DV360 Course Fees, Syllabus, Duration and Certification in 2026

Summary

Being laid off can feel like a major career setback, but it doesn’t have to define your professional journey. How to Explain a Layoff to Recruiters explains how to discuss a layoff honestly, confidently, and professionally without sounding defensive or negative. The article shares practical strategies for keeping your explanation short and factual, clarifying when a layoff resulted from restructuring, budget cuts, or broader business changes, and avoiding criticism of a previous employer. It also explains how to handle difficult recruiter questions such as “Why you?”, demonstrate productive activities after the layoff through freelancing, certifications, training, or volunteering, and quickly shift the conversation toward your skills and career goals. With preparation and practice, candidates can present a layoff as one part of their career story rather than allowing it to overshadow their experience, capabilities, and future potential.

Expect to pay about INR 55,000 for a guided DV360 course in Hyderabad in 2026. The thing to note here is that the fee buys you the part which recruiters check for, which is time spent building campaigns on the platform yourself, a live project for your portfolio and support with placements.

A guided program takes two months, and Google’s certification exam doesn’t cost anything. So in this blog, we’ll walk you through what the fee includes, what’s on the syllabus, how long it takes and how the certification works, so that you can pick a course which gets you hired.

• Fee: INR 55,000 for the two-month classroom program, where you’ll be working on the platform yourself.
• Time: two months of weekend classes, which comes to 80+ hours in all.
• The Google exam costs nothing, and you sit it online from home.

Sources:
NextGen Programmatic Advertising Program, Digital Nest
·
Display & Video 360 Certification, Google Skillshop

Display & Video 360, which most people just call DV360, is Google’s demand-side platform, and agency buyers use it to bid on banner, video, connected TV and audio slots across apps and websites that aren’t owned by Google. You can’t just sign up for it, though, because nobody hands out personal logins. Unless your agency already holds a seat, you don’t get to practise on it at all, and honestly, that’s the whole reason people pay for training.

Google Ads is self-serve. A bakery owner with a debit card can have a search campaign up in about an hour. The DSP is a different beast: it’s licensed to agencies and big advertisers, and it opens up far more exchanges, private deals and audience controls than Google Ads ever will. If you’ve already run the types of Google Ads campaigns for a client, you might not be aware that it sits one level above them, in the programmatic layer where the big display budgets get spent.

The demand keeps growing because the money keeps moving into programmatic buying, which is no longer a side channel in India.

• Going by the dentsu-e4m numbers, programmatic buying took 42% of India’s digital media spend in 2025, which works out to INR 30,081 crore and a 19% jump over 2024.
• For 2027, the report’s estimate is INR 42,435 crore, and that would be 43% of everything India spends on digital.

What that tells you is that out of every INR 100 Indian brands put into digital ads, roughly INR 42 is running through machines like this one, and somebody still has to plan, traffic and watch over each of those campaigns.

Sources: Display & Video 360, Google Marketing Platform · Google Ads · dentsu-e4m Digital Advertising Report 2026, exchange4media

A guided DV360 course costs INR 55,000 in 2026, while Google’s own learning path and exam are free. Moreover, the whole of that fee goes into practice time, because a guided program makes you build campaigns yourself instead of watching a trainer’s screen.

The same program also runs as a 2.5-month batch at INR 50,000, if you’d rather spread the classes over a longer stretch.

Well, a classroom program costs more because it carries the expensive bit of learning, which is supervised practice on a live campaign. On top of that, it bundles in Campaign Manager 360, The Trade Desk and Integral Ad Science too.

The free route is enough if you already work in a media agency and only need the certificate. However, if you’re a fresher, go for a guided program, because the first question a recruiter asks is what you’ve set up in the platform with your own hands.

Sources: NextGen Programmatic Advertising Program, Digital Nest

A complete DV360 course syllabus begins with how programmatic works as a whole. After that, you’d go through DV360, CM360, The Trade Desk and Integral Ad Science one at a time, and the last stretch is capstone projects in which you plan, set up and report on a campaign on your own.

• Introduction to programmatic advertising: how is programmatic different from paid search and paid social? That’s where you begin, before getting into the ecosystem, key concepts, ad formats, inventory types and the tools landscape
• DV360: the big one. Campaign setup and structure, targeting, audiences, inventory and deals, creative trafficking, YouTube campaigns, programmatic DOOH, reporting, optimisation and Google Tag basics all sit in here
• CM360: here’s where you’ll handle account structure, sites and placements, ads and creatives, third-party tags and 1×1 trackers, plus Floodlight setup for tracking and building audiences
• The Trade Desk: you’ll learn campaign setup, targeting, audiences and the data marketplace, inventory, reporting and optimisation here, and you’ll also get to know Kokai, the platform’s AI layer
• Integral Ad Science, where you study brand safety and suitability, viewability measurement, invalid traffic and ad fraud
• Projects and exercises, where you complete a media plan capstone, a campaign setup capstone and a reporting and insights analysis

A syllabus should go beyond Google’s DSP because most agency jobs expect you to work across two or three platforms. The thing to note here is that Campaign Manager 360 is used alongside DV360 for ad serving and measurement, and The Trade Desk is an independent DSP that isn’t tied to Google.

Sources: Curriculum, NextGen Programmatic Advertising Program, Digital Nest · Campaign Manager 360, Google Marketing Platform

A guided DV360 course takes two months, with 80+ hours of classes on weekends. If you only want the certificate, Google’s free learning path runs at your own pace, so the time depends on how many hours a day you put in.

Sources: NextGen Programmatic Advertising Program, Digital Nest

Google awards this certificate through Skillshop, once you finish the learning path and clear an online exam. Skillshop is Google’s official training and certification site for its ad products, which is why it’s the only place to sit the DV360 exam. You’ll need a Google account to sign in, and that’s the only thing you’ll need, since there’s no payment step at all.

• Where you take it: Google Skillshop, online and on demand
• Exam fee: free
• Format: around 50 multiple-choice questions in 75 minutes
• Pass mark: 80%
• Validity: 12 months, and then you sit it again

Google tweaks these details now and then, so do check the page before your attempt.

Sources: Display & Video 360 Certification, Google Skillshop

If you are based in Hyderabad and you want classroom training, Digital Nest runs a NextGen Programmatic Advertising program covering DV360, CM360, The Trade Desk and Integral Ad Science. According to the institute, the program is two months long with 80+ hours of offline weekend classes; it is priced at INR 55,000, with a 2.5-month option at INR 50,000, and it comes with placement assistance, 10+ assured interviews and access to 500+ hiring partners. The program also prepares you for the DV360, CM360 and The Trade Desk certifications.

Sources: NextGen Programmatic Advertising Program, Digital Nest

conclusion

Being laid off from a company doesn’t mean that you’re being judged for your capabilities and your worth. This point is known by all recruiters, particularly in today’s world where restructuring and economic turbulence occur quite often. So, you have to provide recruiters with just a short explanation of the situation without getting upset and talking about yourself and your abilities further.