API V201607 Cross Client Report for click performance and MCC with thousands of sub-accounts

[Chris Hahn]

Hello,

Is there any way to determine which sub-account from an MCC a particular GCLID belongs to other than looping through the sub-accounts and checking them one at a time? I've seen some things in help topics about cross client reporting but that was from a few years ago and I can't find solid examples anywhere. It seems like the click performance report still has a property called "external customer id" which makes me think something like this is possible, but I can't figure it out.

When I try to request information on a batch of GCLIDs for the MCC customer client ID, I get the following error:

ReportDefinitionError.CUSTOMER_SERVING_TYPE_REPORT_MISMATCH

Any direction or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi, 

The cross client (MCC) reporting feature was deprecated in the version v201109 of the API. A given report request can only include data from a single AdWords account. If you need to gather reporting data for multiple accounts, submit a separate report request for each account by setting the clientCustomerId header.

The ExternalCustomerId available in reporting fields corresponds to the customer Id of the account against which the API requests are being made. In your case, there might not be an easier option than to loop over the sub accounts. The ParallelReportDownload Java example downloads reports for all accounts directly under a manager account in multiple parallel threads. Example code in other languages is available here. 

Thanks,
Shwetha, AdWords API Team.

[Zweitze]

You can't derive the proper account from the GCLID alone.

Can you get more info where the GCLID came from? For instance, if you know the website domain where it was issued you probably know which account was involved. And if the accounts advertise to multiple websites, changing all the time, you could some software that regularly retrieves all final URLs from all accounts, then stores the website domains in a local database.
Then, when you are asked about a website/GCLID combination, lookup the website in your local database, see which account(s) that website is related too, then try those accounts for the GCLID.