How to Create DV360 Campaign Reports: A Practical Guide

A good DV360 report answers one question for one reader. The brand manager wants to know if the money went where the plan said. The trader wants to know which line item to fix. Building the report takes minutes. Deciding what goes in it is the real work.

Where do you build campaign reports in DV360?

Most reporting happens in Instant reporting. You reach it from Reports, then Instant & offline, then Instant reporting.

Offline reporting used to hold a few special report types, including Floodlight and Inventory Availability. Google moved both into Instant reporting in September 2026, so the reports most teams need now sit in one place: delivery, YouTube, conversions and supply. For YouTube there are ready-made YouTube Standard and YouTube Conversions templates, which avoid fields that do not work together.

There is also a beta option, Generate report with Google AI, inside a new instant report. You type a prompt such as "impressions and clicks by campaign" and it suggests the metrics, dimensions and filters. Check what it picks before you share anything.

How do you create an instant report step by step?

1. Go to Reports, then Instant & offline, then Instant reporting, and click New instant report, or start from a template.
2. Choose the date range.
3. Drag dimensions, such as date, campaign, line item and creative, into the Rows area.
4. Drag metrics, such as impressions, clicks and conversions, into the Columns area.
5. Add filters for advertiser, campaign or insertion order. The advertiser filter shows up to 800 entities, and regex filters work only on budget segment name, domain, keyword and subdomain.
6. Leave Auto-run on for small reports. Turn it off for big ones, make all your changes, then click Run report.
7. Click Save as and give the report a name your team will recognise.
8. Download it as CSV or Excel, or export it to Google Sheets.

Which metrics should a DV360 campaign report include?

Match the metrics to the campaign goal. A report that tries to show everything ends up showing nothing.

Three definitions help when clients ask. Viewable means at least 50% of a display ad was on screen for one second (30% for very large ads), or 50% of a video ad for two consecutive seconds while playing. Unique reach is the number of different people or devices that saw an ad. Frequency is impressions divided by reach. Our guide on checking reach and frequency in DV360 goes deeper.

Reach needs care. Most reach metrics can only be reported for date ranges of 92 days or less, so for longer flights report reach by month. And never add reach across line items, because one person can be counted in several. Pull unique reach at campaign or advertiser level instead.

If viewability is low, our guide on improving ad viewability explains what to change. For performance campaigns, conversions only appear if tracking is right, which our guide on tracking conversions in DV360 covers.

Which other DV360 report templates are worth using?

The standard delivery report covers most weeks. Four templates answer questions it cannot.

• Unique Reach Overlap. Shows how many unique users saw ads across a pair of dimensions, such as two insertion orders, campaigns or device types, plus exclusive and duplicate reach. Use it to check whether your YouTube and OTT insertion orders reached different people. Pivoted overlap reports have to be downloaded.
• Audience Performance. Shows how line items performed across audience lists. It covers up to the last 98 days, can lag by 48 hours, and does not include YouTube & partners line items.
• Floodlight. Shows conversions by Floodlight activity, so you can see each step of a funnel, such as form starts and completed applications, side by side.
• Inventory Availability. Shows matching supply before launch rather than delivery after it. Our guide on forecasting impressions in DV360 explains how to read it.

How fresh is DV360 report data?

Fresh enough for daily checks, but not final on the day. Google's help gives these timings:

• Impression and click data updates every 3 to 4 hours.
• Conversion data updates about every 6 hours, and cross-environment conversions every 24 hours.
• DV360 can revise data for up to 31 days while it validates impressions, clicks and conversions.
• Renamed line items or insertion orders take 24 hours to show in reports.

Retention varies by report. Most data is kept for 24 months, standard audience performance data for 98 days, keyword data for 60 days and anything with the hour dimension for 31 days.

So close month-end numbers a few days into the next month, not on the 1st. And pull hourly data within the month if you need it.

One change to note in future reports: Google has said that from February 2027 billed display impressions will be counted when an ad begins to render rather than on download, in line with MRC standards, and expects a slight drop in billed impression volume. Flag it to clients so a small dip is not read as a delivery problem.

How do you schedule and share DV360 reports?

Open the report, click the Schedule and delivery icon and turn on Schedule status. Then set:

• Time zone. Use India time so dates match your advertiser and your client's systems.
• Frequency and date range. Weekly, covering the last seven days, suits most campaigns.
• Format. CSV or Excel.
• Delivery. Turn on email, choose an attachment or a link, and add recipients.

Scheduled reports arrive at midnight in the time zone you chose. CSV files over 200KB are zipped, and email attachments are limited to 25MB. Recipients get the files, not the report, so they cannot rerun it. A schedule stops if the report has not been downloaded for 60 days, has failed for 30 days, or if the owner loses access.

A worked example: the pacing line in a weekly report

Pacing is the first thing anyone reads, so put it at the top. Here is an illustrative ₹8 lakh, 28-day flight checked on day 14.

• Expected spend by day 14 = ₹8,00,000 × 14 ÷ 28 = ₹4,00,000.
• Actual spend = ₹3,60,000.
• Pacing = ₹3,60,000 ÷ ₹4,00,000 = 90%.
• To finish on budget, the remaining ₹4,40,000 must spend over 14 days, or about ₹31,400 a day against the original ₹28,571.

At 90%, look for the line items that are behind and check their bids, targeting and creative approvals. Our DV360 optimisation checklist covers the fixes.

A simple weekly report then follows this order:

How do you report to people who do not use DV360?

Scheduled CSV or Excel files, plus the odd Google Sheets export, work for small teams. For agencies and brands whose campaigns we run through our DV360 Managed Service or a Campaign-Based Engagement, our DV360 Reports Section does this job. It pulls delivery data from DV360 through its APIs and shows spend, impressions, unique reach, frequency, CPM and video completion, with budget against actual spend and breakdowns by creative, audience, geography, channel and placement. It updates once a day, each morning India time. Agencies can ask for a separate login for each client that shows only that client's advertiser, and every number is the campaign's real delivery.

What reporting mistakes should you avoid?

• Adding reach across line items. Use unique reach at a higher level.
• Judging video awareness on CTR. Use completion rate, viewability and reach.
• Mixing time zones. A report in UTC and a CRM in India time will never agree on daily numbers.
• Comparing DV360 and Google Analytics without context. They use different attribution, so expect gaps. Our guide on connecting DV360 with GA4 explains why.
• Reporting outputs, not outcomes. Impressions are not results. Our guide to measuring programmatic advertising ROI shows how to link spend to business value.

Next step

See what a finished client report looks like in our DV360 Reports Section sample, with daily delivery, budget pacing and breakdowns by creative, audience, location and channel. If your team builds its own reports, keep the weekly template above and schedule it for the same day each week.