How To Determine if Account is Express or Regular?

[Nick Harris]

It is suboptimal that the API can't be used to mutate Express campaigns. Is there a way to determine if an Account is Express? That way I could just have my app ignore any Express accounts entirely. 

[Vincent Racaza (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Nick,

Currently, there is no way in the AdWords API to determine if your AdWords account is an AdWords Express account. You can only determine AdWords express campaigns in the API as you can see on this blog post.

For the AdWords account itself, I believe you can only identify this in the AdWords UI by logging in to your MCC, and on the list of the accounts, you can see the "Account type" per account. The account type will be "AdWords Express" if the client account is an AdWords Express account.

Thanks,

Vincent

AdWords API Team

[Zweitze]

You could try to create a new campaign in the account with the flag ValidationOnly=true.
Doing so will not actually create a campaign, but it will raise an error when the call was not valid.

Note such a request may fail due to different reasons, eg. campaign name is not unique, Google disabled the account for multiple policy violations, the user logged in with a read-only account, etc.etc.
My point: if it fails then you should not report that the account is an express account, instead just report that campaigns appear to be read-only.