How can I get account status?

[tom.wa...@raisingit.com]

Hi everyone,

I want to get account status from the API i.e. is it active, or has it been suspended, cancelled etc.

It seems that CustomerService or ManagedCustomerService only return active accounts - can anyone confirm if that's the case?

Cheers,

Tom

[tom.wa...@raisingit.com]

Further to my own question: how does the Keywords Performance Report treat suspended accounts?

In my experience it sometimes throws a CUSTOMER_NOT_ACTIVE error - but sometimes accepts the query - and comes back reporting 0 impressions etc. for all campaigns/ad groups/keywords...

[Luis Xander Talag (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Tom,

Unfortunately, there is no available service in AdWords API that could retrieve the status of your account. Currently, your account status could only be seen through your Google Ads UI. If you tried to create a request against an inactive account, you would get the CUSTOMER_NOT_ACTIVE error.

Thanks and regards,

Luis

AdWords API Team

[tom.wa...@raisingit.com]

Thanks Luis,

That's a shame. What about the ManagedCustomerService? When I query my accounts through e.g. your account hierarchy script (https://github.com/googleads/googleads-python-lib/blob/master/examples/adwords/v201809/account_management/get_account_hierarchy.py) it seems that all inactive accounts are left out. Could that be a way of discovering this, or is it only excluding accounts in certain circumstances?

Cheers,

Tom

[Luis Xander Talag (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Tom,

Yes, you are correct. As stated in this blog post, inactive accounts will no longer be returned when you used the ManagedCustomerService.get() method. This being said, you could only retrieved those active accounts.

Regards,

Luis

AdWords API Team

[tom.wa...@raisingit.com]

Thanks Luis,

That's reassuring. Just to confirm: is it only accounts inactive in the circumstances described in the blog i.e. no spend for 15 months that would not be returned, or is it the case that ManagedCustomerService will only return active accounts? So any account that's inactive whether that's because it has been cancelled, suspended etc. will be excluded from ManagedCustomerService. It sounds like that's the case, and that's ideal!

Cheers,

Tom

[Luis Xander Talag (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Tom,

Yes, all accounts that are inactive (whether they have been cancelled, suspended, etc.) will be excluded from ManagedCustomerService.

Regards,

Luis

Adwords API Team

[tom.wa...@raisingit.com]

Hi Luis,

We had a number of accounts deactivated by Google over the weekend. I was surprised to find that they continue to be returned by the ManagedCustomerService, although they are not active accounts. I've also found that we've continued to harvest performance reports for those accounts, and no error was thrown - I was expecting a CUSTOMER_NOT_ACTIVE error or something similar.

The problem is that I'm responsible for monitoring accounts and collecting performance data, and for inactive accounts I don't want to record anything. The script I've built is designed to skip any accounts that are not returned by the ManagedCustomerService or that throw an error like CUSTOMER_NOT_ACTIVE when requesting the performance data. Instead I've ended up with a load of false data (all zeros of course) rather than what I wanted - no data.

Do you have any suggestions about how we can avoid collecting erroneous performance data from the API when you (Google) deactivate our accounts?

Cheers,

Tom

[Vincent Racaza (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Tom,

Based on this blog post, ManagedCustomerService.get() should no longer return inactive accounts beginning Mid-May 2018. Can you provide your clientCustomerId and complete SOAP request and response logs so I can further investigate the issue on my end? You can send it to me via Reply privately to author.

Thanks,

Vincent

AdWords API Team