Video campaigns: how to distinguish In Stream results from Video Discovery results?

[Zweitze]

Hi all,

Subject says it all. I have a lot of video campaigns, some with In Stream, some with Video Discovery, most with both. I want to report them and distinguish between those types - an impression in In Stream has a very different meaning from an impression in Video Discovery. A second reason is that using this information I can recalculate the video quartile percentages.

I did expect to distinguish using AdNetworkType2 (and/or AdNetworkType1). This is not the case, at least not in the few campaigns I studied.

Browsing through the AdWords web interface I notice that this depends on AdGroup type, being either In Stream or Video Discovery. Apparently this is an attribute of Ad Groups. But... that's not available in AdWords API.

So, it seems I have to identify which groups show In Stream, which show Video Discsovery and which are others. But how do I do that? VIDEO_PEFORMANCE_REPORT shows both types, and I can't find a field showing which is which.
AD_PERFORMANCE_REPORT shows both groups have ads of the same type ("Display ad")

For AdWords API support:

See campaign 676721986, results on Oct 31 2016. How do I distinguish its results? That campaign has two ad groups, one with results for in stream and one for video discovery. In AdWords web interface I can see which group has which, but how with AdWords API? Without looking at its name? (I have over 500 video campaigns...) Please note, the objective is how to distinguish In Stream from Video Discovery. Thanks in advance!

[Sreelakshmi Sasidharan (AdWords API Team)]

Hi 

Currently we cannot differentiate the in stream and video discovery ad formats via the API. Usage of AdNetworkType1/AdNetworkType2 might not help in this case as well. 

I recommend to keep an eye on our blog to check on future announcements about this feature. 

Thanks,

Sreelakshmi, AdWords API Team

[Zweitze]

Getting back on this...
I noticed that in v201702, report ADGROUP_PERFORMANCE_REPORT contains a new field AdGroupType which tells the ad group type. And this field does contain values like "In-stream" and "Video discovery" for groups with videos.

Sreelakshmi stated that this feature will be announced on the blog. When can I expect the article? The new field is not mentioned anywhere but above doc.

What I am mainly looking for is how to get the field in a campaign report. This is obviously not available - AdGroupType is an attribute of an ad group. But in the AdWords Web UI the Campaigns tab now has a new segment called "View type" - this was called AdGroup Type when I wrote the first post of this topic. I can't find a similar segment for CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT.

I'm looking forward to hear your thoughts - either here or in the blog article.

I can work around this by using AdGroupType of ADGROUP_PERFORMANCE_REPORT. Unfortunately the documentation is incomplete: The display values are missing (but I can look those up), but also the predicate values are missing - please update the documentation.

[Sreelakshmi Sasidharan (AdWords API Team)]

Hi, 

Thanks for your feedback. I will pass on your request to the team for getting the documentation updated. 

As you have observed, the CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT doesn't have a field that reports the ad format. And yes, you could workaround this by using the ADGROUP_PERFORMANCE_REPORT. If you just need to recognize your campaigns/adGroups, you could also look into creating labels to differentiate them. You will be able to get Labels using both CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT and ADGROUP_PERFORMANCE_REPORT. 

[Zweitze]

My use case is the following (also read the first message of this topic again):

Given a campaign having (say) 1000 impressions on a certain day, I need to know how many of those impressions went to In-stream, and how many went to Video discovery. So I need the View type segmentation here. I prefer not to reverse-engineer the AdWords UI implementation of that segment (like, what is its behavior on search campaigns, display campaigns, shopping campaigns etc.etc.)

Do you know whether the API team considers adding the View type segmentation to CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT, and if so, whether that will be published on the blog when it's implemented?

I don't see how labels may help for segmentation, note I have over 600 video campaigns (out of almost 100K campaigns) which are not completely under my control (read-only access etc.etc.). I think I completely missed your line of thought on this solution, please expand on this.

Thanks!

[Sreelakshmi Sasidharan (AdWords API Team)]

Hi, 

Thanks for explaining your use case. At the moment, getting the campaign data segmented as per the 'view type' is not possible via the API. 

I will pass on your request to the team for adding the "View type" segment to the Campaign Performance Report. Unfortunately, I cannot comment on the timeline for this change to be available. When there are changes made to the API, there will be a blog announcing the major changes. The detailed changes will be available in the release notes of that version if not the blog. 

Labels will help you to filter the rows in your report. In your first post you had mentioned that the adGroups could only be differentiated by their name. If you create labels with the type of ad format at AdGroup level, you will be able to filter the rows in your report manually based on the label instead of filtering by their name. At campaign level, using labels will only work if the specific campaign has only one type of adGroup. If it has both "In-Stream" and "Video" adGroup types, the usage of labels will not work. In your case, the labels will not help to differentiate campaign level data.