Today we are launching v201308 of the DFP API, which brings many new and exciting features and a glimpse of the API’s future. This release improves report stability, offers a brand new way to fetch line items through a Publisher Query Language table, the ability to create first party audience segments, and the ability to see contending line item in forecasts. A detailed list of these features and what’s changed can be found on our release notes page.
First off, we heard you loud and clear - reports are very important to you and when a report fails for no apparent reason, it’s incredibly frustrating. Starting today, we are taking major steps towards our goal to fix this. You’ll now notice that large reports, which would otherwise time out or fail with a 502 HTTP status code while fetching the download URL, will now spend more time preparing the report in the runReportJob stage. Some reports may still be too large to run, but any report that runs in the UI will now work via the API as well. We've also made this change behind the scenes, so you’ll start seeing improvements right away without having to switch to v201308. While we know there is still more work to be done, we hope this is a clear sign that we take this issue seriously and are working hard to improve it.
In addition to stability improvements, in v201308, we are launching two highly requested features: targeted criteria reporting and ActiveView (a.k.a. viewability metrics) columns. These features are not available in all networks yet, but you or your third-party will be able to use them as soon as they are rolled out, if your network is eligible.
Starting in v201308, we are adding support for creating first party audience segments with the AudienceSegmentService as well as retrieving contending line items with the ForecastService. We know the latter has been a long time coming, so we are looking forward to any feedback.
As always, if you have any suggestions or questions about the new version, feel free to drop us a line on our Ads Developer Google+ page.
- Adam Rogal, DFP API Team
Reporting
In addition to stability improvements, in v201308, we are launching two highly requested features: targeted criteria reporting and ActiveView (a.k.a. viewability metrics) columns. These features are not available in all networks yet, but you or your third-party will be able to use them as soon as they are rolled out, if your network is eligible.
Publisher Query Language
We are launching two major PQL features today - the LIKE keyword and the Line_Item table, both of which will be made available in all versions.
The LIKE keyword allows you to do wildcard matching for fields. For example, if you pass the filter statement “WHERE Name LIKE 'my order%'” to the OrderService.getOrdersByStatement method, it will match all orders that have a name beginning with ‘my order’ (like ‘my order 1’, ‘my order 2’ and ‘my orders’).
The other exciting feature of this release is the experimental Line_Item table. With this new table, you’ll be able to select only the fields you want for line items using the PublisherQueryLanguageService. For example:
SELECT Id, Name FROM Line_Item WHERE IsMissingCreatives = TRUE LIMIT 1000 OFFSET 0
This allows for extremely efficient synchronization; tasks that would take hours with LineItemService, will now take minutes. We think this will be a great fit for pulling “match tables” and we’ll have a follow-up blog post soon about how to do this. Although we are launching this with a limited set of fields, we have made it a priority to add more in upcoming releases and we’d love to hear your feedback on our forum or Ads Developer Google+ page. If you want to get started playing with these new features now, you can always visit the dfp-playground. Try using the Publisher Query Language section with a query like “SELECT Id, Name FROM Line_Item WHERE name LIKE 'Line Item #%' LIMIT 100”.
The LIKE keyword allows you to do wildcard matching for fields. For example, if you pass the filter statement “WHERE Name LIKE 'my order%'” to the OrderService.getOrdersByStatement method, it will match all orders that have a name beginning with ‘my order’ (like ‘my order 1’, ‘my order 2’ and ‘my orders’).
The other exciting feature of this release is the experimental Line_Item table. With this new table, you’ll be able to select only the fields you want for line items using the PublisherQueryLanguageService. For example:
SELECT Id, Name FROM Line_Item WHERE IsMissingCreatives = TRUE LIMIT 1000 OFFSET 0
This allows for extremely efficient synchronization; tasks that would take hours with LineItemService, will now take minutes. We think this will be a great fit for pulling “match tables” and we’ll have a follow-up blog post soon about how to do this. Although we are launching this with a limited set of fields, we have made it a priority to add more in upcoming releases and we’d love to hear your feedback on our forum or Ads Developer Google+ page. If you want to get started playing with these new features now, you can always visit the dfp-playground. Try using the Publisher Query Language section with a query like “SELECT Id, Name FROM Line_Item WHERE name LIKE 'Line Item #%' LIMIT 100”.
Last, but not least
As always, if you have any suggestions or questions about the new version, feel free to drop us a line on our Ads Developer Google+ page.
- Adam Rogal, DFP API Team