Google API Update Causes Problems, Gets Rolled Back
- By: AussieWebmaster [privmsg - website] On 22nd Sep 2005
Okay I discovered this on Tuesday and may have been one of the many screaming about the errors that were happening with my Google accounts.
We had had our Google ad rep team do some bulk uploads on Tuesday morning. The system spat out some gook pulling adgroup numbers and inserting them into the tracking code so that by the time it was set all pages were going to error pages... not to the nice 404s that we have redirected but to ISS problem pages that in essence wasted the day's spend (we did get a prompt refund the next day).
We got a refund and thought no less of it... figured it was some problem the ad rep team had with their terminal or even a bad file transfer - so figured it was not worthy of a blog... can't bitch about every little thing and the fast refund would have been the angle.
But then I saw some problems with the Japanese account and heard another person saying there was a problem.... and then the Google Blog announced a roll back.
I have to say Google uses the right approach. Announce problems quickly and address them. Yahoo! I hope your recent changes to this approach continue and we do not roll back to the 'dark ages' of Overture.
Destination URLs Lost
We use a bid management service to manage our bids at AdWords. They, in turn, use the AdWords API. With the rollout of their update to the API, we noticed that anytime we changed the bid on a keyword, the destination URL for that keyword was being changed to the default URL of that Ad Group.
This has big implications for us in terms of loss of conversion data. Each of our keywords has a different destination URL so that we can track conversions at a keyword level and that data helps us decide our bids.
The worst thing is that there is no way (that I've found so far) to determine which keywords were affected by this. Even though the update was rolled back, in our case, the keywords whose destination URLs were changed are still the same. Those changes were not rolled back.
there have been some recent changes
The keyword service has now been depricated in Google, and replaced it with a new service that handles CPM and site targeting features.
We have noticed the whole API access slow down every now and again this past week also. It may have been these that are causing these problems - I think the new stuff was added on the 20th of Sep
adwords advisor
posted this just now: