Placement Performance Report - ID field null

[Mark R]

Hey Folks,

In the Placement Performance Report, I'm observing a large quantity of Placements where the ID field is coming in as null ("--") and I'm not seeing in the documentation why that would be.  Is there a segmentation that could cause this result?

Thanks,
Mark

[Thanet Knack Praneenararat (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Mark,

That means the placement is an automatic one (as compared to managed placements). In AWFE, it will have value of 0.

For managed placements you specified, the placement performance report shows the ID field as usual.

Cheers,

Thanet, AdWords API Team

[Mark R]

Hey Thanet,

That agrees with what we've observed, but is there a technical reason?  It seems to also be the case when I pull the Placement through the AdGroupCriterionService.

Can you suggest an alternative method for getting the ID?

Regards,

Mark

[Thanet Knack Praneenararat (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Mark,

I'm not sure I understand your use case correctly.

Why would this mechanism (returning null when the placement is automatic one) is problematic to you?

That is just one of other possible ways (e.g., returning an arbitrary constant value) to show that a certain row is of automatic, not the one you have manually specified.

Could you please tell me what you are trying to achieve so I can help you appropriately?

Cheers,

Thanet, AdWords API Team

[Mark R]

Hey Thanet,

 

We use an internal tool for managing some of our Criterion, and our team would like the capability to bid/pause/remove Placements through this tool.

 

Without an ID they would need to individually select each Placement through the AdWords webpage they wish to manipulate, rather than use API calls.

 

Thanks,
Mark

[Thanet Knack Praneenararat (AdWords API Team)]

Hello Mark,

Thanks for your clarification.

I still think that you should ignore those placements without IDs or not offer them to your users.

Originally, they are automatic placements (i.e., you or your user haven't created them), not the managed placements that you can add or delete.

If you still would like to tweak around them, the best possible way might be using their descriptions instead of IDs.

Cheers,

Thanet, AdWords API Team

[Mark R]

Hey Thanet,

Thanks for the info.  We'll look into alternative methods for updating the Automatic placements.

Regards,

Mark

[Mark R]

Hey Thanet,

Can you point me towards an API call that uses the Placement description as suggested?

Thanks,
Mark

[Thanet Knack Praneenararat (AdWords API Team)]

Hello Mark,

You can use a Selector of AdGroupCriterionService to get placement URLs by the field PlacementUrl.

This code example might be similar to what you would like to do.

Just change the code from using the type KEYWORD to PLACEMENT instead.

Cheers,

Thanet, AdWords API Team

[Mark R]

Hey Thanet,

I'm using a very similar implementation of the googleads-java-lib example, but that is still not grabbing all the placements.

At a high level, does an Automatic Placements even get a Criterion ID?

Thanks,

Mark

[Thanet Knack Praneenararat (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Mark,

No, as I mentioned before, automatic placements don't receive Criterion ID, that's why their ID are shown as "--" in PLACEMENT_PERFORMANCE_REPORT and as 0 in AdWords user interface.

I apologize that I suggested wrongly. In fact, you cannot obtain the placements without ID, namely automatic placements, via AdGroupCriterionService.

The service only returns those with criterion IDs.

I'll look for other possible workarounds and will get you updated in case we have ones.

But possibly they are not returned by Selector due to the fact that they are not supposed to be added/deleted by users at first place.

Cheers,

Thanet, AdWords API Team

[Mark R]

Hey Thanet,

Thanks for the clarification.  That was my assumption after trying different avenues ourselves.

Regards,

Mark

[Mark R]

Hey Thanet,

Followup question - would we be able to interact with Automatic Placements if we were to use an AdWords script?

Thanks,
Mark

[Thanet Knack Praneenararat (AdWords API Team)]

Hello Mark,

AdWords script is not my expertise but I'm asking my colleagues for you.

My guess is that it might be not so different between the script and the API.

You may get 0 as an ID if you call getId() of AdWordApp.Placement.

By the way, as you may know, you can use Automatic Placements Performance Report to get only rows for automatic placements.

Cheers,

Thanet, AdWords API Team

[Mark R]

HiThanet,

I had a follow-up question.

As you have mentioned in the thread below - 

'But possibly they are not returned by Selector due to the fact that they are not supposed to be added/deleted by users at first place.'

A user can 'Exclude' automatic placements from the Ad Words user interface as shown below. So, Automatic placements are actionable by an user. The only difference is that we want to perform the same action using an API call instead. 

We will not be adding any new placements. Just excluding them using an API call.

Let us know if we have any options to just do the exclude action using API call.

Thanks for all your help.

-Bhaven

[Chirag]

Hello Mark/Thanet,

I am also in same situation. i wants to pause/exclude placements with automatic placements.

Any workaround to pause automatic placements using API?

Thanks,

[Thanet Knack Praneenararat (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Chirag,

I once replied to Mark privately, but it seems I forgot to relay information here as well.

To exclude automatic placements, please do as follows:

Add a NegativeAdGroupCriterion to a certain ad group, setting its Criterion.Type to PLACEMENT.
Then, set its url to the same one you would like to exclude (the original automatic placement of your interest).
Finally, use AdGroupCriterionService to execute an ADD operation of the AdGroupCriterion.

Note that in this way, the automatic placements will be changed to managed one.

To get automatic placements, please run AUTOMATIC_PLACEMENTS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT.

Best,

Thanet, AdWords API Team

[Chirag]

Hello Thanet,

Thanks,This would certainly help me.