Google Product Taxonomy vs Product Bidding Category

[Joe Stedman]

Hi All,

When automating the creation of shopping campaigns I noticed that the Google Product Categories returned by the API don't quite match up with the taxonomy found here:

https://www.google.com/basepages/producttype/taxonomy-with-ids.en-GB.txt

 

Causing my code to throw exceptions when it tries to create a product tree using the outdated taxonomy.

The exact error I receive is : "Bidding categories do not form a valid path in the Shopping bidding category taxonomy.."

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Regards,

Joe

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Joe,

The taxonomy you are referring is more than a year old and is most likely deprecated. Please see this document for the current list of products and services category codes. You can retrieve the full set of bidding categories from the ConstantDataService method getProductBiddingCategoryData.

Regards,
Shwetha, AdWords API Team.

[Joe Stedman]

Hi Shwetha,

Thank you for getting back to me.

I still have a problem though, example:

I have a selection of products with the taxonomy "Hardware/Painting & Wall Covering Supplies/Paint"

Using the ConstantDataService, I can get category ids of '1689639310991627077' for Hardware and '6493303640508933718' for Wall Covering Supplies, and can confirm that 'Wall Covering Supplies' is indeed a child of 'Hardware'.

Yet when I call mutate on the adGroupCriterionService I get an error telling me that "Bidding categories do not form a valid path in the Shopping bidding category taxonomy...". Which if i'm understanding that correctly, is telling me that 'Wall Covering Supplies' is not a correct child of 'Hardware'.

Of course, this is just one example, there are far more products for some of my other clients that have the same problem.

If the ConstantDataService is telling me that it should be correct, I have no way of catching the error before i call mutate, so the entire operation array will fail unless I call mutate on each product individually which is a bad idea :)

Am I doing something wrong, is there another way to make sure my products have the correct taxonomy before I try to create their partitions?

Kind Regards,

Joe

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Joe,

These product bidding categories are now obsolete, which will be indicated by the status field in the response. You would need to find other categories that best classify your products from this list and use these product category ids.