Google Ads Developer Blog: tools

Ads Developer Blog

The official blog for information about the Google Ads, Google Ad Manager, Google Mobile Ads SDKs for AdMob and IMA SDKs, and other Google Advertising Platform developer tools.

Sunsetting the creation of target spend field for Maximize Clicks strategies in Google Ads API

Monday, June 3, 2019

On July 31st, 2019 we will begin to sunset the target spend field for Maximize Clicks bidding strategies in the API. This will affect all versions of both the AdWords API and Google Ads API. The following behaviors will be blocked:

Populating the target spend field on existing standard and portfolio strategies.
Attaching portfolio strategies that have the deprecated field set to campaigns.

Later this year, our systems will start ignoring the target spend field and instead use your daily budget to manage spend. In order to prepare for this change, you should start using your budgets to specify how much you’d like to spend for Maximize Clicks bidding strategies and migrate your campaigns off this field today.

Read on to see how this will affect your API usage.

	Affected Target Spend Fields
Google Ads API	`campaign.target_spend.target_spend_micros` `bidding_strategy.target_spend.target_spend_micros`
AdWords API	`Campaign.BiddingStrategyConfiguration.TargetSpendBiddingScheme.spendTarget` `SharedBiddingStrategy.TargetSpendBiddingScheme.spendTarget`

Change Description
Any mutate operations that set a target spend field for the first time will return an error. You will be able to update a target spend field that currently contain a value, but you cannot set previously empty fields to a new value. Additionally, any operation attaching a bidding strategy to a campaign, where that bidding strategy has a value set for a target spend field, will throw an error. To manage Target Spend on any new campaigns, we recommend using a campaign budget. In each of these disallowed cases an error will be thrown.

Performing any of the disallowed actions above will generate one of the following errors:

OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT
UNSUPPORTED_FIELD_IS_SET

If you have any questions about this change or any other API feature, please contact us via the forum.

- Cory Liseno, Google Ads API Team

Google

Labels: google_ads_api , migration , query_language , reporting , tools

Announcing Google Ads API Doctor

Monday, April 22, 2019

We have heard from users that correctly configuring a client library and provisioning OAuth2 credentials can be challenging, so today we are introducing Google Ads API Doctor, a new tool that will analyze your client library environment. The program will:

Verify that your OAuth2 credentials are correctly configured and ready to make API calls.
Guide you through fixing any OAuth2 problems it detects and verify the corrected configuration.

The initial version of this tool will help you analyze and fix issues related to OAuth2 configuration, including the following common issues:

Invalid refresh token: The program will identify this and guide you through the process to obtain a valid token, back up your configuration file, and write the new value to your active configuration file.
Permission denied: There are several OAuth errors that sound similar, such as user permission denied and permission denied. The program identifies that in the first case it is caused by an invalid refresh token and in the second it’s because the Google Ads API is disabled in the Google API Console.

If you want to send the output to support, you can run your scenario with the PII flag to hide your Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and copy the screen output. To gather even more information, you can use the verbose flag to see the low-level JSON that is returned.

We are releasing this project as open source per Google’s open source initiative, and we encourage contributions. See contributing to Google open source to learn more about how to contribute to this project. As always, share your feedback on the Google Ads API forum.

Bob Hancock and

Poki Chui, Google Ads API Team

Google

Labels: client_libraries , google_ads_api , oauth2 , tools

Introducing the Google Ads Query Builder tool

Monday, March 11, 2019

Today we are excited to announce that the Google Ads Query Builder tool is now available on the Google Ads API Developer Site.

The Google Ads API has a robust reporting system that utilizes our new Google Ads Query Language. The language’s syntax allows you to select from all the resources that are available for reporting, and also filter or sort the result set on the server before they are returned to your application.

This tool provides a friendly web interface for you to explore our API’s reporting capabilities, and generate queries that you can copy and paste right into your applications. You can visit the site and try out the tool today!

Example usage of the Google Ads Query Builder: A screenshot showing a sample usage of the Google Ads Query Builder UI, including both filtering and ordering.