After six weeks of releasing version 7.0 of Google Ads API, the tech giant has announced version 8 of its advertising API. Google indicated key highlights of what is new in the updated Google Ads API and notifying developers to necessarily update client libraries and code to take advantage of the new features of the latest release. This update includes new cross-account bidding strategies, improvement to sales tracking, and new label management options.
Let’s take a look into what is new in the updated version 8.0 of Google Ads API.
Google has added dozens of features and released numerous changes in version 8.0. Here are the highlighted changes from Google:
- Feature for cross-account bidding strategies has been added that allow attaching manager-owned bidding strategies to client accounts. Another new resource, Accessible Bidding Strategy, has been included to provide a read-only view of all bidding strategies accessible to the current customer. It also includes portfolio strategies, owned by the customer and cross-account bidding strategies shared with the customer.
- In this new version, you can now retrieve labels that are managed by the manager account using CustomerClient.applied_labels.
- the feature of Call-Only Ad Info is replaced with Call Ad Info in order to support more capabilities of this ad type. It comprises the ability to attach text after the URL displayed in the Ad using fields CallAdInfo.path1 and CallAdInfo.path2.
- For uploading conversions with the additional information about the items sold, there is Click Conversion that supports cart_data.
- The version 8.0 advertising API has several added fields to Transaction Attribute and User Attribute. While uploading user data using User Data Service or Offline User Data Job Service, these added fields will allow you to associate more information about a sold item and a user’s purchase record.
- Smart campaigns have now added support for creating, monitoring and managing smart campaign types. These are highly automated, efficient campaigns designed to maximize returns with minimal ongoing management.
- You can set response_content_type to MUTABLE_RESOURCE as a request parameter to return all the fields mutated in a mutate request for CustomerAssetService, CampaignAssetService and AdGroupAssetService.
- When the asset is used as an extension, to support retrieving metrics for each asset field type, now there is Added Asset Field Type View Service.
- CampaignError.NOT_COMPATIBLE_WITH_VIEW_THROUGH_CONVERSION_OPTIMIZATION is now replaced with CampaignError.PAYMENT_MODE_NOT_COMPATIBLE_WITH_VIEW_THROUGH_CONVERSION. It reports incompatibilities with view through conversions setup.
- The new version has added Detailed Demographic Service to retrieve User Interest with Detailed Demographic as the Taxonomy Type.
- For feeds, DYNAMIC_FILTER_INVALID_CHAIN_IDS has been added to Feed Item Set Error.
So coming to what is Google Ads API, you can also find the importance of using it.
The Google Ads API is a programmatic interface of your Google Ads accounts. It lets you automatically bring in reporting to your own stack, automating ad creation by building procedures for it, change your bids or bidding strategies and more.
In the bigger picture, we can say, API allows developers to directly interact with the Google Ads platform. Following are a few features of the Google Ads API:
- Automated account management
- Custom reporting
- Ad management based on inventory
- Manage Smart Bidding strategies
The company has provided instructions related to migrating from v7 to v8. Sometimes while upgrading to the newer versions, not everything is backwards compatible. Google, in its upgrading note has said, “periodically, you will upgrade from an older major version of Google Ads API to a newer major version. It could be because a version is sunsetting, or it could be because you want to use a new feature.” The company has recommended upgrading to the newest version when going through the migration process and not upgrade to an older version.
Final Words!
Overall, in case you, your customers or toolset providers, are using the Google Ads API with version 8.0, you can now explore more features within the API. It would work in a more efficient way, and campaigns would run more smoothly. You can check the full release notes from Google to find what additional features you can utilize or ask your tool provider to use for making daily work-life as a search marketer stress-free.