SDF stands for Structured Data File, a comma-separated values (CSV) file format that Google's Display & Video 360 (DV360) uses to retrieve and manage advertising resources in bulk. Rather than clicking through a browser interface to build one insertion order or one line item at a time, a trader downloads an SDF, edits it in a spreadsheet or a script, and uploads it back, applying changes to potentially thousands of resources in a single pass. The format exists because DV360's own interface does not scale to the volume of work large agencies and in-house teams actually do: a holding company running hundreds of advertisers cannot rebuild every flight date and budget cap by hand.

An SDF is not a single document but a family of file types, one per resource, sharing a common CSV structure and a shared version number that changes as Google adds or removes columns. According to Google's format documentation, every file opens with a header row naming its columns, string values are wrapped in quotation marks, missing values are left blank, and lists use semicolon-delimited strings, with lists of lists expressed as parenthesised, semicolon-separated sublists.

What sits inside the file

Google's current documentation defines seven SDF resource types: Campaign, Insertion Order, Line Item, Ad Group, Ad, Inventory Source and Media Product. Only Line Item and Ad Group also support a QA variant, a read-only format that swaps numeric identifiers for recognisable display names. Standard-format files are the only ones that can be uploaded to create or change resources; QA files exist purely for manual inspection.

The resource types mirror DV360's own hierarchy. A campaign sits at the top, holding budget and objective settings. Beneath it sit one or more insertion orders, each carrying its own budget, pacing rules and bid strategy unit. Beneath each insertion order sit line items, the most granular and most frequently edited layer, where targeting, frequency capping, bid strategy and creative assignment actually live. YouTube and Partners inventory uses a parallel structure of ad groups and ads. Inventory source files manage the private marketplace and programmatic guaranteed deals a line item can be restricted to, and media product files handle a narrower set of packaged inventory offers.

A single Line Item file has historically required more than 120 columns in every uploaded row, regardless of how many a given update touched. Partial Structured Data File Upload, generally available from May 5, 2026, let advertisers submit files containing only a subset of columns, organised into named column groups: every column in a group must travel together, but unrelated groups can be omitted. The Line Item ID remains the only column mandatory in every partial upload, so a team changing only flight dates no longer needs to resubmit the full schema.

How a file moves through the system

The practical cycle is download, edit, upload. A trader downloads through the DV360 interface, selecting Download SDF under an advertiser's Insertion Orders or Line Items, or through the API's sdfdownloadtasks resource, which runs asynchronously. Google's guidance warns against opening files in Excel, Python or a plain text editor, since reformatting can silently corrupt targeting settings.

Existing rows are edited to change existing resources; new rows, carrying a temporary negative identifier, create new ones; unrelated rows are deleted rather than left untouched, both to limit file size and avoid overwriting a colleague's concurrent change. Multiple files upload together and process in submission order, with temporary identifiers linking a new line item to a new insertion order created in the same batch, though Google advises against simultaneous files referencing the same line item, a documented source of race conditions. Upload runs entirely through the interface; the API can generate and download SDFs but cannot upload them. Files are capped at 10,000 entries. Processing returns a ZIP archive with an updated-resources CSV, a failed-resources CSV, or both, plus a file listing any unsupported resource subtype.

Origin and version history

The format predates Display & Video 360's current name, having begun as the bulk interface for DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM), the platform Google renamed Display & Video 360 in July 2018. Documented versions run back to v3.1, sunset March 2, 2020. DBM's own Line Item and SDF Download API services were retired February 26, 2021, moving all bulk operations onto the current API.

Version churn since has been structural rather than incidental. Google aims to keep three versions supported at any time, announcing a sunset the moment a new version ships and holding deprecated versions live for a minimum of six months, with the default advancing to the next-oldest version four weeks before cutoff. Version 5.5 was deprecated March 27, 2024, and sunset October 3, 2024. Version 7 reached general availability in late 2023 with identifiers aligned to the API and new YouTube Target Frequency settings, later sunsetting November 4, 2025. An SDF QA format entered open betaMay 30, 2024, and reached general availability August 8, 2024.

