Need advice on the right way to delete Campaigns.

[bruce]

After reading through the forum, I found there is no way to delete a
campaign. It can only be set to "DELETED" status, but it's a real
deletion. It doesn't allow us to create new campaigns with same name
as deleted campaigns. To accommodate, there are two choices to
workaround:

1. append a timestamp at end of each campaign name. But the problem
is we will end up putting millions of deleted campaigns in the system
after a month of usage of API. This would finally drag down the
system performance.

2. Never delete campaigns. However, there is big performance
penalty. Before adding each new campaign, we have to query the API,
to find out if that name is already used or not. i.e. to add 10 new
campaigns, we have to read all 5000 campaigns from API, make a
comparison, then decide to add 3 campaigns as new, revive the other 7
campaigns from "DELETED" pile.

You may argue that we should keep a good record of which campaign
names are used. Yes, I can do that. But that will create duplicate
information about campaigns, and make the system much less reliable.
Whenever those duplicate information becomes inconsistent (I believe
experienced software people all found this happening frequently), it
will create a mess / unnecessary bugs.

Also, It seems Campaigns do not support cascade delete (to propagate
the deletion to all elements within.) Can this be added soon? It
would help a lot to maintain system consistency, and make programming
easier.

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[AdWords API Advisor]

Hi Bruce,

You can delete a campaign by setting its status to DELETED, but you
are correct that there is no way to completely remove a campaign from
your account. As for how to handle name conflicts, we generally
recommend solution #1. You don't need to add a timestamp to the
campaigns as they are being created, only as they are being deleted.
Having many deleted campaigns in your account will not impact the
performance of the AdWords API, and if you use the campaignStatuses
field of the CampaignSelector then you can can ensure that deleted
campaigns are not returned in your requests.

Best,
- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team

> Also find us on our blog and discussion group:http://adwordsapi.blogspot.comhttp://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api