Budget Ordering and Campaign Payment

[sa]

Hi,

I have a question about creating an AdWords Campaign via AdWords API. I found the sample codes to create client accounts under my MCC account and create campaign under that created client account. According to the answer I got from AdWords support hotline, if a client account does not have billing setup, AdWords will bill its MCC account if consolidated billing is set up on that account. If consolidated billing is not setup on the MCC account, then the campaign will not run. If these are correct, it seems like I do not need to set a BudgetOrder in order for the campaign to run properly but according to an answer I found on this forum:

"As you suspected, it is not possible to deposit money using the AdWords API. If the Manager account is whitelisted for BudgetOrderService and set up for Consolidated billing, you could use the API to create budget orders for the client accounts. Please check this guide for more details. Let me know if you have any further questions."

And the provided guide for BudgetOrderService, it seems like I do need to call the mutate method on BudgetOrderService in order to create a BudgetOrder to authorise the AdWords API created client account to bill the MCC account with consolidated billing, even if that billing account is used to create the client account; is that correct? Or it is not necessary to make this mutation call?

Thanks,

[Vincent Racaza (AdWords API Team)]

Hi,

As you can see in this guide, particularly in the "Budget order" section, you need to create a budget order via the BudgetOrderService.mutate() method (you need to be whitelisted to use this method) if you want that your specific client account to spend up a certain amount of money over a certain period of time, and accruing that spend to the particular billing account specified in your budget order. This said, in order for a successful creation of a budget order, you need to make sure that you set-up your account on consolidated billing (under "Put an existing account on consolidated billing").

If your set-up (consolidated billing, and not on a standard billing) is like this, then it is necessary that you create a budget order via the mutate() method. However, if you are on standard billing, then I believe that you don't need to use the BudgetOrderService.mutate() for this.

Let me know if you have further clarifications.

Thanks,

Vincent

AdWords API Team

[sa]

Hi Vincent,

My intention is for a "specific client account to spend up a certain amount of money over a certain period of time, and accruing that spend to the particular billing account specified in your budget order"; then I would need the following:

1. Add credit line to a MCC account
2. Whitelist that MCC account
3. Set-up consolidated billing

I would like to confirm that after the above are done, I can follow the Create Budget Order guide to create a budget order. After this budget order is created, I can the ID of the BudgetOrder; but I am wondering how do I assign this new BudgetOrder to a client account. As this mutation method can only be done through whitelisted accounts, I assume the client customer ID I need to use when I call the mutate method is the MCC account. I would like the client accounts under that whitelisted MCC account to have different spending over a month and accruing those payments to a particular billing account?

For clarification, let say I fulfilled the requirements to create new BudgetOrders and created BudgetOrder 1, 2, 3 which all have different settings. I used the same MCC account to create these BudgetOrders as this is the only whitelisted account. If I have three separate client accounts that I want to set these BudgetOrder to, how exactly can I do that? Or as long as my MCC account is whitelisted, I can set the AdWordsSession's client customer ID to those client accounts and use that to create the BudgetOrder and when the mutation method is called, these created BudgetOrder is automatically linked to the client account's client customer ID used that created those BudgetOrders?

Best Regards,

[Vincent Racaza (AdWords API Team)]

Hi,

Yes, I can confirm that you can already follow the guide for the creation of budget order after you have done the three steps that you mentioned above. In regards to your concern on creating a budget order for a particular account, you can add/create a budget order to your client account even though your manager account is the one that is being whitelisted. You just need to make sure that you are authenticated as a user of your manager account (on which your client account is under to this manager account) as you can see in the section.

With this, if you have three separate client accounts that you want to create a budget order, then you just need to set the specific clientCustomerId (which you wish that the budget order to be created) in the property file or in your request header.