Explicit AdWords limits

[henry...@ly.st]

Hi all!

The company that I work for manage several very large accounts that we continue to expand.

We have it the ad group targeting items per account limit (5,000,000) through our keyword expansion efforts and would like to preemptively predict this next time.

I want to know in detail what entities contribute to which limits. We initially assumed it might be any non removed adgroup criteria but when querying the adgroup criterion service we'd sometimes get total number of entries greater than the limits.

We also tried just keywords, placements and audience lists (https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/6372658?hl=en-GB) and this also returned totals greater than the limit.

It also doesn't state if negative variants of entities contribute to something like the ad group targeting items limit.

Do active ads/keywords in deleted adgroups/campaigns contribute to this limit too?

I have been messing around with the AdGroupCriterionService (we have a mainly python codebase) and found that we can get totals quickly using by setting start index and number of results to 0, giving us access to totalNumEntries.

Anyone found a better way of doing this other than having a snapshot of the account structure locally?

Lots of questions in the above I know but I haven't had any success trying to retrieve this info from the support team so have resorted to posting here :-)

[Shwetha Vastrad (AdWords API Team)]

Hi, 

The targeting options listed here which are available at the AdGroup level count toward the limit of 5 million ad group targeting items per account. Both positive and negative criterion contribute to this limit. Since status at the campaign level impacts the status of the ad groups, ads, and keywords within it, the criterion in removed adgroups/campaigns will have an effective removed status. You need to use CampaignService and AdGroupService to retrieve the Ids of removed Campaigns and AdGroups and include these Ids in a predicate to exclude criteria from these campaigns or ad groups when you get the totalNumEntries to count the number of targeting items.

Regards,

Shwetha, AdWords API Team.

[henry...@ly.st]

Hi Shwetha,

This is perfect, that list is just what I was looking for!