Disclaimer: This is not an official Google product. In fact, this tool is now DEPRECATED and no longer actively maintained.

The TrueView SDF Generator is a tool that lets you generate SDF (Structured Data Files) to create TrueView ads in DV360, especially useful when you have many videos (e.g. programmatically generated with tools like "Vogon").

The output SDF-compatible CSV files, once manually uploaded to DV360, let you create and correctly target the needed Ads, AdGroups, Line Items and Insertion Orders for each of your input videos, starting from a set of basic default values and targeting rules.

The tool is accessible via a Google Sheet, which includes the custom Apps Script code which handles the generation of the output.

Note: only TrueView Ads and Bumper Ads (if you're using SDF version >= 4) are supported.

Create a new Google Spreadsheet and open its script editor (from Tools > Script Editor)

• Copy all the .js files from this project in corresponding .gs (Code.gs, Utils.gs, SdfObject.gs, Setup.gs) files in your AppScript project.
• Save all the files and refresh your Google Sheet page (the Script Editor page will automatically close, that's fine). After a couple of seconds you will see a new TrueView SDF Generator drop-down menu in the toolbar (from now on, "the menu").
• Click on Initial Setup in the menu: this will automatically create the three necessary sheets in the document (see below for usage).
• Please note that the first time you ran the functions in the menu you might be prompted to grant the necessary permissions to the tool.

You're ready to start using the tool!

• In the STRUCTURE_AND_DEFAULTS sheet you will see a representation of all the fields (and corresponding values) needed to describe an Insertion Order (IO), Line Item (LI), AdGroup (AG) and Ad (AD). Note: these are the same field which are available in the DV360 SDF files - which in fact you're going to recreate.
• You will need to fill out the default values for all the relevant fields: these will apply to all the IOs, LIs, AGs and ADs that will be created.
• One easy and safe way to do this is to manually create a sample LI/AG in DV360, and then download it as SDF (Actions > Download SDF), so that you can reuse the same values in the Sheet (Edit > Paste Special > Paste transpose will let you copy-paste the SDF values vertically).
• Pay special attention to the lightblue fields (using placeholders - see below) and the yellow fields for mandatory values such as start/end dates (start date has to be in the future) and targeting.
• You can see a detailed list of available fields and accepted formats (very important for your upload to succeed!) in the SDF Documentation for Developers
• Please note that for targeting lists (or geo-targeting locations) you’ll need to use IDs and not the full names! (see the Targeting IDs sections below)
• The other key part is the use of placeholders like %%ID%% or %%NAME%% to differentiate values for each LI, AdGroup, Ad corresponding to a video in the INPUT sheet (see below). This means that all LIs, AGs and ADs will have the same default values listed in the STRUCTURE_AND_DEFAULTS sheet, except for when a %%NAME_OF_PLACEHOLDER%% notation is used, because in that case each LI/AG/AD will have a different value obtained from the different (videos/) variants listed in the INPUT sheet.
  • For instance, to distinguish the Line Items names you might want to use Line Item %%NAME%%, where NAME is also one of the columns in INPUT sheet, containing the different names of your different videos.
• You will also be able to manually edit individual items later (after the automatic generation of the tool but before downloading the CSV files to upload to DV360).

• Add one row for each iteration (e.g. each video) that you want to add as a Line Item, AdGroup and Ad. You might get these values in an almost immediately reusable format as output of the tool which has generated those videos (e.g. the CSV output of Vogon)

• Be sure to have for each row at least a Name, the YouTube ID, a Display URL and a Landing Page URL (in fact, these are the columns that you will already find in the INPUT sheet). These are required to create the corresponding Trueview Ad in DV360.

• You also have an ID column which should just be an incremental unique number. But this is also used if you want to group some videos (Ads) in the same AdGroup: in that case, use the same ID for videos that corrispond to different ads of the same adgroup:

  

  So if you have N rows in the INPUT sheet, with K different IDs, you’ll generate N Ads in DV360, grouped into K AdGroups (and K Line Items, and 1 Insertion Order).

• You can add additional columns for fields/settings you want to customize at video/ad level (vs. having a default value for all video/ads): for instance, you might want to add a GEO_TARGET column to target each video to different locations.

• Please note that, as mentioned, for targeting lists (or geo-targeting locations) SDF require IDs and not names! (see the Targeting IDs sections below).

