In our previous blog posts, we discussed post-filtered bids and disapproved ads. In those posts we recommended integrating tools such as the Creative REST API, Snippet Status Reports, and Publisher Settings File into your bidder as best practices to improve the efficiency of your application.

Today, we'd like to share how to integrate these tools into your setup.

Why implement these tools into your bidder?

As a recap, here are our suggested best practices and why we feel they are beneficial for your bidder:

The Creative REST API is a proactive measure that provides methods for submitting a creative for verification, for checking the status of a creative that you have submitted, and for retrieving a list of all your active creatives before bidding on the creative ad. By using the Creative REST API to submit and manage your campaign creatives, you’re able to ensure that your bidder is better prepared to bid with an approved creative.

If you are unable to implement the Creative REST API, the Snippet Status Report can also help you review and determine the exact reason for which your ad was disapproved. The snippet-status-report-proto.txt file lists all the issues described in the section of the report. The snippet status report will also show ads that are approved or have not yet been checked by our verification system.

Publisher Settings File is a list of exclusions set by AdX publishers that will block bids from winning the auction for their inventory. Buyers should take note of and adhere to these publisher requirements. By leveraging the Publisher Settings File, your bidder can ensure it does not bid on an ad that will be filtered out of the AdX auction due to an exclusion. By only bidding on eligible impressions, you can avoid wasting bids.

How to incorporate these tools into your bidder?

Below is a sample visual representation of how you can integrate the Creative Rest API, Snippet Status Report and Publisher Settings File into your bidder’s logic to maximize the efficiency of your bidder:

1. Upload creatives from your ad repository/server using the Creative REST API.

2. Use the Snippet Status Reports or Creative REST API to periodically find the creative status (APPROVED, DISAPPROVED, NOT_CHECKED). Update the creative status in your ad repository/server. To avoid wasted bid opportunities, ensure that your bidder only returns BidResponses with APPROVED creatives. Creatives with DISAPPROVED or NOT_CHECKED status will not be eligible to compete in auction. Read more about post-filtered bids.

3. Use categorization data from the Snippet Status Reports or Creative REST API to help match creatives during targeting and avoid getting post-filtered. We use two types of categories, product and sensitive.

Product categories (ex. Banking, Real Estate, or Sports) will be identified by a detected_product_category.
Sensitive categories (ex. Dating, Politics, or Religion) will be identified by a detected_sensitive_category.

If a publisher has category exclusions, they will appear in BidRequests within the excluded_product_category and excluded_sensitive_category fields. Your bidder should honor these category exclusions by ensuring that it only returns BidResponses with creatives that are not categorized in an excluded_product_category or an excluded_sensitive_category.

4. Periodically pull the Publisher Settings Files to incorporate publisher exclusions into your targeting engine to minimize the chance of returning creatives that will be blocked by publishers. It might not be feasible to load all publisher data, but you may consider concentrating on the top N publishers on which your creatives run or publishers that you explicitly target. Publisher Settings Files contain valuable information such as excluded_attribute, excluded_product_category, excluded_sensitive_category and excluded_url. See the complete proto file.

Note: In order to reduce the size of the bid request, BidRequests do not contain excluded_url. Therefore, the only way your bidder will know what advertiser URLs the publisher is excluding is through the Publisher Settings Files. Your bidder should honor URL exclusions by ensuring that it only returns BidResponses with creatives that declare click_through_url’s that are not excluded by the publisher.

Have questions or want to enable any of the tools mentioned? Reach out to your Ad Exchange account team.

Posted by the Ad Exchange Team

We’re pleased to announce the newest DFA Reporting API release, version 1.2. This version’s main additions include paid search dimensions and a way to view all reports and files in your account, not just those that you own.

Paid Search

Paid search dimensions have been added to the API with this release. We also added support for these new dimensions to version 1.1, but only version 1.2 contains the new matchType field in the DimensionValue resource allowing you to filter paid search dimensions by one of the following:

• EXACT
• CONTAINS
• BEGINS_WITH
• WILDCARD_EXPRESSION

Report Sharing

We have added the ability to list all reports and files in your DFA account (in addition to those owned by you). You may also optionally list just those files that have been shared with you using the Files resource. You can find this option in the scope parameter in the input to the respective list methods.

Refer to the release notes in our developer documentation for more details. We’re always available to answer your questions on our forum, or you can reach out to us on our Google+ Page.

- Joseph DiLallo, the DFA API Team

The sunset date for v201209 of the AdWords API has been extended to July 22, 2013. This will provide you with additional migration time while you are exploring the newly launched Enhanced Campaigns functionality.

Calls made to this version after July 22, 2013 will fail. It is therefore important that you migrate to AdWords API v201302 if you want your applications to continue to run without interruption.

