Google released Google Ads API version 8.0

Google has released version 8.0 of the Google Ads API, announcing the key highlights of what is new in version 8.0. The previous version, version 7.0 was released about six-weeks ago on April 28th.

What is new. Google added dozens of features and released numerous changes in version 8.0, the exhaustive list is located in the release notes. But here are the highlighted changes from Google:

• Added cross-account bidding strategies, which allow for attaching manager-owned bidding strategies to client accounts. Also included is a new resource, AccessibleBiddingStrategy, which provides a read-only view of all bidding strategies accessible to the current customer (including portfolio strategies owned by the customer and cross-account bidding strategies shared with the customer).
• You can now retrieve labels managed by the manager account using CustomerClient.applied_labels.
• CallOnlyAdInfo is replaced with CallAdInfo to support more capabilities of this ad type. This includes the ability to append text after the URL displayed in the Ad using fields CallAdInfo.path1 and CallAdInfo.path2.
• ClickConversion now supports cart_data for uploading conversions with the additional information on the items sold.
• Several fields added to TransactionAttribute and UserAttribute allow you to associate more information about a sold item and a user’s purchase record, when uploading user data using UserDataService or OfflineUserDataJobService.
• Added support for Smart campaigns, which allows for creating, monitoring and managing smart campaign types. Smart campaigns are highly automated, efficient campaigns designed to maximize returns with minimal ongoing management. For more details, visit our development guide.

What is the Google Ads API. The Google Ads API lets you programmatically interface with your Google Ads accounts so that you can automatically bring in reporting to your own stack, and/or build in procedures to automate your ad creation, change your bids or bidding strategies and more.

The API enables developers to interact directly with the Google Ads platform. Some features include…

• Automated account management
• Custom reporting
• Ad management based on inventory
• Manage Smart Bidding strategies

Migration notes. When you upgrade, sometimes not everything is backwards compatible. Google said “periodically, you will upgrade from an older major version of Google Ads API to a newer major version. It could be because a version is sunsetting, or it could be because you want to use a new feature.” Google recommends that you upgrade to the newest version when going through the migration process, and not upgrade to an older version. Here are things to know when migrating from version 7.0 to 8.0:

Video. Here is a video from Google highlighting the larger changes with this release.

Why we care. If you, your customers or toolset providers are using the Google Ads API, you can now explore more features within the API to get more done and in a more efficient way. Check out the full release notes to see what additional features you can utilize or nudge your tool provider to use to make your daily work-life as a search marketer easier.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.