Managing segmented requests for large accounts - at scale

[Sam]

Hi there.

We have an MCC of hundreds of accounts. Maybe 5% of these accounts are big enough to require multiple calls for something like CampaignCriterionService, as otherwise they give a START_INDEX_TOO_HIGH error at some point. For these accounts, we run campaign by campaign to retrieve the data in segments.

My question is - when running data collection processes across all accounts in the MCC - should we:

1) Run data collection for all clients at a campaign level (drastically increasing the number of calls, but reducing the response size)

2) Set a flag on accounts which give START_INDEX_TOO_HIGH error so that only these are pulled campaign by campaign, and the remainder pulled at account level

Option 1 is a bit easier to implement, but is there a problem with dramatically increasing the number of API calls? Is option 2 preferable for performance of the data collection at scale?

Thanks

Sam

[Umesh Dengale]

Hi Sam,

In the AdWords API, when the start index of the request is 100,000 then SelectorError.START_INDEX_IS_TOO_HIGH error occurs. You could narrow the query as much as possible using predicates to avoid this limit when retrieving a large result set. I would recommend using the option 2 (for the big account retrieving data campaign by campaign and for the smaller account get the account level).  Please check out our rate limit guide for more details.

Cheers,

Umesh, AdWords API Team.

[Sam]

Great, makes sense.

Thanks Umesh!