Report contains zero metrics with segmenting

[Developer Poidi]

Hey guys!

I have a strange behaviour during migration from Adwords-AWQL to Ads-GAQL. I have following AWQL query:
SELECT OfferId,Date,DayOfWeek,Week,Month,Impressions,Clicks,Conversions,ConversionRate,ValuePerConversion,Ctr,Cost FROM SHOPPING_PERFORMANCE_REPORT WHERE CountryCriteriaId = 2040 DURING 20220209,20220216

This has been migrated to following Ads-GAQL (also confirming with the migration tool):

SELECT segments.product_country,segments.product_item_id,segments.date,segments.day_of_week,segments.week,segments.month,metrics.impressions,metrics.clicks,metrics.conversions,metrics.conversions_from_interactions_rate,metrics.value_per_conversion,metrics.ctr,metrics.cost_micros FROM shopping_performance_view WHERE segments.product_country = 'geoTargetConstants/2040' AND segments.date BETWEEN '2022-02-09' AND '2022-02-16'

The odd thing is, that the results of both queries differ. The results from the Adwords AWQL Query contain no rows with all zero metrics. The results from the Ads GAQL Query however contains rows with all zero metrics (I would have not expected that)

Based on this Page, this should not be the case if segmentation is done.

What is the reason that zero metrics are included in the Ads GAQL query?

Unfortunately I could not find an example with multiple segments in the select clause and only a few in the where clause. Could it have something todo with this?

Cheers,
Poidi

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi,

​​​​​​Thank you for raising this concern to Google Ads API Team.

With regard to your concern, "What is the reason that zero metrics are included in the Ads GAQL query?", I recommend to use v10 as according to the first bullet of this document, fixed there the inconsistencies where rows with zero metrics were returned when segments were selected in some reports. All reports will now follow the expected behavior of ignoring zero-metric rows in reports that select metrics and segments.

Let me know if you have any questions with the provided documents.

Best regards,

Jinky Google Ads API Team

ref:_00D1U1174p._5004Q2WwZDs:ref

[jni...@condati.com]

This is unfortunate that there is no longer an option to retrieve the zero metrics rows. 

Here is an example of a real-world situation. When looking at bid_adjustments broken down by household income segments, segmented however one wishes (Date + maybe device, etc...) , if the metrics for that segment are all 0 it won't return the result, but you can see the result in the UI. This particular segment has a bid_adjustmnet of say -59%, but that becomes invisible in API reports, leading to discrepancies between API and UI displayed information and leads to a lack of trust from our clients of the API data when compared to the UI. This is frustrating to say the least. This was not an issue in adwords, as there was an explicit option to include or exclude zero-metric rows in the API reports.

The left side of the screenshot is the API report, Right side is the UI downloaded report all filtered to the same campaign, ad group, and date. Ordered by impressions for easy comparison. As you can see, the bottom two rows on the right (from the UI) do not appear on the left (from the API) You can clearly see how not being able to provide rows with zero metrics results, fails to provide needful and valuable information about bid_adjustments. If i used the API only, then i would not see that the other two segments are currently -59% and -22% for bid_adjustments.