• Order of columns doesn’t matter - names do: in particular, each column in the INPUT sheet can be used as a placeholder (through the %%NAME_OF_COLUMN%% notation explained in the previous section) in the values you have defined in the STRUCTURES_AND_DEFAULTS sheet

  • For instance, the column NAME can be used to generate Line Item names with a default value of Line Item %%NAME%%; or you can add adgroup-level targeting with a AUDIENCE_TARGETING column in the INPUT sheet, and a %%AUDIENCE_TARGETING%% placeholder for the corresponding field in the default values

• If you're not targeting audience lists, geolocations or other settings requiring DV360 list IDs, you can skip this step.
• SDFs accept targeting clusters (typically Geo-locations and/or User/Audience/Affinity/In-market lists) using their IDs, not their names
• If you are only targeting a few audiences / locations, the easiest approach is to manually check the IDs in the DV360 UI and insert them in the STRUCTURES_AND_DEFAULTS sheet (if they apply to all the different LIs/AdGroups,...) or with the relevant value in each row of the INPUT sheet.
  • If you can't find the ID in the DV360 UI, an even more reliable way to do this is downloading the SDF file of a LI/AG which already target those lists - the SDF will contain the corresponding ID.
• Obviously this gets a little more complicated if you have many rows with many different targets, especially as you might only be familiar with their external-facing names, and not the IDs. To convert your names to IDs, you have different options:
  • Download Entity Read files to have a complete list of the audiences of your client, and play with Vertical Lookups in a sheet to find the correspondence between your targeted lists and the corresponding ID.
  • For geo-locations, you can probably more easily find the IDs you need using this Adwords API tool (the Criteria ID you find there is the ID DV360 needs)
  • If you have added the name of the targeting location/list names in the INPUT sheet, and you have the corresponding DV360 IDs and you “just” need to automatically convert those names to the corresponding IDs, we have added a NAME_IDS_MAPPING sheet where you can add a row for each list/location with:
    • INPUT_COLUMN: the name of the column in the INPUT sheet where the list/location name would be found.
    • FULL_NAME: the name of the list/location to be replaced in that column.
    • DV360_ID: the DV360 ID to replace the name with. If you click on Convert Names to IDs in the menu, the tool will automatically loop through all the INPUT sheet rows to replace the list/location names with the corresponding DV360 IDs. See the Target lists conversione example in the ADDITIONAL INFO section below.

• Click on Generate SDF Sheets in the menu to generate the sheets for your IOs, LIs, AGs and ADs. This might take a few seconds.
• Have a look at the new/updated sheets, and if everything looks right download the corrisponding CSVs: go into each sheet and select File > Download As > Comma-separated values to download the SDF CSV to upload in the DV360 UI.
• Upload your CSVs in DV360, clicking on Actions > Upload (at Advertiser level). In a few seconds you’ll see whether your upload successfully creates the new IOs, LIs, AGs and ADs or there have been errors (and which ones). More info on how SDF work in DV360 here.
• If you need to edit and re-produce the sheets/CSVs (e.g. to correct wrong formatting which led to an error while uploading) just edit the INPUT and/or STRUCTURE_AND_DEFAULTS sheets and generate the sheets again.

• Do not edit sheet names, as they are critical for the script to work correctly.

• IO-level default targeting doesn't apply to TrueView line items.

• Even if SDF uploading fails at some point, it will create the IO and the other objects that were valid "until that point". Hence, you might need to "clean up" the half-baked resulting IO after a failed upload.

• Sometimes (very rarely) if you're uploading CSVs with many rows/videos, the upload might fail even if the CSVs are correct. You might recognize these "false negatives" when you get, for instance, 3 errors out of 100 Line Items (and those 3 failing rows are not particularly different from the others). In those cases, you might just want to try again!

• Video targeting: use YouTube IDs, not full YouTube URLs.

• All cells in the sheet need to be formatted as text (even numbers). The script takes care of that for the fields it generates, but keep that in mind if you manually edit the cells (Format > Number > Plain Text can help).

• SDF version support: we are providing the tool to support SDF version 4. When using a different version (i.e. your DV360 partner/advertiser has a different SDF version settings, and you are not able to change it), a different structure of the SDF object might be needed. You can adapt the structure in file SdfObject.gs to match the one supported by your SDF version.

• Example of Target lists names/ids conversion: In the INPUT sheet, we have our list/locations, listed by their names:

  

  We list all the list/location names in the NAME_IDS_MAPPING sheet, specifying the name of the column of the INPUT sheet the script needs to look into, and the corresponding DV360 ID:

  

  (list continues with all geo-locations for that country/granularity) We apply the automatic conversion, clicking on the Convert Names to IDs option in the Menu. If everything has been setup correctly, the INPUT sheet now will show IDs rather than names for the lists/locations:

  

  Note: this example obviously just has a few rows, so a manual replacement would have been the quicker solution! But the automated function helps when you have many more rows/lists/locations.