Campaign Report is giving lower clicks/Cost over time

[Jacek Raczkiewicz]

Hi, 

This is my first post here, I hope you will be able to help me out. 

This issue have happened second time, it occurs not very often but seems there is something not right in our reports.

We download thru API (using PHP SDK) CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT, we request quite general information: Impressions, Clicks, Cost, AverageCpc, as a time frame we always use 'ALL_TIME'.

Both reports were downloaded with API v201609

$reportDefinition->dateRangeType = 'ALL_TIME';

$reportDefinition->reportType = 'CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT';

On October 20th we downloaded this file:

cat reports/report_673-030-4804_1476921604.csv

Campaign ID,Impressions,Clicks,Cost,Avg. CPC 

681638065,202,10,86120000,8612000

Then on October 25th we downloaded the report for same campaign and got this:

cat report_673-030-4804_1477353602.csv

Campaign ID,Impressions,Clicks,Cost,Avg. CPC 
681638065,353,7,51160000,7308571

Over 5 days the clicks dropped from 10 to 7 and also cost is lower.

On October 25th all the values from the report were consistent with adWords web interface.

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Jacek,

This is most likely because some clicks were considered invalid for this campaign. You could download the Click Performance Report to validate this as it includes stats aggregated at each click level, and includes both valid and invalid clicks. You could also query for InvalidClicks form Campaign Performance Report, which provides the number of clicks which weren't charged as they were considered illegitimate.

Let me know if this helps.

Regards,
Shwetha, AdWords API Team.