Empty value for "Device" field in report response

[stef...@adference.com]

Starting this morning, we get a lot of errors in our system because the value for the "device" attribute is empty in report responses under some circumstances.

The error occurs when we load a keyword- or product partition report segmented by "Device" with includeZeroImpressions set to true. The xml response contains, for example, the following lines:

<row campaignID="xx" keywordID="xy" adGroupID="xz" keyword="Fonduebesteck Set" matchType="Exact" impressions="0" clicks="0" avgPosition="0.0" avgCPC="0" maxCPC="300000" cost="0" device="Computers" conversions="0.00" totalConvValue="0.00"/>
<row campaignID="xx" keywordID="xy" adGroupID="xz" keyword="Fonduebesteck Set" matchType="Exact" impressions="0" clicks="0" avgPosition="0.0" avgCPC="0" maxCPC="300000" cost="0" device="Tablets with full browsers" conversions="0.00" totalConvValue="0.00"/>
<row campaignID="xx" keywordID="xy" adGroupID="xz" keyword="Fonduebesteck Set" matchType="Exact" impressions="0" clicks="0" avgPosition="0.0" avgCPC="0" maxCPC="300000" cost="0" device="Mobile devices with full browsers" conversions="0.00" totalConvValue="0.00"/>
<row campaignID="xx" keywordID="xy" adGroupID="xz" keyword="Fonduebesteck Set" matchType="Exact" impressions="0" clicks="0" avgPosition="0.0" avgCPC="0" maxCPC="300000" cost="0" device="" conversions="0.00" totalConvValue="0.00"/>

In the last line, the value for "device" is an empty string. This is not a valid value according to the documentation (https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/reports/keywords-performance-report). The invalid value causes our system to fail loading the report because it does not expect empty strings for device.

We are not seeing this behavior for all accounts / campaigns in our system but for roughly 20%. 

From the response, it looks like the last line corresponds to the "Other" device. Is this correct? In this case we could implement a quick-fix to bypass the problem until it has been solved.

Thanks for investigating,

Stefan

[Teja Makani]

Hello Stefan,

Yes, you are right. When the Device field is UNKNOWN it will result into blank space in the report, you could treat them as others/Unknown device types. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Regards,
Sai Teja, AdWords API Team.

[GregT]

We also are running into this starting yesterday with campaign and criteria performance reports.

It appears, though, that these are really corresponding to the new TV device type, based on the fact that at the same time, we suddenly started getting "ConnectedTv" back as a campaign Platform criteria for these campaigns when using the Campaign Criteria report. 

It would be really nice for this to be consistent across all the reports. Could you please fix the performance reports to return the appropriate device type as well? I realize there are some backward compatibility issues with doing that -- but that's already an issue with the Campaign Criteria report (which is already doing it), and the fact that we suddenly started getting empty strings back for the device type in the performance reports already broke backwards compatibility as well.

Thanks,

Greg

[stef...@adference.com]

Hi,

thanks for the answer. Can we expect the behavior to continue or is it a temporary thing? Also, should we expect other segments to be "blank" as well?

Best,

Stefan

[Igor Schut]

We have the same issues and found out these are from ConnectedTV platform. This is not documented but you can find this in the response if you download this as objects.

Interested in what Google has to say for this new implementation, which is not documented anywhere. 

Hope this helps.

Best,

Igor