Determine account creation date?

[Don Spaulding]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone knew of a reliable method to determine
the date an account was created? I don't see anything explicitly in
the docs, but I'm hoping that I'm just missing it. The closest thing
I could find is the 'timeZoneEffectiveDate' of the 'AccountInfo'
object.

Thanks,
Don

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Don,

timeZoneEffectiveDate is the closest you'll come to retrieving the
account creation date via the AdWords API. While most accounts will
have their time zone set once at creation time and never changed,
there are some edge cases. So if you need the date with 100%
confidence, you cannot rely on timeZoneEffectiveDate always being an
accurate representation.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[Don Spaulding]

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for the info. I was afraid of that. We've ditched the code
that made this a requirement, but we still wanted to know what the
creation date is. For future reference, here's what we came up with.
It's a bit hackish, but what I did was to get the list of all
campaigns for each account, and then pick the earliest start date
among them. There's a chance (probably a good chance) that the
account existed before any campaigns were created, but as I was
interested in this from a reporting perspective, there wouldn't be any
data that I cared about before that date.

Hope it helps,
Don Spaulding

On Jan 22, 11:21 am, AdWords API Advisor
<adwordsapiadvi...@google.com> wrote:
> Hello Don,
>
>  timeZoneEffectiveDate is the closest you'll come to retrieving theaccountcreationdate via the AdWords API. While most accounts will
> have their time zone set once atcreationtime and never changed,

> there are some edge cases. So if you need the date with 100%
> confidence, you cannot rely on timeZoneEffectiveDate always being an
> accurate representation.
>
> Cheers,
> -Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team
>
> On Jan 21, 2:35 pm, Don Spaulding <donspauldin...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Hi, I was wondering if anyone knew of a reliable method todetermine

> > the date anaccountwas created?  I don't see anything explicitly in

[j.e.frank]

I realize this is a very old thread, but I am looking at the upgrade path to v201109 from v13.  We use the timeZoneEffectiveDate as a proxy for account creation date, and I don't see that field anymore in the ServicedAccountService's Account object.  How would I get this information now?

[Eric Koleda]

Hi Jason,

As discussed in the office hours last week, it doesn't appear that this information is accessible any longer.  Regular calls to the ServicedAccountService could be used to approximate when the accounts was created / linked.

Best,

- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team

[j.e.frank]

As you suggest, I am making semi-regular calls to the ServicedAccountService to approximate account creation time.  It's not too bad.  What I dislike about this approach is, it relies on our scheduled jobs staying up all the time.  If it goes down over the weekend, then I will end up with some pretty inaccurate create times in my database when I start it up again.  Ironically, it is for the benefit of our Google account reps that we want to track this data, since we send them a weekly email with the list of new accounts that we've created during that week.  (I say ironically because Google is now taking away our ability to do this accurately)

I was thinking about using the CustomerSyncService as another way to figure out account create time.  In the AdWords UI, you can go to the Change History and see when the account was created.  However, the CustomerSyncService requires you to pass in an array of campaign IDs and a timeframe.  The timeframe could be fudged, but often our accounts are created as "shells" with no campaigns in them, so that is not going to work.  Are there any plans to make these kinds of changes (not campaign-specific) available in the CustomerSyncService?  Or maybe there is another way that I can infer when an account was created.

[Eric Koleda]

Hi Jason,

I'm not aware of any plans to extend the functionality of the CustomerSyncService. Out of curiosity, what is the use case for knowing the exact date and time that an account was created on?

Best,

- Eric

[J]

I know this is an old thread, but I'm new to the AdWords API, and I need to know the account creation date as well.

In my case, I need to know the account creation date because I'm building a reporting service that queries the CAMPAIGN_PERFORMANCE_REPORT.  The algorithm I'm using is to start with today's date, then query backwards (reverse chronologically) one month at a time.  The problem is I need a reliable way to know when to stop querying.  My current method is to stop querying when I get 0 records for a query.  I'm not sure if this is reliable as I'm guessing it's possible that there could be no activity for a month (perhaps all campaigns are paused)?

Knowing the account creation date would give me a reliable way to stop querying since this will ensure that I'm querying the entire period of the account's existence.

Any better suggestions?

[Kevin Winter]

Hi,

  As far as I know, the date an AdWords account was created isn't stored anywhere.  I'm also not sure how useful this would be, as there's no guarantee that is the date they started seeing impressions (i.e. if they hadn't set up billing or added a campaign ready to serve until much later).  You could probably approximate the useful lifetime of an account by performing an AccountPerformanceReport and choose the Year and Month fields along with Impressions - then you'll get a list of Year, Month and impressions for every month you need to run your reports for.

- Kevin Winter

AdWords API Team