Google Ads Developer Blog: August 2019

Announcing the 2019 London Google Ad Manager Developer Workshop

Monday, August 26, 2019

The Ad Manager Developer Relations team is excited to hop across the pond and bring our Ad Manager Developer Workshop to London on September 26, 2019. If you’re a regular user of the Ad Manager API and Google Publisher Tags, then you’re sure to find something of interest at this event!

What is it?

A full-day event featuring technical talks by Google engineers and office hours with Google's Developer Relations team. We will have talks on a range of topics, including Ad Manager API tips and best practices and strategies for faster loading pages and ads.

Who is the target audience?

The event is targeted toward developers who use the Ad Manager API. The talks will be technical in nature, so a technical background is required for all attendees. You’ll get the most out of some sessions if you come prepared with an API user’s credentials for your network and a laptop. For the full list of sessions, see the event schedule.

Where and when?

This event will be at Google’s London office at 1 St Giles High St. Doors will open at 9:30 AM and we’ll kick things off at 10 o’clock.

How do I sign up?

To register, please visit our website for this event. Seating is limited, so after you register, we will reach back out to you to confirm your spot at the workshop.

- Donovan McMurray, Ad Manager API Team

Restricting Payments account usage across manager account hierarchies

Friday, August 23, 2019

Starting September 9, 2019, we are rolling out a change to prevent the same Payments accounts in the Google Ads API (billing accounts in the AdWords API) from being used across manager account hierarchies. Only valid Payments accounts belonging to the Google Ads manager account hierarchy can be used to create and update billing setups in the Google Ads API.

How does this affect you?
For your authenticated Google Ads client account

PaymentsAccountService.ListPaymentsAccounts() will return only valid Payments accounts belonging to your Google Ads manager account hierarchy, and
BudgetOrderService.getBillingAccounts() will return only valid billing accounts belonging to your Google Ads manager account hierarchy.

Therefore, you may get fewer results from those API calls than before.

What do you need to do?
Google Ads API
When creating/updating a new billing setup, you will need to select a valid Payments account returned by PaymentsAccountService.ListPaymentsAccounts(). If you use an invalid Payments account during the above processes, the INVALID_PAYMENTS_ACCOUNT error will be thrown.

AdWords API
When creating a new budget order, you will need to specify a valid billingAccountId (the ID of a valid billing account returned by BudgetOrderService.getBillingAccounts()). If you use an invalid billingAccountId during the above process, the BudgetOrderError.INVALID_BILLING_ACCOUNT error will be thrown.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post your questions on the Google Ads API forum.

- Thanet Knack Praneenararat, Google Ads API Team

Sunsetting accelerated budget delivery

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Update (Oct 1, 2019): We have updated the error codes that will be returned in the table below.

Starting October 14, 2019, accelerated budget delivery will no longer be available for use with search campaigns, shopping campaigns, or shared budgets. This will affect budgets in all versions of the AdWords API, Google Ads API, and Google Ads scripts.

All three developer surfaces will stop accepting ACCELERATED delivery method setting on budgets for search campaigns, shopping campaigns, or shared budgets. Campaigns using accelerated delivery with these campaign and budget types will be automatically migrated over to STANDARD delivery, starting October 7, 2019.

Note: When a new budget is created using the API or scripts, it is shared by default. Thus, a newly created budget will behave as STANDARD. To explicitly create a budget with ACCELERATED delivery, all of the following conditions must be met:

The budget’s isExplicitlyShared field is set to false
The budget’s delivery method is set to ACCELERATED
It is not associated with a search or shopping campaign post creation

Affected API and scripts operations

After this change goes into effect, API clients and scripts will no longer be able to use the ACCELERATED delivery method setting on search campaigns, shopping campaigns, or shared budgets. Any programmatic operations that create or modify such budgets, or that would result in the following states, may result in errors according to the following criteria.

