AdWords API Terms and Conditions: Thank You for the feedback

[Patrick Chanezon]

Thank you all for your feedback on the recent changes to the AdWords API Beta terms and conditions. We have been collecting your comments over the last few days, and we plan to review them alongside our policies over the next few weeks.

The new terms and conditions seem to cause some concern for developers of open source and commercial third party tools, and we want to address these concerns.

We will have more specifics for you in the coming weeks once we have had a chance to thoroughly discuss your feedback.

--
Patrick Chanezon, AdWords API evangelist
http://blog.chanezon.com/
http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/

[Chrisl1234]

Patrick

Thank you for responding.

Do you have an email address/point of contact that I may
put some concerns directly to you in private?

Regards,

Chris

[Zweitze]

Patrick,

Can section II(3)(a) also be reviewed. In my understanding it states
that every screen displaying data acquired with the API must also
display the Adwords image.
However, this is not always possible, eg. when using a console window,
when logging in the event log or when sending data through SMTP.
Right now this section implies that Google clients can only be rich
clients or web server applications.

Regards
Zweitze

[Patrick Chanezon]

Sure, thanks Chris.
My personal email is my first name at my last name dot com.

P@

[Shad]

Patrick, I would like to add one more point for your team to discuss.
The new terms explicitly make it a violation to have multiple tokens.
This is impractical for large organizations who have a need for
seperate MCC accounts for separate projects or business units. That
wording needs to be relaxed a little. Thanks.

[Robert]

Here are some thoughts about the Adwords API open for discussion

-What Google wants:
· avoid Adwords Spam (a programm creates millions of Adwords campains
with low quality like the ebay ads
· software, wich supports the advertisor (manage campain Manager,
CampainCharts, Campain Backup + Restore)
· protect advertisor for bad software
-What the developer wants:
· stable API for developing Adwords related programs (and user bying
this without compunction)
-What the Adowrds user (advertiser) wants:
trustworthy programms (supports succesfully) will respect
their privacy

The quota solution is a way to prevent Adwords Spam, but IMHO it is not
a good idea to link the quota to the developer token.
This forces the adwords advertiser to sign up for a developer token
(see the first released Adwords API programs). I guess the number of
signed in Adwords API developer is much higher than the real number of
developer, because the advetiser need a token to use the adwords API
software.
The easiest solution would be simple links the quota to the clients
adwords account. So the user simply have to input his Adwords
email+password.
There is another, more safer solution: a User token. The advetiser can
request a user token for each adwords account. The quota limit is
linked to the user quota an depends on number of keywords or spent
money of this account.

So an AdwordsAPI software ask for the user token only(no email, no
password, developer token is optional).
The adwords server identify the adwords account through the user token.
When the advertiser request a user token, he can decide which rights
(or privilegs) the software gets, which used this user token. So the
user can create a user token for a Charts Software. This Charts
Software is able to get the statistics from a adwords account, but it
is not able to change anything or get the email and password or credit
card info from the adwords account.

The webpage on google.com where the adveritie can create the user token
could have following options:
your adwords email, password
Comment/used for ______________
[x] get/query stats
[x] get credit card info
[x] add new campains, keywords, text
[x] delete campains
[x] edit campains
[x] edit campains settings

- Google could also provide an additional log file for API changes for
the advertiser.
- Perhaps Google could verify the Adwords API clients (like XP logo
program http://www.microsoft.com/winlogo/default.mspx)

Thanky for reading,
Robert

[Robert]

Robert wrote:
> The webpage on google.com where the advertiser can create the user token

> could have following options:
> your adwords email, password
> Comment/used for ______________
> [x] get/query stats
> [x] get credit card info
> [x] add new campains, keywords, text
> [x] delete campains
> [x] edit campains
> [x] edit campains settings

[x] Access my adwords account only when IP range is [102.23.xx.xx]
[x] Access my adwords account only in the next 30 days

So you can prevent "user token hijacking". I (and a lot of other
Adwords user) would not use a new Adwords API client, because this
client could send my use token to some dubious server. This two options
create confidence.