How to Create a Campaign in DV360: A Step-by-Step Guide

Building a campaign in Display & Video 360 (DV360) is not hard once you know the order the platform wants things in. Launch problems usually come from a skipped step rather than a missing skill: a line item with no approved creative, an insertion order that ends a day before its line items, or a frequency cap nobody set.

Below is the full sequence in the order DV360 asks for it, with the settings worth slowing down for.

What do you need before you create a campaign in DV360?

You need access to an advertiser, a plan, tracking and approved creatives. Sort these out first, because DV360 will happily let you build a campaign without them and then fail quietly at launch.

• Advertiser access. Your user role must allow you to create and edit campaigns in the advertiser. Our guide on how DV360 works explains partners, advertisers and access.
• A media plan. Objective, audience, markets, languages, budget, dates and the KPI you will judge success on.
• Conversion tracking. If the campaign has a performance goal, your Floodlight activities should already be firing. Our guide on tracking conversions in DV360 covers the setup.
• Creatives. Display sizes, video lengths and click-through URLs ready, with UTM parameters added where you use them. YouTube ads need the video uploaded to YouTube as public or unlisted.
• Deals. Programmatic Guaranteed (PG) or private marketplace (PMP) deals should be set up and visible in your inventory before you build line items against them.
• YouTube terms. Google & partner inventory terms must be accepted at partner level before anyone can create YouTube line items. Under a reseller seat, the seat holder does this.

How is a DV360 campaign structured?

A campaign sits inside an advertiser and holds insertion orders, which hold line items. The campaign states the goal, the insertion order (IO) controls budget and pacing, and the line item does the actual buying.

Step 1: How do you create the campaign?

1. Open your advertiser, select Campaigns in the left menu and click New campaign.
2. Give it a name you can read in a report six months later. A pattern like Brand_Festive26_Awareness_MH tells anyone the brand, flight, goal and market.
3. Choose the goal. DV360 offers four: "Raise awareness of my brand or product", "Drive online action or visits", "Drive offline or in-store sales" and "Drive app installs or engagements".
4. Pick a KPI, such as CPM, CPV, CPC, CPA, CTR or viewable %, and add a target if you have one. DV360 uses the goal and KPI for optimisation suggestions and automatic budget allocation, so keep the target realistic.
5. Select the creative types you expect to run.
6. Enter planned spend and planned dates. Neither limits serving. They help you track the campaign against plan.
7. Set a campaign frequency cap if you want one limit across every IO and line item. Serving stops at whichever cap is reached first, at campaign, IO or line item level. On Programmatic Guaranteed line items the campaign cap is best effort, because DV360 puts the publisher booking first.
8. Choose inventory sources and default targeting, such as geography, language, brand safety, environment and viewability. New IOs and line items inherit these defaults, with one exception: YouTube & partners line items ignore campaign and IO default targeting, so set their targeting on the line item itself.
9. Click Create.

Step 2: How do you set up the insertion order?

The insertion order is your budget container. Create one IO for each distinct job, not one for everything.

1. Inside the campaign, click New insertion order and choose Standard.
2. Pick an objective: Brand awareness, Clicks, Conversion, Custom, or Insertion order without objective. The objective decides which KPIs, bid strategies and line item types you can use.
3. Enter the budget and flight dates. Use budget segments if you want to split spend by month or hold more money for a festive peak.
4. Choose pacing. Flight Even spreads spend across the flight, Flight Ahead pushes a little faster so the full budget goes out, and Daily ASAP spends each day's money as quickly as possible. Even pacing suits most brand flights. ASAP suits a one-day sale.
5. Choose optimisation. The two main options work like this: "Automate bid & budget at insertion order level" lets DV360 set line item bids and move budget, while "Control bid and budget at the line item level" leaves both with you. Audio line items do not work with IO-level automation.
6. Set the IO frequency cap, inventory sources and default targeting, then save.

Give each IO one job. If awareness and retargeting line items share an IO with automated budget, whichever line item hits the KPI most cheaply will usually take the money, whatever your plan said.

Step 3: How do you build line items?

Line items are where targeting, bids and creatives come together.

1. Open the IO and click New line item.
2. Choose the type: Display, Video, Audio, YouTube & partners, Demand Gen or one of the app-focused types. YouTube works a little differently, with ad groups inside the line item, so we cover it in our guide on running YouTube ads through DV360.
3. Name it and set the status. Draft keeps it from serving. Active lets it serve once its start date arrives.
4. Choose inventory: open auction exchanges, deals and auction packages, or grouped deals.
5. Set flight dates inside the IO dates, then the budget and pacing.
6. Choose a bid strategy. You can set a fixed CPM bid or let DV360 bid automatically, for example to maximise viewable impressions on a brand campaign or conversions on a performance one.
7. Add a frequency cap, choose the Floodlight activities that count as conversions, and assign creatives.
8. Click Create.

Step 4: How should you set targeting?

Start broad enough to spend, then add layers one at a time. Every layer shrinks the pool of impressions you can buy.

The usual layers are geography, language, audiences, age and gender, device, environment (web or app), brand safety, viewability and position. A Marathi language setting plus two cities plus an in-market audience plus a narrow age band can leave a line item with too little supply to deliver. Our guide on targeting audiences in DV360 explains each option, and our guide on forecasting impressions in DV360 shows how to check supply before you launch.

Step 5: What should you check before launch?

Run a short QA pass on every campaign. It takes ten minutes and can save days of underdelivery.

1. Dates. Line item dates sit inside IO dates, and both match the plan.
2. Budgets. Line item budgets add up to the IO, and IOs add up to the plan.
3. Creatives. At least one creative per line item is approved. A line item cannot serve until one is.
4. Tracking. Floodlight tags fire on the right pages, and click-through URLs open the right landing page.
5. Frequency and safety. Caps sit at the level you intended, and brand safety exclusions are applied.
6. Timing. Activate at least a day before the start date. Google notes that an activated line item can take up to 24 hours to begin serving.

An illustrative example: a ₹20 lakh festive awareness campaign

Here is how a four-week Diwali push in Maharashtra might be structured. The figures are an illustrative example, not a quote.

The impression maths is simple: impressions = budget ÷ CPM × 1,000. At an illustrative ₹150 target CPM, ₹8 lakh on YouTube buys about 53 lakh impressions. On ZEE5, where our ZEE5 advertising guide lists indicative CPMs of ₹350–650 and a minimum spend of about ₹10 lakh, ₹10 lakh buys roughly 15 to 29 lakh impressions depending on the agreed rate. GST is extra.

What mistakes should you avoid?

• Too many small line items. Splitting ₹2 lakh across ten line items leaves each one too little to learn or to deliver steadily.
• Mixed jobs in one IO. Awareness and conversion line items pull automated budget in different directions.
• No cap on retargeting. A small audience sees the same banner far too often.
• Same-day launches. Approvals and activation take time, so day one often delivers little.
• Changing everything at once. Change one setting, wait, read the result. Our checklist on optimising DV360 campaigns covers what to change and when.

Once the campaign is live, set up a weekly report on the same day each week. Our guide on creating DV360 campaign reports shows which metrics to pull for each goal.

Next step

If your team will build campaigns itself, a DV360 self-serve account gives you your own advertiser under our partner seat, with onboarding and tracking setup help. If you want to plan first, ask for a free media plan: a DV360 specialist drafts a channel mix and budget that you can turn into this exact structure.