structure report for CriterionUserList

[GregT]

Hi,

For remarketing lists for search (RLSA), we can use the audience performance report to get statistical information for the performance of the remarketing lists on an ad group basis.  However, this report surprisingly does not appear to be able to be used as a structure report, because it's missing one of the most important fields -- the id of the criterion. There is an "Id" field in this report, but it returns the id of the UserList, not the CriterionUserList, i.e. the id of the audience and not the id of the criterion (that UserList attached to a particular ad group).  The id of the criterion (not just the UserList/Audience id) is what is needed to be able to actually change (or remove) the bid modifier for that audience for an ad group, because it's a required field on CriterionUserList during SET and REMOVE operations on BiddableAdGroupCriterion in the AdGroupCriterionService.  I hope I've made that id distinction clear.

Unfortunately, the only other report that seemed promising to pull this structure data, the criteria performance report, also appears to be unworkable.  It also has an "Id" field, which given the name of the report, would presumably be the id of the criterion -- but from running it on some accounts, it also appears to be the UserList (audience) id, not the CriterionUserList id.  

As it stands now, I don't see a way to get the id of these criterion so that they can be updated or removed other than by querying the AdGroupCriterionService.  Could someone please let me know if I'm missing something (some report, some field on one of these two reports that I've overlooked, etc.), and whether it's possible to get the criterion id for these remarketing lists that have been added to ad groups using some report rather than the (relatively slow) SOAP service?

Thanks in advance,

Greg

[Danial Klimkin]

Hello Greg,

The CriteriaPerformance report should be the one you are looking for. Can you please confirm you indeed receive UserList ID as Id in this report?

-Danial, AdWords API Team.

[GregT]

Hi, Danial.

I double-checked, and I was wrong -- sorry, my bad!  It appears that the id field of both the audience performance report and criteria performance report are actually returning the CriterionUserList id.  I mistakenly thought it was the UserList id because for the clients I checked, the id returned is the same for a given audience/UserList in almost every (but, it turns out, not quite every) ad group that targets the audience (I was looking at campaigns with many thousands of ad groups targeting the same audiences).

A couple follow up questions:

1 - Given this, it now appears there is no field in either report that will actually return the UserList id, at least not as a numeric value. The Criteria field of the audience performance report, and both the Criteria and DisplayName fields of the criteria performance report all return something like "boomuserlist::12345", which appear to match up with the ids of audiences as retrieved by the AdwordsUserListService if you strip off the "boomuserlist::" part (so in this example, 12345 matches up with the id of an audience/UserList in the account).  Should I be able to rely upon those fields of these reports containing "boomuserlist::<userListId>" and parse that string to match it up with the actual audience id?  If not (or even if so), is there a more reliable way of getting the audience/UserList id in these reports that doesn't require relying on this apparent convention and stripping out part of the field?

2 - The other field we need and would love to be able to get from a structure report for audiences that I don't see is the targeting setting (i.e. does the ad group target the audience for "bid only" or "target and bid").  Is this available in any report?  The only place I see to get it is from the AdGroup.settings field in the SOAP AdGroupService call, which is obviously much slower to use.

Thanks,

Greg

[GregT]

Any word on the follow up questions? :)

Thanks,

Greg

[Danial Klimkin]

Hello Greg,

Sorry for the delay, this thread was re-assigned while I was on holidays.

1. You are correct, there is no dedicated field in the report for it. Parsing the string is the only way available now.

2. See the "TargetingSetting" field of display reports.

-Danial, AdWords API Team.

[GregT]

Hi, Danial.

I'm not sure how I overlooked the TargetingSetting field in the report.  Thanks very much for the confirmation on #1 and help with #2.

Greg