One account's Cost metric is slightly higher in API pulls than the Google dashboard

[Alison M]

We’ve been having an issue with one of our Google Ads accounts (specifically, one that deals with only our YouTube campaigns) where the API pulls a slightly higher amount for Cost than what’s displayed on the website dashboard. It’s typically a few dollars higher for only this account, our search-based accounts and the campaigns within them don’t have this issue.

The IT-partner we work with automates this process for us and has not been able to determine why some of the metrics keep changing for only one account. They tried delaying our weekly data pull by a few days, then a couple of weeks, but the issue remains. If the data is pulled again, the numbers are usually closer to the dashboard.

Any ideas of what may be causing this discrepancy? The articles on discrepancies don’t seem to address issues with a fluctuating Cost metric.

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi,

Thank you for contacting the Google Ads API support team.

To check further on your ‘discrepancy issue’ from our end, kindly provide the complete API logs (request and response logs with request-id and request header) generated at your end when pulling the ‘cost metrics’ via the API where you are observing the discrepancies in the API response. Also, provide the relevant Google Ads UI uncropped screenshots from which you are trying to retrieve the data. This information will help us to assist you effectively and accurately.

I would request that you enable logging for the specific client library that you are using. You can refer to the guides Java, .Net, PHP, Python, Ruby or Perl to enable logging at your end. For REST interface requests, you can enable logging via the curl command by using the -i flag.

You can send the details via Reply privately to the author option, or direct private reply to this email. 

This message is in relation to case "ref:!00D1U01174p.!5004Q02vGiI1:ref" (ADR-00274443)

Thanks,
 

Google Ads API Team