Click type totals don't add up

[Justin Coon]

Hi,

We download data on click types from the API - when you add up the impressions for the click types they do not match what would be expected. It appears "Headline" is always correct when taken by itself, but for instance the "Phone Calls" segment - when you add those in, that takes you past the expected total impressions. There is even a note in the AdWords UI about this - 

"Calls

The number of clicks on your phone number when your ad is shown on a mobile device. This includes clicks on either a phone number in your ad text (in the US and UK) or on a call extension. Since some ads may display both a display URL and a click-to-call phone number, impression counts for these ads may not reconcile within this table."

How should we handle this?

Thanks

Justin

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Justin, 

The ClickType field is used to get the breakdown of how often the ad was served with that click type. Since ads can serve with multiple click types displayed, impressions may be double counted and the totals may not be accurate. In the summary row, you can see that the totals for impression is not returned when the ClickType field is included in the report definition. To get the total impressions for AdWords entities, you need to remove the ClickType field from the report definition. The clicks metrics on the other hand will match the total number of clicks.

Regards,

Shwetha, AdWords API Team.