Updating ad dest URL

[tozor]

I'm curious why AdService.updateAds() is so limited in terms of the
attributes that can be updated. One aspect of my application involves
updating URL parameters in the destination URL. This works fine for
placements and keywords but I have no way to do this for an Ad. I'm
curious if anyone else is bothered by this restriction and if the
Adwords folks have any plans to allow more ad attributes to be updated
in the future. My only alternative is to "clone" the ad by deleting
the old one and creating a new one. This is not a great solution
because I wil lose all of the history associated with the ad.

Thanks for listening.

Tim

[AdWords API Advisor]

Hello Tim,

AdWords does not allow for editing the destination URL of an ad, and
the API reflects this restriction. If you use the web interface to
"change" the destination URL of a given ad, you're really mimicking
the API workflow you describe--a new copy of the ad is created with a
different destination URL, and the old copy is deleted. You can see
for yourself that the process of editing the destination URL of an ad
via the web interface results in a new ad with a different id.

Cheers,
-Jeff Posnick, AdWords API Team

[tozor]

I implemented the solution I described which "clones" my ad in order
to update the destination URL. This strategy worrks fine with text
and mobile ads. However it fails with image ads because the API does
not seem to return the image data associated with the image ad. All
the rest of the Ad.Image attribute fields (eg. heighth, width) are
filled in, but the Image.data field is null when I retrieve it via
AdService.getAd() This makes it impossible to create a new ad based
on this image ad, and as such I cannot change the destination URL
using my copy and delete strategy.

Is there (or will there ever be) a way to get the image data returned
for the image ad?

Thanks again.

Tim

On Feb 23, 12:39 pm, AdWords API Advisor

[Peer]

Hi,

image.data is write only. On existing image ads you should use the
image.imageUrl and then download the data using that Url.

Cheers,
Peer Jakobsen
eSearchVision

[tozor]

Thanks much that worked great.

Tim