Upcoming extended AdWords API/Scripts, Ad Exchange, and DFP API Downtime

Update: Ad Exchange will be affected by the downtime as well. Please see below for details.



As previously mentioned, we have an upcoming AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP service outage. This will occur on Saturday, September 22 -- AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP systems will be unavailable from approximately 10:00 am to 8:00 pm Pacific Time (17:00 Saturday to 03:00 Sunday GMT) due to system maintenance.



AdWords

During this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual (with the settings you established as of 10am PST), but you won’t be able to make SOAP API calls or download reports. Requests to the AdWords API will fail with an HTTP 50x error during the maintenance window. Please also keep in mind that any automated rules scheduled during this time will not run and AdWords scripts will not execute during this period. We encourage you to verify your campaign settings prior to the outage.



Ad Exchange

During this time, your ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to downtime period, but you will not be able to make API calls to Ad Exchange Buyer SOAP API. On Ad Exchange Buyer REST API, only the Direct Deals related API calls will be affected. For the Ad Exchange Real-Time Bidding Protocol, you will not be able to make changes to pre-targeting settings, everything else should continue to run as usual.



DFP

As mentioned above, ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to the downtime period. If you use the audience feature in your network, any API call to the AudienceSegmentService service will fail with a SegmentError.UNEXPECTED_ERROR error. Also, if you target any audience segments in your line items, any calls to LineItemService, ForecastService, or LineItemCreativeAssociationService that involve those line items will fail.



We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as our engineers work to keep AdWords, Ad Exchange, and DFP running smoothly.



 - Kevin Winter, Ads Developer Relations Team

Upcoming AdWords API/Scripts and DFP API Downtime

On Saturday, September 8, AdWords and DFP systems will be unavailable from approximately 10:00am to 11:00am Pacific Time (17:00 to 18:00 GMT) due to system maintenance. A longer downtime will also be scheduled in the next few weeks -- please stay tuned for another blog post with more specific details.



AdWords

During this time, your campaigns will continue to run as usual (with the settings you established as of 10am PST), but you won’t be able to sign into your account or make changes. Requests to the AdWords API will fail with an HTTP 50x error during the maintenance window. Please also keep in mind that any automated rules scheduled during this time will not run and AdWords scripts will not execute during this period. We encourage you to verify your campaign settings prior to the outage.



DFP

As mentioned above, ad serving will continue to run per changes made prior to the downtime period. If you use the audience feature in your network, any API call to the AudienceSegmentService service will fail with a SegmentError.UNEXPECTED_ERROR error. Also, if you target any audience segments in your line items, any calls to LineItemService, ForecastService, or LineItemCreativeAssociationService that involve those line items will fail.



We apologize for any inconvenience, and appreciate your patience as our engineers work to keep AdWords and DFP running smoothly.



 - Kevin Winter, Ads Developer Relations Team

Release Schedule for AdWords API

In response to your feedback, we are pleased to announce that starting at the end of September 2012, new major versions of the AdWords API will be released according to a published schedule. These major releases will occur 3 times per year: at the end of February, in the middle of June and at the end of September. Exact release dates may vary.



A major release is one that starts the sunset clock on previous releases. An example of this is the recent v201206 release which started the sunset clock on the v201109 and v201109_1 releases. We will also continue to release minor versions to deliver new features as required. Minor versions are optional and are source code compatible. Minor versions are delivered as dot releases and an example of this is the v201109_1 dot release.



We believe that delivering new API releases to a published schedule will allow you, the API users, to better plan and allocate resources, not just for performing required API updates but also for innovating and implementing new features and continuously developing your tools and platforms. It also provides us with a more stable and more frequent vehicle for delivering new features.



Each new major release will trigger the deprecation of the previous major release. Exact deprecation timelines will be announced with each major release.



If you have any questions about this announcement please post on the forum or attend one of the AdWords API Office Hours Hangouts.



- Mandy Waite, AdWords API Team

Docs Grow Ears: Google Feedback now in Google Ads Developer Documentation

If you've recently visited any of the Google Ads Developer documentation, you may have noticed a "Feedback on this document" link at the top right corner of a page. That's right—you can now use that link to report errors, comment on existing content, or request further clarification for any of the Google Ads Developer docs:

• Google AdMob Ads SDK


• AdSense APIs


• AdWords API


• DoubleClick Ad Exchange APIs


• DoubleClick for Advertisers API


• DoubleClick for Publishers API


• Interactive Media Ads SDK

In addition to this new channel, you can continue to reach out to us through the developer forums or Google Developers Live events.

Quang Nguyen, Ads Developer Relations Team

OAuth in Ads APIs

Authorization is an important concern when writing software that interacts with Google’s Ads APIs. We’ve recently improved our documentation and published resources documenting how to use OAuth2 with many of our Ads APIs.



OAuth2 is an authorization flow that allows you to direct a user to a specially crafted Google URL where they grant permissions to your software to make changes to their account. With an authorized access token, you can make requests to Ads APIs on the user’s behalf. Benefits include:

• Users don’t need to provide a username and password - they just log into Google.


• No CAPTCHA challenges.


• Limited scope - the user will only be prompted to grant access to a specific part of their account. For example, they could grant access to AdWords without the application being able to see their email or calendar.

OAuth2 is supported by:

• AdWords API


• DoubleClick for Advertisers Reporting API


• DoubleClick for Advertisers Trafficking API


• AdSense Host API (v4)


• AdSense Management API


• DoubleClick for Publishers API


• DoubleClick Ad Exchange Buyer REST API

The Ads API client libraries supported by Google have built-in support for OAuth2. We’ve included examples demonstrating how to use this feature in all client libraries. See your respective product and language product sites for more information on OAuth2.