If you have any questions about the sunset or need help with migration, please contact us on the forum. You can also reach out to us on Google+ page.

- Stan Grinberg, Ads Developer Relations Team

Last week at Google I/O, we had a Google Ads Track where we provided updates on our Google Ads products. We also made some product announcements, including the launch of a new AdMob to help you build your app business and Open Bidder to help you create real-time bidding applications.

If you weren’t able to attend these sessions in person or watch the live stream, we have recorded them for your convenience:

• Build a Great App Business with AdMob
• Dynamically Configure Mobile Applications: Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps
• Optimize Web and Mobile Apps, Across Devices, Using Google Analytics
• Introducing Open Bidder: Leverage Google’s Cloud Platform to Reinvent Display Advertising
• Google Analytics and AdSense Data Analysis in BigQuery

Share your thoughts on our Google+ page and tell us which session was your favorite!

 - Eric Leichtenschlag, AdMob Team

Toni Fingerroos, a games developer in Finland, became inspired to create a mobile app. He devoted 3 months to building it, often working 16 hour days. That idea became the hugely popular Hill Climb Racing, and the game has grown to be part of a successful app business called Fingersoft.

Hill Climb Racing has been downloaded in over 145 countries on both iOS and Android. AdMob consistently generates nearly 100% ad fill rates and enables Toni to monetize the game on a global scale. He uses AdMob house ads to promote his app too.

“Hill Climb Racing has over 60 million downloads. About 40% [of the revenue] comes from advertisements, and AdMob is our cornerstone,” says Toni. Hear more about Toni’s story in the video below.

Download the PDF version of the case study here.

Posted by Mike Schipper, Product Marketing Manager, AdMob

We recently announced upgraded ad extensions that provide many new capabilities, including mobile-optimized settings, new scheduling features, and detailed reporting at the individual sitelink level. We’ll be helping all advertisers transition to these improved extensions over the coming months. Starting on September 23, 2013, the AdWords API will support only these upgraded extensions, including the 25-character sitelink limit, and we’ll begin automatically upgrading legacy extensions to the new format.

We recommend upgrading your extensions ahead of September 23, 2013 so you can take advantage of all the new features and customize specific settings. Most advertisers are upgrading their extensions as part of their overall upgrade to AdWords enhanced campaigns. To help make the process easy for you, we’ve put together a number of resources:

• The feed services can help you create and retrieve upgraded ad extensions
• Our upgrade guide as well as a complete code example in Java provide best practices 
• Our client libraries provide full support for various feed services and code examples that show how to use them
• The AdWords API Required Minimum Functionality document is updated with information about how feed services can be used to create and manage upgraded ad extensions

As you are upgrading, you can create upgraded ad extensions while still keeping legacy ad extensions in the same campaign; however, only the upgraded extensions will be served. Beginning on September 23, if a campaign only has legacy extensions, we will auto-upgrade them to the new format. If a campaign has both legacy and upgraded extensions, we will only serve the new format, and legacy extensions will be marked as deleted.

If you have questions or need help with the upgrade, please visit us on the developer forum, or at one of the upcoming GDL Office Hours.

 - Anash P. Oommen, AdWords API Team

Thursday at Google I/O 2013, we announced Open Bidder, a fully customizable toolkit for building real-time bidding applications. By combining the speed and flexibility of the Google Cloud Platform with DoubleClick’s expertise in real-time bidding, Open Bidder provides developers a robust platform to quickly create innovative RTB solutions.

Currently, companies interested in building their own real-time bidding technology face significant barriers to overcome, including:

• Development and maintenance of a scalable and secure infrastructure for their bidder
• Development of a robust system to apply bidding logic to incoming bid requests
• Development of a bidder with sufficient latency at scale to meet real-time bidding requirements

Open Bidder removes these barriers by providing a customizable bidder toolkit with a reference implementation that developers can adapt to plug in their own bidding logic and data. Additionally, we provide an administration console for managing bidder and load balancer instances within Google Compute Engine. With Open Bidder buyers can significantly lower the latency of their bidders by leveraging Google Compute Engine’s scale, speed, and proximity to DoubleClick Ad Exchange. Now buyers can focus on developing new and innovative bidding logic instead of worrying about the complexity of scaling to over 250,000 qps while responding in under 100ms.

We’ve been working on Open Bidder for over a year, and over that time we’ve been fortunate to have some fantastic alpha testers that have helped us develop and improve the product. Going forward, we’re excited to see what brilliant ideas developers can bring to advertising through Open Bidder. If you’re interested in being a Beta tester, please submit an application here.

More details about Open Bidder can be found in our Beta documentation. To stay up to date on all of our ads-related technologies follow our Google Ads Developers Google+ page.

