Negative Keywords not contained in Keyword Performance Report, unless using IsNegative predicate

[Giles Bodger]

Hi all,

For the past 18 months or so, we have been syncing our keyword data for AdGroups using the reports utility. The Keyword Performance Report has always given us data on both Biddable and Negative keywords. However we recently noticed that the report was NOT now giving us data on our Negative Keywords.

I did some research and found here ....

 https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports/keywords-performance-report

...  that you have to add the IsNegative IN, "true" and "false", predicate if you want to include Negative Keywords in that report.

That's all good and we can change our implementation, but we used to NOT have to do that (up till now we have had no predicate relating to the IsNegative field). So my question is, has there been a change recently ?

The only change we have made to this particular call is to add the FinalUrls field as one of the selectors (which when we remove it, makes no difference to whether we do or do not get Negative Keywords in the report) - our selector fields are as follows ....

"AdGroupId"

"ApprovalStatus"

"CpcBidSource"

"CriteriaDestinationUrl"

"Id"

"IsNegative"

"KeywordMatchType"

"KeywordText"

"CpcBid"

"CpmBid"

"Status"

"FinalUrls"

Like i said, we have no problem adding the predicate and that has solved our issue, BUT, we weren't aware that this change (if it was a change your side) was going to happen

cheers in advance

Giles

[Anthony Madrigal]

Hi Giles,

The recent change to the Keywords Performance Report was made so that the report would be more consistent with the user interface. Like you said, you can use the predicate isNegative IN [true, false] to include negative keywords in your report. 

Regards,

Anthony

AdWords API Team

[Giles Bodger]

Thanks Anthony, 

can you tell me from what date that happened? (we will need to re sync some data fro that date), and also was there any notification anywhere that we missed ?

cheers

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Giles,

That change went into effect around July 10th. There wasn't an announcement because we were making the reports behave as intended -- that is, they were supposed to exclude negative keywords unless explicitly requested.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team

[GregT]

Hi, Josh.

We were also hit by this, as we use reports like this to download structure, and it unfortunately has caused us a lot of trouble due to our system thinking that all of the negative keywords in all our clients' campaigns were gone.  I just want to point out for the future that changing something to behave as intended without announcing it in advance is probably a fine thing if it's only been released a couple days and no one's using it yet.  In this case, it's literally been years that this report has behaved this way, so changing its behavior to what was intended when first released years ago without advance notice really causes problems -- whether documented or not, actual behavior becomes expected behavior for a public API when it behaves in a certain way for a long time.  In this case, what would have been a couple minutes to fix the code had we known in advance has caused us additional hours of cleanup.

Thanks,

Greg

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for taking the time to provide feedback on why this change was problematic for you. I'll pass this along to the reporting team so they keep this in mind for any future changes.

Best regards,

Josh, AdWords API Team