Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Sunsetting Login email in AdWords Scripts

We recently announced that we will sunset the login email field in AdWords API. To keep our APIs consistent, we will also sunset the getLoginEmail() method in AdWords scripts on November 5, 2014. We have identified some of the common use cases for this field and have come up with some possible workarounds.

Identifying accounts

When retrieving client accounts, use their Customer IDs instead of login emails to identify the accounts. You can use the getCustomerId() method to retrieve an account’s Customer ID. When available, you may also use the getName() method to retrieve the account’s friendly name. To set an account’s name,
  • Login to your My Client Center account and navigate to My Client Center tab
  • Click on the pencil logo in the corresponding Account’s the Client column
  • Provide a new name, and click the Save button to update the account name
Maintaining customer contacts

You should maintain your customer contacts going forward. If you were relying on the login email field to manage your client contacts, then you can use the getCustomerId() and getLoginEmail() methods to create a mapping from your customer ids to their login emails before November 5, 2014.

Determining access levels of a user in an account

Scripts run with the same access levels as the user who authorized the script. You shouldn’t rely on a login email to figure out a script’s access levels--this is a bad programming practice that makes your script error prone if the user’s account access level changes. Instead, make sure that the script is authorized by a user who has enough access levels as required by the script.

If you have questions or feedback about this change, or a use case we missed, let us know on our developer forum or our Google+ page.