How to remove placements from a campaign?

[Anna Nguyen]

Hello,

I've been wrestling with this for a couple of weeks now and I can really use some clues.

I am using API version v201406.  I need to be able to:

1. identify placements (e.g. "about.com") in a running campaign that has more than N impressions and,

2. CPC of more than $X and then exclude those placements from the campaign.

For 1., I am using ReportService to get the campaign's PLACEMENT_PERFORMANCE_REPORT, which lists its placements along with impressions, CPC etc. from which I can select the  placements to be excluded.  (The criterionID returned is always "--".)

To remove those placements from the campaigns, I think I need to use MutateJobService.mutate, which takes a list of CampaignCriterionOperations, each with an Operator ("ADD", "REMOVE", or "SET") and a CampaignCriterion.  The CampaignCriterion has a Placement, which has an ID and an URL, and this is my problem.  I need to get the placement's criterion ID.  I tried using CampaignCriterionService.get on the campaign, passing it (in Ruby):

    selector = {

      :fields => ['CampaignId', 'Id', 'CriteriaType', 'PlacementUrl', ],

      :predicates => [

        { 

          :field => 'CampaignId',

          :operator => 'EQUALS',

          :values => [ campaign_id ]

        },

        {

          :field => 'CriteriaType',

          :operator => 'IN',

          :values => [ 'PLACEMENT' ]

        },

      ],

      :paging => {

        :start_index => 0,

        :number_results => AdwordsCommon::PAGE_SIZE

      }

    }

BUT.  CampaignCriterionService.get returns a set of placement URLs that is 100% disjoint with the placement URLs that I got from the performance report:  the two sets of URLs have nothing in common!  What am I doing wrong an what do I actually need to do?  Thanks!

[Josh Radcliff (AdWords API Team)]

Hi,

Regarding adding the placements, you do not need to specify an id when performing the ADD operation - AdWords will assign the ID as part of the operation. The id is only required when performing a SET or a REMOVE. In other words, to exclude a placement at the Campaign level, you'd create a NegativeCampaignCriterion with:

• campaignId = your campaign ID
• criterion = Placement with:
• url = the URL to exclude

Note that you can also exclude placements at the AdGroup level -- just ADD a NegativeAdGroupCriterion instead of a NegativeCampaignCriterion.

Cheers,

Josh, AdWords API Team

[Anna Nguyen]

That worked!  Thanks!

--

Anna