- The Open Bidder Team

We’re committed to helping app developers with discovery, distribution and monetization on all platforms so they can continue doing what they do best: creating awesome apps. Last year, we integrated our AdMob inventory into the AdWords system, giving mobile app developers access to many more new advertisers. And we’ve continued to invest in tools to help app developers succeed.

Today at I/O, we’re announcing that we’ve rebuilt AdMob, incorporating the best technology from our other ad platforms, like AdSense. It’s a particularly great tool to help small mobile app developers grow their business.

Starting today, we’ll begin rolling out the new AdMob to our developers. We expect it to be available for all of our developers globally in the coming months. If you’re an AdMob developer, you’ll see a notice in your account asking you to upgrade to the new AdMob.

With the new AdMob, some of the features available are:

• Smarter app promotion: Conversion Optimizer helps many AdWords advertisers increase conversions while decreasing cost per acquisition. We’re now bringing Conversion Optimizer to app developers using AdMob to promote their apps, so they can get the best possible number of installs for their budget. Choose a target cost per acquisition for each download, and Conversion Optimizer will show ads when they are most likely to lead to an install.
• Robust ad filters: Ensuring that your app is showing quality, relevant ads is important for app developers. Now, developers will have more control over which ads appear in their apps, by blocking sensitive categories, so they can increase relevancy and protect their brand.
• Maximized earnings: If developers want to show ads in their apps from more than one ad network, they can use AdMob Mediation with a new, simplified setup.
• Local payments: We’re introducing local currency payments, so developers don’t need to spend time calculating currency conversions and organizing money transfers.
• Intelligent reports: The new reporting interface enables app developers to slice the data in many ways with multi-dimensional reports that help them identify opportunities to grow. They can break down their reports over time by app or ad unit, platform, country, bid type, and more.

If a developer is just starting out, AdMob can connect them to more than a million advertisers globally, providing a consistent source of advertising revenue which can grow as their downloads take off.

We want AdMob to open up opportunities for many more app developers worldwide to help them build successful businesses. Join us at Google I/O at 11:15 AM PST today or watch a livestream of our talk: Build a Great App Business with AdMob, and see new demos.

Posted by Vishay Nihalani, Product Manager, AdMob

We’re pleased to announce that the recorded talks for the AdWords API Workshops are now available. The talks are from the workshop in New York, but we had the same agenda for all other locations. The major topics include

• Enhanced Campaigns and New Extensions Support
• New & Improved MCC Services
• OAuth2 authentication
• New Bidding & Budgeting
• Account Performance Tracking & Optimization (and introducing a new tool - Kratu)

We have made available all presentation slides used in the workshop. We hope this is useful for those who attended other locations or didn’t attend the event in person.

- Takeshi Hagikura, AdWords API Team

Editor's note: repost from Developers Blog, --Stan Grinberg

At Google I/O 2013, we will share the future of our platforms with you. Developers from all over the world are the key innovators of powerful, breakthrough technologies, and that’s why we challenged ourselves to make the Google I/O experience available to every developer, everywhere.



Watch Google I/O live
From the comfort of your own home, office, secret lair, or anywhere you have a reliable Internet connection, you can stream Google I/O May 15-16 live. Brought to you by Google Developers Live (GDL), the Google I/O homepage will become the GDL at I/O live streaming hub starting on May 15th at 9:00 AM PT (16:00 UTC). From this page, you can:

• Stream 4 channels of technical content on your computer, tablet, or phone. You’ll feel like you’re right there in the keynote and session rooms, listening to product announcements straight from the source. Live streaming will run on developers.google.com/io from 9 AM PT (16:00 UTC) to 7 PM PT (2:00 UTC) on May 15 and 16.
• Watch exclusive interviews with the Googlers behind the latest product announcements. This year, GDL will be on site, broadcasting one-on-one product deep dives, executive interviews, and Sandbox walkthroughs from the GDL stage.
• Get the latest news in real-time. We’ll be posting official announcements during I/O. You’ll be able to see the feed on the Google I/O homepage, in the I/O mobile app (coming soon), and on +Google Developers.
• Never miss a session. All Google I/O technical sessions will be recorded and posted toGDL and the Google Developers YouTube channel. Subscribe to our YouTube channel for archived session updates.

Live blog the keynote
Grab our live blogging gadget to add the keynote live stream to your own site or blog. Customize the gadget with your site or blog name, live blog alongside real-time Google announcements, and share a dynamic Google I/O experience with your readers. Have questions? For more info, check out our live blogging gadget FAQ.

