Scheduled maintenance tonight

Hi AdWords API developers,

The API will be unavailable from 9pm to 9:45pm PDT tonight (5/20/05) for routine AdWords system maintenance. All ads will continue to run as normal, but you will not be able to perform any API operations during this time. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Best,
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

New release: Automated Policy Checking

Hi AdWords API Developers,

Today, we are integrating the automated AdWords editorial policy checking system into the API. This mechanism will identify AdWords editorial policy violations and return error messages immediately. This will allow you to correct basic policy violations before submitting creatives to AdWords for final approval.

What this means is that you may now see more errors (rejections) when submitting your items for approval. However, these are simply policy violations that you would have eventually encountered one to three days after submission. With the integration of the automated editorial policy checking system, the AdWords API will now flag basic violations immediately – saving you valuable time in getting your creatives approved.

In addition, you may now also submit policy exceptions via the API. Your exemption request and ad text will then be submitted to AdWords for approval.

Please note that operations containing rejected submissions do count against your quota.

We have updated the documentation to reflect the new error codes. As usual, if you have questions, please post to the Developer Forum and the community (which includes us) will hopefully be able to help.

Best,
Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

Increased quota limits

Hi AdWords API Developers,

Based on your feedback on the Developer Forum and our increased server capacity, we are raising quota limits across the board starting May 1. The quota structure remains the same as before; we are simply raising the quota allocations for everyone.

Our long term goal is to ensure all developers have access to enough quota to successfully build and run their applications. At the same time, we want to ensure our servers maintain production level uptimes, so we need to impose some limitations. We certainly appreciate your patience as we move closer to our goal. We ask that you continue to use your quota efficiently and focus on operations that drive value.

To view your new API quota, please login to your My Client Center account (starting May 1st) and go to the “AdWords API Center” under the “My Account” tab.

We hope that this quota increase will allow all of you to continue building creative programs and applications. Please continue to direct any feedback to the Developer Forum .

Best,
Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

New API release: MCC reports and image creatives

Hello, developers! We keep cranking out the AdWords API features, and this time around we have two new things to offer you.

The first new feature is MCC reports. Now you can create your reports with statistics for all of the campaigns you manage under MCC. No more scheduling a different report for each account! Using MCC reports will save you quota and make the report generation more efficient.

The second new feature is support for image creatives. We try hard to make the AdWords API support all the features of the AdWords product, but until now we were a bit behind on images. Now you can upload image creatives alongside your usual text ads.

Three caveats around the image ads. First, the first image for an account must be uploaded via the AdWords front-end; this is to ensure that the account owner agrees to let Google use their images in the AdWords program. Second, while we've tried hard to make all API changes backward compatible, there's a chance that your existing software may break if you download all the Creatives for an AdGroup that has an image creative in it. In the past you wouldn't have downloaded the image creative at all. The addition of that data may cause problems for your client software, particularly strongly typed languages like Java or C#. If you find yourself having trouble, refreshing and rebuilding the client from the WSDL file should take care of it. Finally, we will continue to update the documentation. So if you don't find what you need right now, please check again a few days later and/or post to the Developer Forum.

Enjoy the new features!

Nelson Minar, Software Engineer

Reports IDs: Finally here

Hi AdWords Developers,

IDs in reports are now available (and this time we mean it!).

As we announced yesterday, when you schedule a CustomReport you can now request for IDs to be included so you can better sync up the data with the rest of your API calls.

For the full details, please see our prior post .

We hope you enjoy the new feature and sorry again for any inconvenience we may have caused.

Regards,
Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

IDs not in reports yet

Whoops... we made a mistake. The IDs in reports are not quite yet working. We'll post another message when they are available.

Sorry for the confusion.


Nelson Minar, Software Engineer
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager

Updates to Terms and Conditions

Hi everyone,

Last night, we updated the AdWords API Terms and Conditions. We made several minor changes in order to further clarify a few points and to correct a typo.

The changes are as follows:

Section II. 3c) Added "or for transmissions directly to Google, at least as secure as the protocol being accepted by the AdWords API servers.”

Section II. 3d) Added “Except as expressly permitted by Google under a separate Google product or service feature,”

Section III 2a iv) Modified existing language and inserted some language so that it now reads “The AdWords API Data in such databases may only be accessed (1) by AdWords API Clients in conformance with this agreement, (2) by intermediary tools whose sole purpose is to analyze data for or supply data to an AdWords API Client in conformance with this AdWords API Agreement or (3) by reporting tools to produce reports only for the account owner of the account from which the AdWords API Data was received.”

Section III. 2h) Added “or for transmissions directly to Google, at least as secure as the protocol being accepted by the AdWords API servers.”

Section IV. 14) Added "Google", so the sentence now reads "You and Google are not legal partners or agents, but are independent contractors.”


Regards,
Rohit Dhawan, Product Manager