Performance metrics totals on Google Adwords Reports

[SEM]

We are facing an issue with matching the "clicks" and "cost" metrics totals on all of the reports including, Campaigns list, Ad Groups list, Keywords list and Ads list.

After migrating to v201109 Ad Hoc reports, downloading the Ad performance report data now contains rows relating to all available Click Types including:
URL_CLICKS / Headline
SITELINKS / Sitelink
GET_DIRECTIONS / Driving direction
PRODUCT_LISTING_AD_CLICKS / Offer
PRODUCT_EXTENSION_CLICKS / Product plusbox offer
CALLS / Phone calls
OTHER / Other

Considering all the rows for every click type causes the totals for performance metrics to be very high (3X to 5X times) as compared to totals in the Adwords UI reports. So, in this case we need to filter to consider only a few click types (from above) to match with Adwords UI reports totals. We tried considering only URL_CLICKS (Headline) click type. For this, the impressions match, but clicks and cost metrics values are slightly lower (10% - 20% lower depending on the data). So, we are assuming that Adwords UI is considering something else along with "URL_CLICKS (Headline)" click type.

Examples:
----------
1) For an account XYZ, we got AD_PERFORMANCE_REPORT data for a single day. We see the following discrepancy:

Total of Impressions (for all campaigns) for the account obtained via API: 846,372

Total of Impressions (for all campaigns) on Adwords Web Interface report: 640,067


2) We tried getting the AD_PERFORMANCE_REPORT data (via API) by adding the ClickType=Headline filter for different day. With this filter, we see that the Impressions match exactly, but the Clicks and Cost metrics values obtained via API are always lower as compared to what is seen on the Adwords web interface report as below:

Data Obtained via API:
Total Impressions = 407512, Total Clicks = 4397, Total Cost = $2190.17

Data on Adwords Web Interface Report:
Total Impressions = 407512, Total Clicks = 4752, Total Cost = $2320.88


Can you please let us know if there is a process in place for inclusion of the above mentioned click types, if so is this documented and updated regularly? Our customers have noticed that the numbers in our reports do not match the numbers in Google's AdWords reports (via the web interface) and have expressed frustration in this regard.

Is anybody else experiencing the same problem?

Thanks.

[Adam Weiss]

If you include ClickType, you will have duplicate data as described here: http://code.google.com/apis/adwords/docs/appendix/reports.html#ad

" Since ads can serve with multiple click types displayed, impressions may be double counted and the totals may not be accurate. "

The problem is when an ad serves it could have multiple types, so the values won't match.  If you want to compare your data to the UI, remove the ClickType field from your report.

We had the same problem :)

-Adam

[Anash P. Oommen]

Hi,

I'm not an expert with the web frontend, but my understanding is that frontend adds up impression only for ClickType=Headline, but cost and clicks for every clicktype. You could verify this by turning on Segmentation in the UI and looking at one Ad at a time. As Adam mentioned, exclude ClickType column if you want the numbers to match the UI. That said, there is the additional caveat that Ad Performance report doesn't report stats for unsupported Ad formats, so for instance, if you have Dynamic Ads in your account (which is not supported by v201109), then the numbers from API and UI would not match.

Cheers,
Anash P. Oommen,

AdWords API Advisor.