AdWords API Operation
Creating new budget	isExplicitlyShared: true deliveryMethod: `ACCELERATED` Campaign Type: (N/A) Service: `BudgetService` Error: `OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED`*
Modifying existing budget	isExplicitlyShared: true deliveryMethod: `ACCELERATED` Campaign Type: All Service: `BudgetService` Error: `OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED`*
Modifying existing budget	isExplicitlyShared: false deliveryMethod: `ACCELERATED` Campaign Type: Search, Shopping Service: `BudgetService` Error: `OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED`*
Attaching existing budget to campaign	isExplicitlyShared: false deliveryMethod: `ACCELERATED` Campaign Type: Search, Shopping Service: `CampaignService` Error: `OperationAccessDenied.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED`*

*For the Google Ads API beta, an analogous OperationAccessDeniedError.ACTION_NOT_PERMITTED will be thrown.

If you have any questions about this change, please don’t hesitate to contact us via the AdWords API and Google Ads API Forum or the Google Ads scripts forum.

Adam Ohren, Google Ads API Team

Announcing v201908 of the Google Ad Manager API

Tuesday, August 13, 2019

We're happy to announce that v201908 of the Google Ad Manager API is available starting today. There are several highly requested features in this new version of the API.

Reporting

You can now access “Advertiser (Classified)” and “Brand (Classified)” dimensions through the API.
We’ve also added the dimensions and metrics for calculating video sell-through.

Programmatic

Programmatic LineItems and ProposalLineItems now have an allowedFormats field, which gives publishers more control over what types of creatives a buyer can add.

LiveStreamEvents

You can now use the slateCreativeId field to programmatically set live stream slates, which are shown during gaps in a live stream ad break that cannot be filled with a dynamically served ad.

The release notes contain the full list of API changes for v201908.

If you have questions about these or any other API changes, reach out to us on the Ad Manager API forums.

- Donovan McMurray, Ad Manager API Team

Announcing v2_1 of the Google Ads API beta

Thursday, August 8, 2019

Today we’re announcing the v2_1 releases of the Google Ads API beta. To use the v2_1 features via the new endpoint, please update update your client libraries. If you are upgrading from v1, some of your code may break when you switch to the new v2 endpoint. Please see the migration guide for more information on breaking changes.

Here are the highlights:

Introduced AdService for updating existing ads that were created using AdGroupAdService. Updating ads maintains existing metrics.
Introduced summary rows when retrieving data from GoogleAdService.Search() by setting return_summary_row to true in the request. The summary row contains the report totals.
Introduced the AdGroupAdAssetView resource for querying ad asset metrics.
Introduced the DistanceView resource (equivalent to the User Ad Distance Report in the AdWords API).
Introduced the UserLocationView resource (equivalent to the Geo Performance Report where isTargetingLocation is false in the AdWords API).
Added the ability to retrieve all label resource names associated with the AdGroup resource using AdGroup.labels and with the Campaign resource using Campaign.labels.
Added time_zone, test_account, manager, descriptive_name, currency_code, and id to CustomerClient to make it easier to retrieve customers in an account hierarchy.

Where can I learn more?
The following resources can help you get going with the Google Ads API:

Release Notes
Guides
Reference

The updated client libraries and code examples will be published by August 16. If you have any questions or need additional help, please contact us via the forum.

Nadine Sundquist, on behalf of the Google Ads API Team

Google Ads scripts now supports price extensions

Thursday, August 8, 2019

We’re excited to announce support for price extensions in Google Ads scripts starting today.

Price extensions allow you to add details about your business’s offerings and prices to a text ad, and are supported at the account, ad group, and campaign level.

You can see how to implement price extensions in our AdsApp.Extensions documentation, or check out some example code using these extension types.

If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us via our Google Ads Scripts forum.

-Tina Nguyen, Google Ads scripts Team

DCM/DFA Reporting and Trafficking API v3.2 sunset reminder

Monday, August 5, 2019

In accordance with our deprecation schedule, we will be sunsetting version 3.2 of the API on August 31, 2019. Requests to version 3.2 will no longer work after this date, preventing you from updating and accessing information in Campaign Manager. To avoid an interruption in service, you must migrate to a newer API version as soon as possible.

To learn about changes between versions and get tips for migrating, visit the API developer site. Also consider subscribing to this blog to stay up to date about new releases, upcoming sunsets, and changes to the API.

If you have technical questions regarding new versions of the API, please reach out via the developer forum.

- Jonathon Imperiosi, DCM API Team

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