Can ads disappear after they have been removed?

[Zweitze]

Hi all,

When an ad is removed, according to the documentation its status is changed to "removed" and it becomes read-only, so it will never be enabled again. But, you can still request it, and you will get all its properties.

However, I find more and more examples of ads that stop existing. I mean, they can no longer be requested. The ad seems to have disappeared. This sounds incredible but starting this year I started to witness "disappeared" ads. And I never witnessed this behaviour in the previous ten years or so.
I have some sample ids (pairs of adgroupid+adid):

51500212996    266833925427
51500212996    266833925430
51500213716    266833925481
51500213716    266833925484
51500214436    266833925655
51500214436    266833925658
51500215396    266833925727
51500215396    266833925730

So, these ads did appear in ad reports earlier this year, but they no longer appear. We learned of its existance with reporting in AdWords API, the report type was AD_PERFORMANCE_REPORT. But if you request the same report now, they no longer exist.

Note: I do know of similar behavior with keywords: they may actually disappear, this happens when a keyword was deleted, and never had any impression. But that was only keywords.

Can this policy have been extended to ads as well? Is it also introduced in other AdWords API objects, like managed placements, or ad extensions, or groups? Under what conditions do ads disappear? Maybe a link to a blog article is helpful.

If ads can actually disappear as I noticed, is it possible that its ID will be reused within the same group? In other words, can later a different ad (with different headlines, description, final URLs etc.etc.) appear using the same adid?

Note: I realize this is actually a product question, but it's hard to explain the significance of a disappearing ad vs. an existing ad with status "removed", and I think the question on adid reuse is a question which is better answered by the API team.


Thanks in advance!

[Nadine Sundquist (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Zweitze,

As always, it's nice to hear from you! I hope you are doing well. You've given me the present of yet another strange puzzle. I wasn't aware that ads could just disappear. Like you, I'm only aware of other entities that could be removed permanently, but I didn't think ads were one of them. Thanks for providing all that information. I'll look into it, and I'll get back to you.

Best,

Nadine, AdWords API Team

[Zweitze]

Hey Nadine,

Any updates?

I think I have an explanation - it's due to the possibility that now most ad properties can be changed (until a few months ago only status could be changed - for other changes you had to set the status to deleted and created a new ad with the desired properties).

Our software always assumed this would not change, at least not in the API version it was operating on.

But exactly that seems to happen: when you request (using an older API version) an ad after it was changed, you will get an ad with the same ad id and its new properties. I must say, I did not expect such behavior change.

Can you confirm this is the case? (All software using older API versions should now be aware that most properties are no longer immutable). Was this announced anywhere?

Thanks in advance!

[Anash P. Oommen (AdWords API Team)]

Hi Zweitze,

The "disappeared ads" seems to be an issue at our end. The case you mentioned is another possibility, but doesn't seem to be the root cause of this issue as far as I can tell. I've pinged the team for updates, and will share them as I hear back.

Cheers

Anash P. Oommen,

AdWords API Advisor.