Get together locally
Experience Google I/O with your local developer community by hosting or attending an I/O Extended event. If you’re hosting, register here and learn how to hold a totally epic event with our handy Organizer Guide. Otherwise, with over 400 sites in 90+ countries, chances are good that there is an I/O Extended event near you. Find an event now!

And before I/O, tune in to Google Developers Live programming to connect with Google engineers, prep for this year’s event, and browse our archived content. For official conference updates, add +Google Developers to your Circles, follow #io13 for big announcements, join the Google I/O community, and keep an eye on the Google I/O site.

--Mike Winton, Director of Developer Relations

We recently created two visual representations, the Basic SDK Interaction Diagram and the SDK-Player Interaction Diagram, that illustrate the actions that occur once your video player is fully integrated with the v3 IMA SDK. These diagrams outline both:

• the high level interactions that take place among the IMA SDK, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), AdSense for Video (AFV), Ad Exchange (AdX) and any third party ad servers
• the more detailed communications that take place between the IMA SDK and your video player

The diagrams are meant to assist you when integrating your video player with the v3 IMA SDK. They can help to visualize the interactions that are taking place when video content and ads are being played (as well as the sequence in which these actions are occurring). Both diagrams are available within the left-hand navigation of the IMA SDK documentation under Resources and are linked to directly from within the IMA HTML5 SDK and IMA Flash SDK Working with Ads pages.

Feel free to contact us on the forum if you have any questions about these new learning tools and if you found them useful (or use the Feedback on this document link on the page). You can also reach out to us on our Google+ page.

- Joe Roepcke, IMA SDK Team

We are pleased to announce that updated localized editions of the IMA SDK v3 documentation are now available for the following languages:

• Spanish
• Japanese
• Korean
• Brazilian Portuguese
• Russian
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)

To view the localized edition of the latest documentation, be sure to select the desired language from the menu in the footer of any page.

Let us know on the forum if you have any questions about our localized content (or use the “Feedback on this document” link in the upper right-hand corner of any page). You can also reach out to us on Google+ page.

- Joe Roepcke, IMA SDK Team

We recently announced the ability to set an eCPM floor when making requests to the AdMob network. This post will show you how to set up this new feature to get the maximum benefit from the AdMob network.

First of all, we highly recommend that you create a new AdMob publisher ID on admob.com for each Mediation Placement you want to configure with AdMob eCPM floor. By creating a unique publisher ID, you’ll get fine grained reporting on how eCPM floor is performing on each of your placements.

Next, select Add Ad Network on your mediation placement, and add the AdMob eCPM Floor Beta network. In the Ad Network Configuration Settings, point this network to your newly created eCPM floor publisher ID.

Note: If you didn’t previously have a mediation placement, you’ll need to create a mediation placement on mediation.admob.com, and use the mediation placement ID in your application in place of your AdMob publisher ID.

Finally, you need to update your allocation to give the AdMob eCPM Floor Beta network an eCPM value. A suitable value for the eCPM floor is a value higher than the highest eCPM you’re getting from other networks.

In the sample below, Ad Network A is getting $0.37 eCPM. By setting AdMob eCPM Floor Beta slightly higher at $0.40, AdMob Mediation will first try to fetch an ad worth $0.40 eCPM from the AdMob Network. If it can’t fill that request, Mediation will try Ad network A, followed by Ad network B. If neither of those networks can fill the request, Mediation will come back to the AdMob network to fetch an ad without the eCPM floor restriction.

This new configuration will increase your ad revenue for requests fulfilled by AdMob eCPM Floor Beta, while still maintaining the same revenue from the rest of your requests where AdMob cannot fill the eCPM Floor request. You can also track your eCPM Floor performance by viewing sites and apps reporting for your newly created eCPM floor publisher ID.

If you have any questions about eCPM Floor or AdMob in general, please direct them to our forum. You can also follow us on our Google+ page to get updates on all Google ads developer products.

 - Eric Leichtenschlag, AdMob Team

To provide more control and precision over bids in enhanced campaigns, we’ve now made ad group level mobile bid adjustments available in the AdWords API, as previously announced.

While the majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments, this new feature will be useful for those who wish to set different mobile bid adjustments within an enhanced campaign. The functionality is accessible via the new AdGroupBidModifierService for all currently available AdWords API versions. It is not required to migrate to a different version of the API to use this new service. Please refer to this guide covering technical aspects of the release.

The new feature is only available for enhanced campaigns, so if you haven’t upgraded yet, now would be a good time. As a reminder, we will begin automatically upgrading all AdWords campaigns to enhanced campaigns starting on July 22, 2013.

If you have any questions regarding this new feature or enhanced campaigns, feel free to ask us on the forum, during office hours or via the Plus page.

 - Danial Klimkin, Ads Developer Relations Team.