AdWords API v2009 Launch

Hello all,

The AdWords API team is pleased to announce the launch of AdWords API v2009 in production! v2009 offers more speed, scale, and flexibility to developers, at a lower cost.

Back in April, we released a sandbox for our newest version of the AdWords API so you could begin experimenting. As mentioned in that blog post, we're using a new version naming convention to highlight the significant differences between this version, called AdWords API v2009, and v13.

This launch is a production beta, and we're asking developers to sign up for access here. We'll add you to our whitelist on a rolling basis,and send each of you a confirmation email once you've been added.

We've made a few policy changes in the API v2009 as well:

• Revised Terms and Conditions - We've updated our Terms and Conditions to improve clarity. This change includes a more comprehensive explanation of our policy regarding the commingling of data, and also redefines the required minimum AdWords functionality for third party developers. You can see the list of required and optional features here.
• Lower costs - v2009 comes with a new Rate Sheet that reflects the improved efficiency of the new system. We've lowered the cost of v2009 for the average developer by approximately 20% through reducing the unit cost of our most commonly called operations -- add criteria, add add, and set adgroup.

Getting started with v2009:

Once you've applied for access, you can find comprehensive developer documentation on our v2009 homepage.

While you're waiting for access to the v2009 beta, we encourage you to begin experimenting immediately with the v2009 sandbox. The sandbox doesn't charge for quota, and all you need to access it is your current Google account username and password. Please remember that the sandbox is a testing and development environment, so changes made there won't affect your live AdWords account. You can read more about sandbox best practices here.

What to expect next:

Over the next few months, we'll continue to introduce new features and additional AdWords functionality. Prior to moving added features to production, they'll be released to the v2009 sandbox so that you can try them out in advance. As they become available, we'll announce them on our blog. Some of the most notable are:

• Partial failure acceptance - We plan to support partial failures, which means that large posts won't be completely rolled back due to a few small errors. This allows you to keep moving forward with development without halting to re-do posts.
  
• Asynchronous calls - We’ll offer asynchronous calls, which will allow you to work with large sets of data faster and more easily. Instead of having to wait for our system to fully complete your request before you can make another one, you’ll be able to make another call as soon as the API service confirms that it’s received your previous call. No more waiting for large requests to be finished. (Synchronous methods will still be supported as well.)

• Keyword Tools - With new keyword management tools, you'll be able to directly access new URL-specific keyword suggestions from the AdWords Keyword Tool and the Search-based Keyword Tool through the API.
• MCC and Reporting functionality.

While we continue to roll out these offerings, both AdWords API v13 and v2009 will be fully supported. We'll begin the sunset countdown for v13 once we remove the v2009 whitelist and all developer have acquired access. Because we're introducing more changes than usual with this version, we'll extend the normal sunset period for v13, so it won't sunset until early 2010. By signing up for the v2009 whitelist now, you have the opportunity to get a head start on development.

Best,

Doug Raymond

Product Manager, AdWords API

AdWords API v2009 Sandbox Update

We are making major updates to the v2009 Sandbox environment starting today and continuing throughout the week. Because of these changes, the v200902 Sandbox environment will be unavailable. We will post more information about what's new in the v2009 Sandbox environment once the work is complete--please stay tuned, and apologies for the downtime.

The v13 Sandbox environment should remain functional throughout this process.

-The AdWords API Team

AdWords Downtime: June 13, 10am-2pm PDT

We'll be performing routine system maintenance on Saturday, June 13 from approximately 10:00am to 2:00pm PDT. You won't be able to access AdWords or the API during this time frame, but your ads will continue to run as normal.

Cheers,

-Jeffrey Posnick, AdWords API Team

Client Library Updates: Part 2

Last month we announced an update of our client libraries to improve their feature sets and make them more consistent across the various programming languages we support. This coincided with the release of the v2009 Sandbox, and a lot of those changes were meant to ensure that the client libraries were still just as easy to use, but also supported the newly-released v200902 API version.

We've continued our work on the client libraries and are now making more features available:

• Utility methods that make use of the API to retrieve a breakdown of API usage per method or per client.
• The ability to retrieve report data in CSV format.
• Utility methods for retrieving several types of codes used with the API (cities, metros, timezones, etc.).
• Full NDoc/JavaDoc/RDoc/Epydoc/perldoc documentation for the client library code.
• Unit tests for the core library functionality and utility modules.
• Finer-grained handling of API exceptions.
• Improved runtime validation on the client side.

Some of these features are already present in a few client libraries, but we're now making them all available across Java, .NET, Python, Ruby and, where applicable, our newly released Perl libraries (which only support v200902).

Update: the client libraries have now been updated to support the latest API version, v200906, in both the sandbox and production environments. An updated version of the PHP library is coming soon.

You can find all the client libraries at the usual place: http://code.google.com/apis/adwords/docs/clients.html. Don't miss out on all the cool new stuff!

-- Sérgio Gomes, AdWords API Team