Why are AdWords API reports being deprecated now?

[Oliver]

Regarding this announcement:

https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2021/06/deprecating-url-performance-report-and.html

What is the reason for deprecating major reports like the above ones in the AdWords APi when that API is still supported until Apr next year?

This is very frustrating and unexpected from a company like Google.  The AdWords API is officially supported and hence we expect you to at least leave it as it is until deprecation for apps that rely on it.  

You can't expect people to jump on migrating to the Ads API when you have officially only made it production ready a month or two ago.  Some of your customers have millions of lines of code to migrate and have been waiting for you to fix what had been a slow and buggy Ads API for over a year.  This is the last thing we expect to have to deal with!

Is this now going to be Google's policy of slow shutting down parts of the AdWords API to force people to migrate in a very short time?

Really frustrating....

Oliver

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi Oliver,

We appreciate your feedback on the recent announcement. We also understand the challenges you might face with the changes. That said, allow me to discuss your concern with the rest of our team and we'll reach back to you once we have more information to share regarding this matter.

Best regards,

Peter Laurence Napa Oliquino Google Ads API Team

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[Oliver]

Hi Peter,

We appreciate if your team give your customers a bit more time to plan the migration.  That announcement is giving us 4 weeks to migrate to the Ads API before 2 important reports are removed.  What is the point of the Apr 2022 deprecation deadline if essential parts of the AdWords API are deprecated much earlier?  This is really puzzling and unexpected.

What is even much more concerning is that in yesterday's webinar your team mentioned that you will be deprecating even more of the AdWords API in the next couple of months!  Why?  The reason your team gave is that it's because the features are deprecated in the web interface.  This is not correct! The 2 reports above you're planning to deprecate in 4 weeks time are not going to be removed from the UI. 

Judging by how many people were concerned in yesterday's webinar about the same issue, we're sure a lot of your customers are not happy about this announcement.  It's our hope that your team will listen and find a better way of managing this transition.

Oliver

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hello Oliver,

Nadine here from the webinar. The webinar does not provide not a lot of time to give an in-depth answer to your question as we need to cover a lot of questions, so I would be happy to do so now. I'll cover a bit about the timeline, the history of what's happened so far, and a little more on why changes happen. As a fellow engineer, I realize that it's frustrating when you have to make changes to your code, especially when it has been working for a long time, but I feel understanding the 'why' can help in your planning. We do not make these changes unless there are valid business and technical reasons.

<essayAlert>I really want to cover everything to make it clear on the 'why', so I realize this is a bit verbose.</essayAlert>

History and timeline

The AdWords API has gotten old enough that it could be a teenager by now. In order to provide opportunity for greater innovation, we had to upgrade the API technology and the underlying infrastructure, which historically we've done about every 10 years. Yes, there was an API before the AdWords API that existed for approximately 10 years. This journey started when we launched Google Ads API v0 in May 2018. We stopped adding new features to the AdWords API in September 2018, which was about the time that the legacy AdWords UI was replaced by the new Google Ads UI that you see today. As a result, depreciations have been occurring regularly to the AdWords API for almost three years. You can see the full  history (https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/adwords_api) of fields being deprecated, field values changed, or reports being deprecated.

In September 2020, we announced GA for the Google Ads API, which means it was ready for production use. This was the point when many developers already started moving to the new API, and some have already finished their migration. Most of the features were already in the API, but we had a few left over that weren't as commonly used. We were finishing those up when we announced the sunset of the AdWords API in April 2021. 

Why the changes

There are a few general reasons why I said that there are likely changes that will happen to AdWords API reporting from now until April 2022 when the AdWords API sunsets:

• As mentioned above, there have been these changes to AdWords API reporting since September 2018 since we do not do releases for that API (https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/adwords_api). We do not have a full roadmap of the upcoming changes from now until April 2022. As soon as we know, then we post to the blog. Just based on the history, there will continue to be changes.
• The data you see in the Google Ads UI is a mirror of the Google Ads API. The AdWords UI was a mirror of the legacy AdWords API that was shut down around 2018. That's why we can't always match the AdWords API to the Google Ads UI any more. They are not mirrors of each other. When we make a change to the current UI, we can't make the same change to the AdWords API, only the Google Ads API. We then need to make a decision on how to best keep the data in the AdWords API reasonably close to the Google Ads UI. If we can't keep the data in line with the Google Ads UI, then we need to deprecate the AdWords API item and usually recommend the Google Ads API instead.
• As I mentioned in the webinar, sometimes we cannot add new Google Ads features unless we deprecate something in the AdWords API. In the case of the recent announcement, we have new features and new metrics we want to introduce to these reports. However, since the AdWords API does not have a release where we can add those, then the reports would be returning incorrect data in the future if we kept the reports in place. This means that our only option is to remove the report because it cannot support anything new and would end up returning incorrect data. Not returning data is preferable to returning possibly incorrect data.

We judiciously weigh deprecation of any fields or reports; it's something that we argue back and forth until we come to a solution where it's the only option that preserves integrity of information. The AdWords API has been an amazing API for years and has served us well, but it's at a point where we need to move to a completely new stack in order to support great new features in the future.

