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

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