Please Improve Display Reporting

[Kurt]

I've been using Google's Ads API(s) for over a decade now and I'm disappointed to still see display reporting not properly integrated with the ad/keyword level reporting. In fact it seems to have gone backwards. Here is what I mean:

I can pull metrics (cost, clicks, impressions, etc) by ad group ID, ad ID, and keyword ID together in a single report based off the "ad_group_ad" resource, but this only includes non-display data. In the old API it included display data too tied to placeholder keyword IDs, which wasn't great, but was at least better than the new implementation since I could get all my data in a single report. 

With the new API I can get display data to show up in a report based off the ad_group_ad *if I exclude all keyword-related dimensions*. Including those dimensions/segments silently filters the data.

Likewise I can pull the display_keyword_view to get ad group ID / keyword ID level reporting, but that does not include the ad ID so its not as granular.

So there is no way I see to get display data by ad group ID, ad ID, and keyword ID through the API, even though your system seems to have that under the hood. 

And what's worse, if I want to get a ~complete view of my metrics at a more granular level, I need to pull the ad_group_ad report twice and combine the data now (basically faking the keyword placeholder you used to provide). Without this, one can easily pull misleading reports that don't throw any warnings or errors but give you different results based on the segments you include. For example I pull a campaign-level report for hourly summary data which captures all campaign types. But the more granular reports omit display and so their totals are wrong. So our reporting warehouse needs extra/unnecessary processing to work around this quirk.

From an API perspective, your query language looks like SQL and quacks like SQL, but databases don't typically add surprising filtering under the hood (like my ad_group_ad example above describes). It would be more consistent with standard UX/DX/warehousing if the display campaigns were still included in a ad group ID, ad ID, and keyword ID level ad_group_ad resource report, either with the actual display keyword IDs populated or just grouped to a NULL keyword value. The metrics should aggregate the same totals regardless of grouping, and only change when one applies additional *filtering*.

Thanks for hearing me out!

[Google Ads API Forum Advisor]

Hi Kurt,

Thanks for your feedback on this. I've included your post in an internal feature request highlighting your request for consolidated keyword reporting and the difference you pointed out between the two APIs. If any related features are implemented, it will be posted on the release notes.

Regards,
Matt
Google Ads API Team

Matt Google Ads API Team

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