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XERXES DOTIWALLA: Hi, I'm Xerxes a developer advocate here
at Google, back again, in our Adwords API series.
In this episode we'll examine how
you can use the API to make updates
to your AdWords accounts.
We'll look at a few popular use cases,
and see how they serve as a basis for almost
any kind of automation.
One of the most common use cases of the API
is to pause and resume ad groups.
For example you could pause an Ad
when the inventory for that item is
depleted, resulting in better use of your advertising budget.
This highlights the power of integrating your own systems
with the AdWords API.
So how would you actually pause and resume an ad group?
Remember from the last video?
The code samples are your friends.
You should have them downloaded by now.
But if you don't, you can grab them from here.
Again we'll be using Java and Eclipse,
but the concepts are the same for all the client
library languages.
Fire up Eclipse and open updateadgroup.java.
We see our typical boilerplate in main.
This time you'll notice that main has a placeholder string
for the ID of the ad group.
Where would we get that ID ?
Well you could get a programmatically
through the Get Method of the ad group service interface.
One unofficial trick that I use for testing
is to grab the ID from the URL of the AdWords web interface
when viewing an ad group.
As usual the Run Example method as the interesting code.
First it gets a reference to the ad group service interface,
because it'll be making an update to an ad group.
To update other entities you would use
of their corresponding service.
A full list of available services can be found here.
Then it creates a new ad group object.
It sets the ID of the new object to the ID of the ad group
that it wants to update.
Then it sets the status to paused.
After that, it creates an ad group operation
using our newly created ad group object as the operand
and set as the operator.
Lastly, it calls the mutate method of the ad group service
interface passing in the ad group Operation Object.
So go ahead and replace the placeholder with an ad group ID
from your test client account, and try running the code.
After it runs log into the test account and the web interface
and confirm the status has been changed.
This same pattern is used for most updates through the API.
So let's review it here.
Create a new object.
Set it's ID to be the ID of the entity you want to modify.
Set the new value of the property on that new object.
Create an Operation Object with set
as the operator and this new entity object as the operand.
And lastly, pass the Operation Object
into the mutate method of the appropriate service.
This is an update, so we use the set operator.
Adds or removals would use the Add or Remove operators.
If this seems confusing, take a look
at other pieces of sample code in this project.
You'll quickly see the pattern.
So now we know this pattern, we can easily
make other updates as well.
Though many require more complex objects than the ad group
status enum we used here.
For example another popular use case
is to modify the bid for an ad group programmatically.
The canonical example is raising the bid
for an umbrella add when it's raining.
Your app could consume a weather web service
and then use the average API to increase
the bid for this ad group.
You could modify this same update ad group sample code
to make that kind of update.
Instead of setting the ad group status,
you would set the bidding strategy.
Click this link for details on how to configure a bidding
strategy.
Another use case is creating new campaigns.
In Eclipse take a look at adcampaigns.java.
It's quite a bit of code, but it follows
the pattern we just discussed.
In this case, once the object hierarchy is created,
we use the add operator to add a new budget via the budget
service and new campaigns via the campaign service.
We don't need to set the ID's here
because these are new entities and don't have ID's yet.
So those are just a few examples of updates using the API.
I said it before, and I'll say it again,
I highly recommend you go through the code samples
as they really are the best way to learn this API.
We have accomplished a lot in these last five videos.
You made your first API call, retrieved reports,
and got a taste of automation.
Of course, there's additional API functionality to learn.
These guides will definitely help you along the way.
Now you're ready to start building your own real AdWords
API application.
And once it's up and running, you'll
see increased operating efficiency
through automation and greater visibility
through custom report.
Thanks so much for being with us through these initial steps.
And keep an eye out for more AdWords API
videos on the Google Developers channel.
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