Best,

Nadine Wang, Google Ads API Team

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[Oliver]

Hi Nadine,

We appreciate you taking the time to elaborate on the reasons behind this recent announcement.  While you might have good reasons for this, the main issue here is the conflict between the messages you gave your customers.  We feel these plans were not communicated clearly to allow us to plan accordingly.  

We were told we will have a year after the sunset announcement of the Adwords API.  We're aware you deprecated various fields in the Adwords API over time but none of those deprecations were anywhere as big as the recent announcement.   Even when you deprecated the Placement_Performance_Report recently, there was an alternative in the Automatic_Placement_Report.  However, the latest announcement deprecates even that one last option to get any automatic placements data at all from the Adwords API and hence has a much bigger impact.

You mentioned some developers started migrating last year. We chose not to for few reasons including: 1) missing features we needed, 2) new API versions constantly being released (and sometimes with big changes) which would have required more code maintenance 3) most importantly, again, because we thought we have one year after the final announcement and hence had no reason to migrate sooner.   Had we known earlier this will happen, our plans would have been very different.

Can you please at least consider extending the 12th July deprecation by a month or two?  We're sure it'll be highly appreciated by everyone who is now starting the migration process.

Oliver

[Mat]

Hi Nadine,

your "history and timeline" is incomplete. Let me help you out:

The v1 of the Google Ads API had already been declared "production ready" on March 4, 2019 but had to be pushed back to beta three months later on July 2, 2019 due to the bad overall performance.

It stayed in (second) beta over a year until September 21, 2020. It had reached v5 by then. So when you announced the production readiness of the Google Ads API for the second time in 2 and a half years, not everyone jumped on the train right away. It was a bad timing. The v5 was a mess because the transition to field presence instead of wrapper types was only done for half of the resources by then. 

And there did not seem to be any urgency for switching from AdWords API to Google Ads API. Despite the frequent questions in this group about the sunset or deprecation date of the AdWords API, you never mentioned, that this will be a gradual process escalating over time until this very posting of yours yesterday.

We were kind of lucky because we started to move to the Google Ads API in March 2019 already, but that was pure gambling and no one knew for sure for years if the Google Ads API will continue to be developed or not.

Regards

Mat

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Greetings Folks,

I see we have more than one post, so I'm going to answer them in one go.

@Oliver - Thanks for explaining your perspective. You've laid it out clearly how planning could be thrown off by a few factors. I'll go check with my colleagues who are responsible for the report deprecation to see if it's possible to postpone for a bit longer. Thanks for the suggestion. I'll get back to you when I have an update.

@Mat - Yes, you're right about the additional timeline information you provided. There was an initial rough rollout a couple of years ago. We did have to humbly take a step back into beta and work on improving the overall experience, and it's understandable that folks would be cautious. I appreciate that your team was willing to migrate. I'll look into finding a central place where we can explain the state of the AdWords API and what to expect over time.

Cheers,
Nadine, Google Ads API Team

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[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Greetings Oliver,

I have good news! After chatting with my colleagues, we were able make a change to the timeline on the deprecation of the Url and Automatic Placements Performance reports in the AdWords API. Your suggestion of 2 months is feasible, so we pushed out the date to September 13, 2021. We've updated the blog post (https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2021/06/deprecating-url-performance-report-and.html) with the new date. For the reasons I mentioned before, we can't completely stop the deprecation of these two reports, but we were able to make some adjustments in our product development to extend the deprecation date. Thanks, all, for taking the time to explain your perspective as we're making adjustments.

Wishing you all the best,

[Oliver]

That's great, Nadine. Many thanks indeed.

Oliver

[AdWordsAPI-Gnr]

Greetings,

PLACEMENT_PERFORMANCE_REPORT 

This report returns empty results.

Why is there such a problem even though the removal date is September 13, 2021?

21 Haziran 2021 Pazartesi tarihinde saat 17:28:01 UTC+3 itibarıyla Oliver şunları yazdı:

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hello,

Could you please provide the query, time range, and client customer ID that you are using to retrieve that report? The timeline was indeed pushed out, so there may be something else going on for your specific situation.

Thanks,

[AdWordsAPI-Gnr]

<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8' standalone='yes'?><report><report-name name='campign performance report #60e72ddaa60c9'/><date-range date='Jul 8, 2021'/><table> .... </report>

8 Temmuz 2021 Perşembe tarihinde saat 20:10:23 UTC+3 itibarıyla adsapi şunları yazdı:

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Greetings,

I have good news. The report is generally still returning data when there is data to return. 

In the API, I see that you ran the following query (this is AWQL to make it easier to read):

SELECT DisplayName,Impressions,Clicks,Cost,Interactions,InteractionTypes,InteractionRate,AverageCpm,AverageCpc,ConversionRate,Conversions,ConversionValue from PLACEMENT_PERFORMANCE_REPORT DURING 20210708,20210708

When I ran it on your account (which I found in our logs), I see that for that day the report is not returning any data.

In the UI, you can go to your account, filter on July 8, and then click on Placements and Placements again. That's the UI view that is the closest equivalent to that API query. Here's a link in our documentation as to how to map the UI to the API: https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/guides/uireports?hl=en#new_22

I see that for that UI view, there is no Placements data for that day. The API data does match the UI data. It's just that there is no data for that view for that particular day in that account.

If you need further details, feel free to reply privately to author, and I can work with you offline.

Take care,