MostSpecificCriteriaId in Geo Performance report

[David Antunes]

Hi,

I get cases (about 1.6% of the rows) where the CountryCriteriaId on the geo performance report is defined (and sometimes the region, etc) but not the MostSpecificCriteriaId.

What is the meaning of this situation? If the CountryCriteriaId is defined shouldn't it be the MostSpecificCriteriaId (or the region/city if they are defined)?

Many thanks,

David

[David Antunes]

Hi,

More questions regarding this report:

 - If I understand correctly the geographical data is in a tree-like structure, where I can, for example, get all the impressions for the MostSpecificCriteriaId:

9056913, CBD & South Melbourne,Victoria,Australia, City Region

by summing all of the impressions of the locations "bellow" it, right?

The locations "bellow" CBD & South Melbourne are the ones which have it as the Parent ID, and so forth, recursively, right?

Now, in the adwords UI, for a certain date range, I see 9 impressions in the city region "CBD & South Melbourne". From the reports I count only 2.

I went to see which are the locations "bellow" CBD & South Melbourne in adwords: it has Neighborhood and University.

I have 7 impressions in the "Melbourne, Victoria, Australia" Neighborhood (none in universities).

So 2 from the City Region "CBD & South Melbourne", plus 7 on the "Melbourne, Victoria, Australia" Neighborhood "bellow" it = 9; all ok in adwords.

Now, from the reports I see only 2 - probably the ones from the city region. So I'm missing the impressions from the locations bellow "CBD & South Melbourne".

I went to see what is the Parent ID of the "Melbourne, Victoria, Australia" Neighborhood, it is:

20040, Victoria,Australia, State

Hmm... if the parent of the neighborhood is the State and not the city region, how can I ever find out that the "Melbourne, Victoria, Australia" Neighborhood is bellow the city region "CBD & South Melbourne", so that I can count the impressions correctly??

Many thanks,

David

[Michael Cloonan (AdWords API Team)]

Hello David,

You shouldn't use the ParentID to construct hierarchies, as that is only included for legacy support. Instead, use the Canonical Name for hierarchical representations. You can find more information on our Geographical Targeting page, which also includes a searchable dataset of criteria.

A given area smaller than and entirely contained within another area is not necessarily going to be a child of that area in the hierarchy; it seems you may have already found one of these exceptions.

Regards,

Mike, AdWords API Team