Opportunities tab optimization ideas now available through the AdWords API (beta)

Monday, April 04, 2011


The Opportunities tab in AdWords can help you find keyword, bid, and budget ideas for your account. With each optimization idea, you’ll also see estimates for how the idea might affect your impressions, clicks, and cost. Until now, you had to log in to AdWords to view these custom optimization ideas. Now you can discover and use ideas from the Opportunities tab with the AdWords API.

This functionality is exposed using the new BulkOpportunityService. The BulkOpportunityService returns new keyword ideas that may help you capture more impressions and clicks, budget ideas that may help you get additional traffic for campaigns that are meeting their budgets, and bid ideas that may help you increase or decrease CPC bids to increase traffic or reduce costs.

Extend your current API tools with BulkOpportunityService
If you use the Adwords API to build tools to manage your complex or large AdWords account, you can now extend your tools to surface or use the ideas returned by the BulkOpportunityService. 

Your tools can display these ideas where they’re relevant. For example:
  • If you have a tool that allows the modification of keywords in an ad group, you might display the keyword ideas returned by the BulkOpportunityService as ideas for that ad group.
  • If you use a tool that allows changes to bids or budgets, you might also use bid ideas or budget ideas respectively and see the potential impact of those changes.
Make BulkOpportunityService calls for free during the beta period
Calling the BulkOpportunityService with a selector and a paging value, both specified in the BulkOpportunitySelector, will return a number of OpportunityIdeas that you can review and decide to accept or ignore on a case-by-case basis. For some examples on how to do this, look at the code samples provided with the client libraries.

If you want to make changes based on ideas you retrieved using the BulkOpportunityService, you can make these changes through existing Campaign Management services such as AdGroupService, CampaignService, etc.

We’ll be introducing the BulkOpportunityService as a beta over the next several days. Calls made to the service will be free during this beta period. We’ll post again to this blog when we are out of the beta period and will start charging.

After you’ve tried the BulkOpportunityService, please share your feedback and experiences on the API and the client libraries at the AdWords API Forum.

Posted by Umesh Unnikrisnan, Product Manager, AdWords