Announcing v201101 and custom targeting support

Today we are excited to announce the next version of the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) API, version 201101. Highlights of this release include the ability to define custom targeting criteria, and the new Publisher Query Language service.

Custom targeting

Custom targeting allows you to define your own targeting criteria (such as age, gender, or content) that DFP wouldn't otherwise be able to determine. To use custom targeting, you create keys and values, target your line items to those key-value pairs, and then add them to your website's ad tags.

Similar to creating ad units and then targeting them with line items, using the custom targeting API is broken into two steps. First, you will create custom targeting keys and values with the CustomTargetingService, and then you will target these keys and values with the LineItemService. To target the keys and values, set the customTargeting field with a CustomCriteriaSet object. The custom criteria set object contains the targeting expression as an ORed set of ANDed custom criteria. The leaf nodes of the tree are key-value pairs of either free-form or predefined criteria.

If you had the expression (age=17 OR (gender=male AND age=42)), this would be represented as two custom criteria sets with logicalOperator.AND, [age=17] and [gender=male, age=42] ORed together. The custom criteria sets would be children of the customTargeting field.

Below is a diagram that will help you understand how the tree must be organized. The first level is the customTargeting field of the line item. The second level is the ORed custom criteria sets, the children of customTargeting. The final level is the custom criteria that belong to each custom criteria set, ANDed together.

In the above example of (age=17 OR (gender=male AND age=42)), the custom criteria set would look something like this:

For more examples on how to create and target custom criteria, please see the CreateCustomTargetingKeysAndValuesExample.java example as well as the TargetCustomCriteriaExample.java example.

Publisher Query Language service

The new PublisherQueryLanguageService allows you to query for data in the DFP network. You can use the service to pull information about geographical targeting that you could only previously retrieve by downloading one of the CSVs on the geographical targeting page. You can retrieve all targetable cities, for example, by sending a PQL statement like:

SELECT * FROM City where targetable = true

You would receive a ResultSet object similar to the one found in JDBC. Notice that we have included the targetable column in each of our tables to select on locations which can be successfully targeted in line items. A full list of tables can be found on the services reference page and we plan to expand this to other tables in the future.

New release notes page

With this new version, we have also modified our release notes page to give you a better per-object breakdown of new and deprecated fields and services. This will make upgrading your implementation that much easier.

Custom criteria targeting has been our most requested feature and we are eager to receive any feedback you may have through our forum. Also, if there are any blog posts about specific topics you may want, please do not hesitate to make requests on our forum as well.

– Adam Rogal, DFP API Team