Adwords API wishlist (mostly UpdateAds)

[Karaman]

Hi,

What are the future plans regarding UpdateAds as of version V12 or
above?
I wish I would be able to change the content (headline, descriptions,
Urls) of my TextAds via the API?
Are you considering such possibility or I just have to do simple old
AddAds / UpdateAds (disable),
which is quite illogical?

and another thing:
Why some of the AddXXXX functions of the API require a parent ID as
second parameter while some don't.
for example AddCampaign and AddAds dont require a second parameter
while AddAdGroup does require it, and this parent id can be part of
the AdGroup record itself. I think the Zen of google API should be
more consistent about these ids. Come on dont embarass yourself!

[Pete Lavetsky]

Bump. I would also like some clarification on this. This Java API
documentation states:

http://www.google.com/apis/adwords/developer/AdService.html#updateAds

"updateAds

Update a batch of ads.

Use the id field of the ad to indicate which ad to update. Currently
only the status field is updateable, all other fields will be ignored.
You must specify the adGroupId element for each ads element."

Is this true? In order to update the parameters of ( for instance ) a
TextAd you have to disable an old Ad and then create a new Ad?

Pete

[Alan]

I haven't found anything that leads me to believe that the
documentation is inaccurate in this case. Unfortunately for me, it
leads to numerous "disabled ads".

On Nov 20 2007, 5:28 am, Pete Lavetsky <pete.lavet...@gmail.com>
wrote:

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Folks,

(Without saying too much about Google's internal systems,) If you've
ever edited an ad via the AdWords web interface and you're
particularly inquisitive, you might notice that the ad's underlying ID
changes after the update. You also might notice that there's a running
count of how many "edited or deleted" ads there are in the Ad
Variations tab of a given ad group in the web interface. One might
draw the conclusion from this that when you edit an ad's text via the
AdWords web interface, you're effectively creating a new ad and
disabling/deleting the previous ad, allowing our system to keep track
of the previous ad versions with a unique ID as well as the current
one.

Given such a potential backend setup, if updateAds() allowed
modifying ad content it would just be a thin wrapper over what
everyone can already do via the API, namely creating a new ad and
disabling the old.

Hopefully that sheds some (hypothetical) light on why the API might
be designed in such a manner.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team