Version 9 carried unusual regulatory weight. It became effectively mandatory from September 8, 2025, when Google began requiring a "Contains EU Political Ads" column on new line item entries, enforcing the European Union's Regulation 2024/900 on political advertising transparency ahead of its October 10, 2025 effective date. Version 9.1 reached general availability September 17, 2025, refining Demand Gen targeting, and 9.2 followed as a beta that October, adding Video Sequence support. Google deprecated all three together on June 29, 2026, setting a single sunset of January 28, 2027.

Version 10 has already superseded that cohort, with a migration guide published June 2, 2026. Version 10.1 followed close behind, reaching general availability around July 30, 2026, adding a field declaring whether a YouTube video asset was created or edited using artificial intelligence, support for digital out-of-home resources, and new creative-association columns. That AI-labelling field had been previewed weeks earlier as part of a broader synthetic-content attestation effort Google rolled out across its advertising APIs through the summer of 2026, a pattern also visible in the DV360 API itself.

Why the format matters to buyers

SDF exists because manual configuration inside the DV360 interface does not scale to how large trading desks operate. A holding company agency or in-house programmatic team can manage thousands of line items across dozens of advertisers, and rebuilding budgets or targeting one screen at a time is not realistic at that volume. SDFs let that work happen offline, in a spreadsheet or a script a bulk-operations team writes once and reuses.

That dependency makes version churn a recurring operational cost. A team treating migrations reactively risks a compressed testing window on a schema spanning well over a hundred fields across several resource types. The compliance dimension sharpens that further: SDF v9's mandatory EU political advertising column arrived as a direct consequence of a regulatory deadline Google could not defer, meaning any advertiser running EU-facing line items had little choice but to migrate within weeks. Third-party trading platforms and bid-management tools frequently generate and ingest SDFs directly rather than calling the API resource-by-resource, since a bulk file matches how large-scale campaign builds are organised.

Limitations and disputes

The format's central weakness is the schema itself. Because a Line Item file historically required more than 120 columns in every row, small changes carried disproportionate overhead. Partial upload addresses the common cases but is scoped only to line item files and only to columns explicitly assigned a column group.

Deprecation cadence is a second point of friction. A minimum six-month window sounds generous in isolation, but the practical runway has varied between versions. Teams building automated pipelines have to track release notes continuously, since a missed migration produces hard upload failures rather than a graceful fallback. Google moved SDF, alongside the DV360 and Bid Manager APIs, onto a Discord server on March 24, 2026, consolidating developer support away from public forums; Discord's lack of native RSS has been raised as a workflow gap for teams that monitor changes through feed readers. The 10,000-entry cap per file is rarely discussed publicly but shapes how large advertisers segment exports, since an account exceeding that threshold in one resource type must split its operations across multiple files.

Disambiguation

SDF in Display & Video 360 should not be confused with the same abbreviation used elsewhere. Standard Delivery Format and similar file-transfer specifications used by some creative ad-serving vendors share no relationship with DV360's structured data files beyond the overlapping acronym. Structured data in the search-engine-optimisation sense, meaning schema.org markup embedded in a webpage to produce rich results, is an entirely separate concept from a bulk CSV export. Bid Manager API, the older DoubleClick-era interface, is related but distinct: it once offered its own SDF download endpoints before those retired in 2021. A Google Ads bulk upload file, used through Google Ads Editor, serves a similar purpose for search and shopping campaigns but uses an entirely different schema and resource hierarchy.

Recent developments

Google has moved through nine major SDF versions in roughly three years, and the pace has not slowed. Demand Gen resource support in the DV360 API completed its rollout as v9.2 entered beta. Developer support for the DV360 API, SDF and Bid Manager API consolidated onto Discord with an overhauled documentation set on March 24, 2026. On June 29, 2026, Google set the single January 28, 2027 sunset for v9, v9.1 and v9.2, describing the three as one generational cohort now that v10 has superseded them. Two further unversioned changes took effect October 1, 2026, removing specific digital content label and sensitive category exclusion options from both the API and the corresponding SDF columns, timed deliberately to land inside the same migration window as the v9 sunset. Version 10.1 followed with AI-transparency labelling and digital out-of-home support, extending a format that began as a DoubleClick-era bulk upload tool into the primary interface through which Google enforces its newest advertising-transparency requirements.

