Just a friendly reminder that v2 of the IMA Flash SDK is deprecated. If your video player integration is still using v2, we encourage you to upgrade to v3 in order to take advantage of the following benefits:

• Ad Rules - allow you to control when ads display in your content, customize ad load by content category, video duration, or other targeting criteria and provide a Broadcast-style viewer experience with podding. In addition, you also have the ability to target ad placement within a pod, enable frequency-capping at the pod and content level and set up competitive exclusions.
• Optimized Pods - TV-style ad breaks consisting of multiple video ads which are algorithmically chosen to optimize for line item priority, pacing goals, and revenue (e.g., specify an ad pod duration and the ad server automatically selects ads of varying lengths that add up to your total duration).
• A more flexible, easily customized tag-based integration with AdExchange/AdSense (versus hard coding parameters in the AdsRequest class as was the case in v2). To make use of this more streamlined implementation, see the AdsRequest section of the upgrade instructions.
• Support for pod-, stream- or page-level competitive exclusions.

For more information about the features supported in the latest IMA SDK and examples of how to use them, see Benefits of using the IMA SDK with DFP Video. Feel free to contact us on the forum if need help with the migration. You can also reach out to us on our Google+ page.

Joe Roepcke, IMA SDK Team

We are pleased to announce the release of v201306 of the DFP API - one of our largest launches yet. It introduces many new features for creative management, forecasting, reporting, and includes a beta release of the sales management services. A detailed list of these features and what’s changed can be found on our release notes page.

Sales Management API

With the launch of v201306 also comes the release of the Sales Management beta services. Sales Management is currently being piloted by a small group of partners and we plan to extend availability throughout the year. We'd like to offer beta access to developers who plan to leverage the API to build connections to other business tools and systems.

The sales services allow you to:

• Create and track proposals
• Manage a catalog of products
• Define and update rate cards
• Reconcile monthly reports

For more information, take a look at our use cases guide.

To request access to the Sales Management services, please complete this form and our team will be in touch with further instructions.

Reporting

As we detailed in our previous blog posts, improving the stability and feature set of the reports is a top priority. Some highlights of note for v201306:

• Columns, dimensions, and dimension attributes will now appear in reports in the order in which they were requested. This does not affect previous versions.

• If you have the feature enabled, you can now specify a timeZone to run the report in. Supported time zones for your network can be found using the Time_Zone table through the PublisherQueryLanguage service. Please contact your account manager for questions regarding enabling this feature.
  
  
• More than 50 columns, dimensions, and dimension attributes have been added to bring the API closer to parity with the UI. 

Creatives

To make managing non-standard creatives easier, beginning in v201306, the creative types FlashExpandableCreative, FlashPushdownCreative, FloatingFlashCreative, and TextAdCreative have been replaced with the type TemplateCreative. In addition, the TemplateCreative.destinationUrl field has been added for use with %u or %%DEST_URL%% macros. As more template types are added to DFP, our hope is that you’ll be able to take advantage of them with less code modification.

If you have any suggestions or questions about the new version, feel free to comment on our plus page: Ads Developer Google+ page.

 - Adam Rogal, DFP API Team

Version 1.3 of the AdSense Management API is now available and comes with new features to help you retrieve more publisher and reporting information.

Metadata for reporting dimensions and metrics
This is a highly requested feature that provides information on the list of available dimensions and metrics for the publishers, as well as their compatibility. This is useful to help developers avoid generating reports with invalid dimensions and metrics.

Alerts
You can now list the publisher’s current alerts, in their default language or in the one you specify.

Ad code
You can now programmatically fetch the code of an ad unit using getAdCode.

Remember to visit the AdSense API forums or our Google+ page if you need any help implementing these new features!

 - Jose Alcérreca, AdSense API Team

Kunal Verma and William Ferguson never imagined that coding for fun would one day become more than just a pastime. Both developers now independently run their own app businesses, Verma’s XigXag Interactive is a full-time job in India and Ferguson’s XandarMob is a side gig.

Verma’s apps have reached 1.5 million downloads on Google Play, his most popular ones, such as Kids Musical Toys Set, are catered to children. AdMob’s ad content control options are particularly useful for the demographic he serves. Verma’s apps are 100% free with a steady 99.09% fill rate. With AdMob, he makes 3x more income than he would at a regular IT job in India.

Ferguson’s word scramble app, Lexathon, has been translated into 19 different languages and downloaded 430,000+ times by a loyal user base that spends an average of 10 minutes on the app per day. AdMob Mediation allows Ferguson to maximize his fill rate and leverage multiple ad networks to increase his total revenue.

Find out how these indie game developers used AdMob to make a living from their hobby. Download PDF versions of the XigXag case study and XandarMob case study.

Posted by Robin Lam, Mobile Ads Marketing