Google AdWords API – Part 6
With this article I will give you an important addition to my article series about Google AdWords API. There I showed you how to use the API to get many important values that are displayed at the Google AdWords web interface. With this data it is easy to build an own tool to display certain parts of those data like campaigns, adgroups, keywords and so on.
Problem
There is a big problem that is not obvious at first. If you store data for example each day you will get a nice database after some days, but you may consider that there are errors compared to the AdWords online tool. Why? The answer is simple, but very bad for such a situation. Google uses fraud detection and with this algorithms, there is a chance, that data will change.
Wrong clicks and cost
Click Fraud is an algorithm from Google to detect fraud and to change data to correct this fraud error. I searched many hours to find an error in my import scripts, but after some research it was clear, that it is nearly impossible to get exact data. All I know till now is, that you can find this error if you compare your imported data with the data from Google AdWords online tool. You may see, that the sum of clicks and costs are sometimes different. Other values that do not depend on clicks (for example impressions) are exact. This is caused by fraud detection.
Click fraud correction
The question now is: what is click fraud detection? Click fraud is a manipulation of Click Ads. Think of this example: someone starts a new campaign for a product and displays click ads with Google with a budget for 10000 clicks. Another firm, a competitor, does not want that this ads are displayed, so it starts to click these ads. So if the ads are limited to 10000, after some time, this ads are not more visible. This is not legal, so Google checks with algorithms if there is something wrong and could be a fraud. If so, this clicks are not valid and be not counted. This happens offline, so it is possible, that a month old data can be changed.
Solution
I have not found a good solution yet. It is not possible to get this deleted clicks form the API. The only solution is to do update imports for the last month each day.
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