Timeline

  • Pre-2018: Structured Data Files operate as the bulk interface for DoubleClick Bid Manager (DBM)
  • July 2018: Google renames DoubleClick Bid Manager to Display & Video 360
  • March 2, 2020: SDF v3.1 and related early versions sunset
  • February 26, 2021: DBM API v1 and v1.1 Line Item and SDF Download services sunset, postponed from an original June 2020 date due to the pandemic
  • July 12, 2021: SDF v5 and v5.1 sunset
  • March 8, 2023: SDF v5.2 and v5.3 sunset
  • February 27, 2024: SDF v5.4 sunsets
  • March 27, 2024: SDF v5.5 deprecated
  • May 30, 2024: SDF QA format enters open beta
  • July 30, 2024: SDF v6 deprecated
  • August 8, 2024: SDF QA format reaches general availability, covering Line Item and YouTube Ad Group file types
  • October 3, 2024: SDF v5.5 sunsets
  • April 30, 2025: SDF v6 sunsets
  • May 7, 2025: SDF v7 deprecated
  • August 21, 2025: SDF v7.1, v8 and v8.1 deprecated; Google announces mandatory EU political ad declarations for the DV360 API and SDF
  • September 8, 2025: EU political advertising declarations become mandatory; SDF v9 introduces the "Contains EU Political Ads" column
  • September 17, 2025: SDF v9.1 reaches general availability with Demand Gen targeting changes
  • October 10, 2025: The EU's Transparency and Targeting of Political Advertising (TTPA) regulation takes effect
  • October 27, 2025: SDF v9.2 enters beta alongside DV360 API asset management for YouTube and Demand Gen
  • November 4, 2025: SDF v7 sunsets
  • March 3, 2026: SDF v7.1, v8 and v8.1 sunset
  • March 24, 2026: DV360 API, SDF and Bid Manager API developer support consolidates onto Discord
  • May 5, 2026: Partial Structured Data File Upload reaches general availability
  • June 2, 2026: Google publishes the SDF v10 migration guide
  • June 24, 2026: Demand Gen resource support completes rollout in the DV360 API
  • June 29, 2026: SDF v9, v9.1 and v9.2 deprecated together, with sunset set for January 28, 2027
  • July 30, 2026: SDF v10.1 reaches general availability with AI-transparency labelling and digital out-of-home support
  • October 1, 2026: Digital content label and sensitive category exclusion changes take effect across the DV360 API and SDF

Summary

Who: Programmatic traders, ad operations teams and bulk-operations specialists at agencies and in-house trading desks use SDFs to manage Display & Video 360 accounts at scale. Trevor Mulchay of the Display & Video 360 API Team has authored most of Google's recent developer announcements about the format. Third-party trading platforms and bid-management tools also generate and ingest SDFs on behalf of their advertiser clients.

What: A Structured Data File is a versioned, comma-separated values file format covering seven Display & Video 360 resource types (Campaign, Insertion Order, Line Item, Ad Group, Ad, Inventory Source and Media Product), used to create and update those resources in bulk through download, offline edit and upload rather than one-by-one interface changes.

When: The format traces back to the DoubleClick Bid Manager era before Google's July 2018 rename to Display & Video 360, with a formally documented version history running from v3.1 through the current v10 and v10.1, released around July 30, 2026.

Where: SDFs operate within Display & Video 360, accessible through the platform's web interface for both downloads and uploads, and through the Display & Video 360 API for downloads and version configuration only; uploads remain interface-only.

Why: The format exists because DV360's interface cannot efficiently handle the volume of configuration work large advertisers and agencies require, and because Google has increasingly used version updates to enforce regulatory requirements, such as the EU's political advertising transparency rules embedded in SDF v9, and platform-wide initiatives, such as the AI content labelling introduced in v10.1.