Hi Nadine, We appreciate you taking the time to elaborate on the reasons behind this recent announcement. While you might have good reasons for this, the main issue here is the conflict between the messages you gave your customers. We feel these plans were not communicated clearly to allow us to plan accordingly.
We were told we will have a year after the sunset announcement of the Adwords API. We're aware you deprecated various fields in the Adwords API over time but none of those deprecations were anywhere as big as the recent announcement. Even when you deprecated the Placement_Performance_Report recently, there was an alternative in the Automatic_Placement_Report. However, the latest announcement deprecates even that one last option to get any automatic placements data at all from the Adwords API and hence has a much bigger impact. You mentioned some developers started migrating last year. We chose not to for few reasons including: 1) missing features we needed, 2) new API versions constantly being released (and sometimes with big changes) which would have required more code maintenance 3) most importantly, again, because we thought we have one year after the final announcement and hence had no reason to migrate sooner. Had we known earlier this will happen, our plans would have been very different. Can you please at least consider extending the 12th July deprecation by a month or two? We're sure it'll be highly appreciated by everyone who is now starting the migration process. Oliver On Thursday, June 17, 2021 at 7:34:39 PM UTC+1 adsapi wrote: > Hello Oliver, > > Nadine here from the webinar. The webinar does not provide not a lot of > time to give an in-depth answer to your question as we need to cover a lot > of questions, so I would be happy to do so now. I'll cover a bit about the > timeline, the history of what's happened so far, and a little more on why > changes happen. As a fellow engineer, I realize that it's frustrating when > you have to make changes to your code, especially when it has been working > for a long time, but I feel understanding the 'why' can help in your > planning. We do not make these changes unless there are valid business and > technical reasons. > > <essayAlert>I really want to cover everything to make it clear on the > 'why', so I realize this is a bit verbose.</essayAlert> > > *History and timeline* > > The AdWords API has gotten old enough that it could be a teenager by now. > In order to provide opportunity for greater innovation, we had to upgrade > the API technology and the underlying infrastructure, which historically > we've done about every 10 years. Yes, there was an API before the AdWords > API that existed for approximately 10 years. This journey started when we > launched Google Ads API v0 > <https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2018/04/join-beta-for-new-adwords-api.html> > > in May 2018. We stopped adding new features to the AdWords API in September > 2018, which was about the time that the legacy AdWords UI was replaced by > the new Google Ads UI that you see today. As a result, depreciations have > been occurring regularly to the AdWords API for almost three years. You can > see the full history ( > https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/adwords_api) of fields > being deprecated, field values changed, or reports being deprecated. > > In September 2020, we announced GA > <https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2020/09/announcing-google-ads-api-is-out-of-beta.html> > > for the Google Ads API, which means it was ready for production use. This > was the point when many developers already started moving to the new API, > and some have already finished their migration. Most of the features were > already in the API, but we had a few left over that weren't as commonly > used. We were finishing those up when we announced the sunset > <https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2021/04/upgrade-to-google-ads-api-from-adwords.html> > > of the AdWords API in April 2021. > > *Why the changes* > > There are a few general reasons why I said that there are likely changes > that will happen to AdWords API reporting from now until April 2022 when > the AdWords API sunsets: > > - As mentioned above, there have been these changes to AdWords API > reporting since September 2018 since we do not do releases for that API ( > https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/search/label/adwords_api). We do > not have a full roadmap of the upcoming changes from now until April 2022. > As soon as we know, then we post to the blog. Just based on the history, > there will continue to be changes. > - The data you see in the Google Ads UI is a mirror of the Google Ads > API. The AdWords UI was a mirror of the legacy AdWords API that was shut > down around 2018. That's why we can't always match the AdWords API to the > Google Ads UI any more. They are not mirrors of each other. When we make a > change to the current UI, we can't make the same change to the AdWords > API, > only the Google Ads API. We then need to make a decision on how to best > keep the data in the AdWords API reasonably close to the Google Ads UI. If > we can't keep the data in line with the Google Ads UI, then we need to > deprecate the AdWords API item and usually recommend the Google Ads API > instead. > - As I mentioned in the webinar, sometimes we cannot add new Google > Ads features unless we deprecate something in the AdWords API. In the case > of the recent announcement, we have new features and new metrics we want > to > introduce to these reports. However, since the AdWords API does not have a > release where we can add those, then the reports would be returning > incorrect data in the future if we kept the reports in place. This means > that our only option is to remove the report because it cannot support > anything new and would end up returning incorrect data. Not returning data > is preferable to returning possibly incorrect data. > > We judiciously weigh deprecation of any fields or reports; it's something > that we argue back and forth until we come to a solution where it's the > only option that preserves integrity of information. The AdWords API has > been an amazing API for years and has served us well, but it's at a point > where we need to move to a completely new stack in order to support great > new features in the future. > > Best, > > Nadine Wang, Google Ads API Team > > > ref:_00D1U1174p._5004Q2IvzuS:ref > -- -- =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~ Also find us on our blog: https://googleadsdeveloper.blogspot.com/ =~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~=~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AdWords API and Google Ads API Forum" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/adwords-api?hl=en --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "AdWords API and Google Ads API Forum" group. 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