easier for you to consume reports, we’ve created a new ExportFormat - CSV_DUMP. Below is a list of the features of this new format:

• Columns are now shown as Dimension.ENUM_VALUE or Column.ENUM_VALUE


• All money values are now displayed in micro format in the currency of the network


• All dates are now displayed as YYYY-MM-DD


• All date-times are now displayed as YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss±hh:mm


• There is no "pretty printing" of values (i.e. commas) and there is no total row

You may also notice that the v201204 CSV export format has been replaced by CSV_EXCEL, which can be imported into Excel-like products.

As an important note to some of our developers, after upgrading to v201206, you will most likely need to update your code; many column names have changed to reflect a more accurate description of what metrics they are indeed pulling. For example, the column TOTAL_IMPRESSIONS has been changed to TOTAL_INVENTORY_LEVEL_IMPRESSIONS because the v201204 column could only be used with dimensions like AD_UNIT_NAME on the inventory level, i.e. it could not be used with line items, orders, companies or creatives. Alternatively, TOTAL_LINE_ITEM_LEVEL_IMPRESSIONS in v201206 should now be used with dimensions like LINE_ITEM_NAME and ORDER_NAME for instances where you need to include dynamic allocation impressions from AdSense or Ad Exchange line items. To determine how each column should be updated, visit the old column’s reference page and look for the phrase that begins with “Replaced with …”, e.g.



    Replaced with TOTAL_INVENTORY_LEVEL_IMPRESSIONS beginning in v201206.

Lastly, we’ve improved formatting for inventory reports that don’t use top level ad unit views. Most importantly, the duplicate columns clicks and impressions issue for hierarchical views has been fixed and the flat view report will now match how the report is downloaded from the UI.



OAuth 2.0



If you are an eagle-eyed developer, you may have noticed that we recently added OAuth 2.0 information to our authentication page. OAuth 2.0 is now fully supported in the DFP API and we are progressively adding support in our client libraries; Java, Python, .Net , and Ruby currently have full support, while PHP will very soon. In fact, our DFP test playground already uses OAuth 2.0 with the Java library. Please stay tuned to the project sites or the forum for announcements regarding future support.



Our next hangout is July 18th and we’ll be taking your report questions or anything else you might have on your mind. As always, let us know if you have any questions on our forum.

 - Adam Rogal, DFP API Team