We’re also hosting a Google Developers Live event covering how to use OAuth2 on August 23rd. This will be recorded if you can’t make it. If you have any questions about OAuth2, please post on the respective product API forums.

 - Kevin Winter, AdWords API Team

Introducing the new Ads Developers Google+ Page

Today we are excited to introduce a new channel for communication - Ads Developers Google+ Page. It's a place to stay informed, engaged and connected on Ads products and developer tools.

Add our Google+ page to your circles for the latest product and feature announcements, best practices, case studies, as well as opportunities to interact with and learn from Google's Ads Developer Relations team and other members of the developer community.

We look forward to having one place to bring timely updates, concise announcements, and to share information in multimedia formats across all Ads products, as well as to listen and respond to your comments.

 - Danial Klimkin, Ads Developer Relations Team.

Next round of Google Ads Developers Live events

Interested in more Google Ads Developers Live (Office Hours) events? We know you are because attendance has been great!



We've scheduled another round of events for AdWords, AdMob, DFP and AdSense APIs. You can view the newly scheduled live events on the Google Ads Developers Live page. Please add the events you are interested in to your calendar. You can follow our schedule by subscribing to the Google Ads Developers Office Hours calendar, which is also linked on this blog’s sidebar.



Just like in previous live events, you can join these hangouts to ask us questions or provide feedback about our products. In response to your request we will be adding AdWords API sessions for the Asia Pacific region and Japan. If you are from Asia Pacific countries or Australia and couldn’t join the hangouts before due to timezone inconvenience, we hope you will find these additional sessions more convenient. The live events in Japan will be in Japanese.



Events will rotate throughout the week to accommodate more people. We are also planning to make some of these events topic-based, where we will introduce you to a new feature of our product and then answer your questions on that topic. The dates and topics for these sessions will be announced in advance in separate blog posts.

In case you haven’t joined us before, you will need 3 things to join the hangout:

• A Google+ account (sign up here)


• The Google voice and video plugin installed on your computer


• A quiet place to hangout so we can hear you

These hangouts are informal and conversational, which make them a great place to ask questions or give us feedback. If you have questions about our office hours, reach out to us on the forums.



 - Anash P. Oommen, Ads Developer Relations Team

AdWords Location Targets will start PHASING_OUT

Location criteria, first introduced in v201109, are undergoing some changes for the v201206 release. This blog post explains these changes and what they mean for your software.

PHASING_OUT obsolete Location criteria

The Location criteria object has a new field, targetingStatus, which can be one of ACTIVE, OBSOLETE and PHASING_OUT.

• ACTIVE Locations can be targeted as normal.


• OBSOLETE Location targets have been retired and cannot be targeted.


• PHASING_OUT Locations will shortly become obsolete and should not be targeted.

Locations can be phased out for a number of reasons: the location may be re-structured into smaller (or larger areas), geo-political changes, etc. The AdWords UI reflects these changes and now the AdWords API will make these changes visible to developers. We will publish a blog post 4 weeks in advance of a location moving to PHASING_OUT.

What this means for your software

As of the launch of v201206, Location criteria that are PHASING_OUT will still be accepted. Starting 4 weeks later (week of 7/23), adding these targets will cause a CriterionError.Reason.CANNOT_TARGET_CRITERION error message. Please make sure before adding a Location target that it is ACTIVE. Choose a different target if it is labeled OBSOLETE or PHASING_OUT.

Soon to PHASE_OUT

Check out this help center article to learn which specific locations will be removed after July 23rd. The article also provides more detail about the phasing-out process in general.



In addition, we will introduce two new separate targets, one for Serbia and one for Montenegro in the coming weeks. These new targets will replace the current single Serbia Montenegro target, and the targeting status of Serbia Montenegro will change to PHASING_OUT sometime after July 27th.



We have documented this new status field in our downloadable documentation. The LocationCriterionService and CampaignCriterionService will also populate this field. Please update your code to check this field or your application may break.



If you have any questions, please post on the forum or attend one of the AdWords API Office Hours Hangouts.



 - Kevin Winter, AdWords API Team

AdWords API v201206 launch - including new Flexible reach targeting settings on the Google Display Network

We’re pleased to announce the launch of AdWords API v201206, which includes new ad group level Flexible reach targeting settings on the Google Display Network, a new query language to retrieve items more flexibly, new report types, and changes to ad scheduling and other services. Below we’ve highlighted some of the new features available to all users. A complete list of changes is available in the release notes.




v201206 highlights:

• CampaignService and AdGroupService changes for the adgroup override/restrict targeting setting migration - The new Flexible reach setting in AdWords enables advertisers to fine-tune where ads show by choosing settings at the ad group level instead of the campaign level. Once you choose Flexible reach for the campaign, you cannot revert back to your previous setting, and will manage targets and bids at the individual ad group level. 


• New services for obtaining customer information - we’re introducing the new ManagedCustomerService and CustomerService in v201206, v201109_1 and v201109. These services will be replacing ServicedAccountService and CreateAccountService, starting with v201206. 


• New reports - We’re introducing a new CLICK_PERFORMANCE_REPORT which provides information on each click, as well as REACH_FREQUENCY reports at the Account, AdGroup and Campaign levels. 


• AWQL - The AdWords Query Language providing SQL-like syntax queries is now available on some services including Ad Hoc Reporting. 


• Other changes - AdSchedule targeting has been moved to CampaignCriterionService. The CampaignTargetService is now sunset. 

With the release of v201206, the following versions and services will be deprecated:

• v13 AccountService - We will sunset this version and service on August 20, 2012 


• v201109 and v201109_1 - We will sunset these versions on October 26, 2012 

As with every new version of the AdWords API, we encourage you to review the resources in the release notes. If you have any questions please post on the forum or attend one of the AdWords API Office Hours Hangouts.



- The AdWords API Team