v201107 is out

Today, we’re excited to release v201107 of the DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) API. In this release, you’ll find support for labels, technology (browsing) targeting, and more.

Labels

Labels can help you categorize your advertisers, orders, and line items, prevent line items from competing advertisers from delivering to the same webpage, and can be used to set frequency caps to ad units. These tasks can now be accomplished via the API using COMPETITIVE_EXCLUSION and AD_UNIT_FREQUENCY_CAP respectively.

Labels can be applied to companies, orders, and line items and are inherited. This means that if you apply a label to an advertiser, it will be applied to the advertiser's orders and line items automatically. If you apply a label to an order, it will be applied to the order's line items automatically. The LineItem.effectiveAppliedLabels and Order.effectiveAppliedLabels fields can be used to determine all labels that are both inherited and defined on the object itself, but the appliedLabels field should be used to update objects.

For more information about labels, please refer to the create, apply, and remove labels Help Center article.

Competitive exclusion for small business publishers

For DFP small business publishers, we have exposed functionality similar to competitive exclusion labels. The Company.enableSameAdvertiserCompetitiveExclusion field prevents ads from the same company from competing with each other. In other words, if two orders exist with the same company or there are two line items from the same order that are eligible to serve on the same page, this field will prevent those two ads from competing with each other. The LineItem.disableSameAdvertiserCompetitiveExclusion, on the other hand, will allow all line items with this set to true to compete with each other, regardless of their labels or company settings.

Technology targeting

Technology (browsing) targeting is also included in this release. Technology targeting allows you to target specific information about the user browsing your site including bandwidth, browser, browser language, and operating system details. The new field Targeting.technologyTargeting can be set with a TechnologyTargeting object with fields for each type of targeting.

To add a new target, first fetch the ID from the respective PublisherQueryLanguageService table and create a Technology object with just the ID filled in. When fetching targets from the API, the objects will be subclassed correctly depending on type. For a refresher on how to set targets using IDs in the DFP API, please refer to the geographical targeting blog post.

External IDs

To help developers who need to reconcile DFP system objects with other systems, we’ve added external IDs to the LineItem and Order objects. Before v201107, the externalId field on Order objects represented the PO Number in the UI. We’ve updated this by renaming it to poNumber and exposing a brand new externalOrderId field. As a developer, you will be able to rename all instances in which you reference externalId as a PO number and use the new field for additional reconciliation.

This blog post has only scratched the surface of the features v201107 brings; to learn more, please visit our release notes page. As always, developer feedback is important to us; if there are any features you are dying to see become a part of the API, please let us know at our forum.

Adam Rogal, DFP API Team