Historical status of zero impression keyword

[David Midgley]

Hi all

I'm trying to work out if I can use a combination of services to work out how long a zero impression keyword has been live. I understand you can record this information yourself by syncing with the account every day and checking the status of the keyword and its parent adgroup and campaign but what I'm looking for is a solution where you have only just got access to the account that day.

I've looked at the CustomerSyncService and seen the changedCriteria fields which look promising. The problem I can see is that I don't know what the status of the campaign or adgroup was at the time and what aspect of the criteria was changed. For example I can see a criteria has changed, but I don't know if the parent campaign or adgroup was live at the time. I can see there is a FIELDS_CHANGED flag on campaign and adgroup, but I can't seem to tell which fields have changed on these campaigns and adgroups.

Hopefully I'm missing something, can anyone help or think of another approach?

Cheers

David

[Umesh Dengale]

Hi David,

That's difficult to figure out since we don't expose change history. The best you could do is to check the stats for the keyword for all-time to figure out when it was added, then do the same to the parent adgroup and campaign to see when they started serving. Even under that case, you cannot distinguish between a keyword being paused (and thus getting zero impressions) and keyword being live(but still getting zero impressions).

Thanks,

Umesh, AdWords API Team.

[David Midgley]

Hi Umesh

Thanks for getting back to me!

Maybe if I told you the problem I'm trying to solve you could help find a solution?

I'd like to create an automated system to delete zero impressions keywords over a specified period of time with one important condition: the keyword must have been enabled during this period (ie not paused) - this means we need to know whether the parent campaign and adgroup (as well as the keyword) were live and that there were active ads during this time (ideally this could also be configurable).

I can see there is a problem that the AdWords API doesn't tell you the historical status (enabled/paused) of a campaign, adgroup or keyword.

There are a few workarounds I can think of which can address elements of the problem:

- As you mentioned, discover when the campaign/adgroup/keyword was added and assume they were enabled the entire time

- Ask the customer to mark new (or recently unpaused) campaigns/adgroups with a label ensuring the application does not delete anything within these campaign/adgroups

- Check the historical impressions of campaigns/adgroups and if the number is greater than zero for any keyword in the container, assume it was live on that day

We've seen numerous accounts where there are hundreds of thousands of keywords but only a few thousand keywords with impressions but frustratingly we can't know with complete certainty whether a keyword has been live so can't confidently delete keywords without monitoring an account and recording historical status for months.

Is this something Google would consider putting on the API? It's presumably good for Google as accounts with lots of zero impression keywords are a waste of processor cycles on the AdWords system?

It would be great to get your thoughts on this Umesh!

Cheers

David

[Nadine Sundquist (AdWords API Team)]

Hi David,

Umesh brought this to my attention to see if I knew of a possible solution. Unfortunately, I don't know of an easy way of doing this. When you're removing keywords, I would recommend that you be cautious to not delete keywords too soon. Here's a post on the AdWords forum that explains why.  

I've put in your thoughts as a feature request for the AdWords API. Thanks for providing your input! It's use cases like these that can be very helpful.

Best,

Nadine, AdWords API Team

[David Midgley]

Hi Nadine

Thanks for your reply, it would be great to have this capability on the API!

Don't worry, we'd only delete keywords with zero impressions after they have been live for some months and after checking the search volume for the last 12 months - this saves seasonal keywords for things like skiing or valentine's day from being deleted.

Thanks for putting this in as a feature request, much appreciated!

Cheers

David