How to get actual cpc for a keyword

[quaylar]

Hi guys,

My apologies in advance if this is an easy one, but i cant seem to
find an answer to this.
I know there is a maxCPC for a keyword, and i also know that google
*somehow* calculates an actual CPC they charge, depending on the rank
of the next lower ad and some other criteria (yes i also found the
formula how they calc.).
Is there any way to retrieve this *actual* CPC via an API call? My
client insists on the fact that there is a possibility to see the
actual CPC for a keyword via the web interface, but i cant find a way
to retrieve this value via an API-call.

Any hints on this would be greatly appreciated!

best regards,

--qu

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Qu,

You can retrieve information about total cost and number of clicks
via the API, either by using the getCriterionStats() method

http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/adwords/docs/developer/CriterionService.html#getCriterionStats

or by running a report using the ReportService. This won't tell you
the exact cost for each click (unless there's only one click, which is
the trivial case), but you can calculate the average CPC with that
data. The average CPC is something that is exposed via the web
interface, and might be what your client is referring to. I believe
your client is mistaken if they claim that each individual click's
cost is displayed somewhere on the web interface--I'd be curious to
hear what they're looking at if there is some place that that
information is available.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[quaylar]

Jeff,

Thanks for your response, in the meantime my client showed me a
screenshot of
the webinterface showing the actual CPC.
It turned out that he in fact meant the value "total cost/nr. of
clicks", that was shown as "avg. CPC"
in the web-interface.
So i can calc. this value now by myself as you stated.
But i still have trouble with other values he seems to be able to get
via the webinterface, that i cant get
using the API, which are:

- CTR for AdGroups
Only possibility i found here was using reports, which is a problem:
I do have 100s or 1000s of AdGroups within different campaigns and
since a report
requires me to set startDate and endDate, and the startDates can be
different for different campaigns,
i need to query 1 report for every campaign.(which is expensive in
API-Units)

- a value called "Quality factor" for Keywords which i suspect is
AdWords' QualityScore.
Apparently the statistics-object for Keywords does not contain this
value..

- CTR for Ads

Any help on how to get these values are greatly appreciated :)

Best regards,

--qu

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Qu,

You'd need to run an Ad Group report to get CTR for ad groups unless
you calculated it manually by getting stats for each ad in each ad
group and aggregate them, but that's not very straightforward. The
start and end dates that you specify in your DefinedReportJob don't
have to correspond to the start and end dates of the campaigns in
which the ad groups belong--you can specify a start date earlier than
the earliest campaign in your account, and an end date of today, and
get stats even for ad groups that belong to campaigns that started
later than the start date in your DefinedReportJob.

Quality score can be retrieve in v13 of the API as a property of the
Keyword object:

http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/adwords/docs/developer/Keyword.html#qualityScore

which you can retrieve with a CriterionService.getAllCriteria() call,
or, more straightforward, by running a Keyword report.

CTR for Ads can be calculated via the AdService.getAdStats() call, or
via a Creative report.

I think that with potentially thousands of ad groups, you're going to
have the best results by using AdWords API reports.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team