Richard's Diary

Sunday, December 7, 2008

First Use of Production Adwords API I wanted to compare the API to the Web GUI so I made a call to both and compared the results. The only difference seemed to be the range of the competition scale and the GUI allowed you to make single negative keyword calls.

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordTool
use synonyms and include adult content
computer yielded results which i downloaded the csv of and stored in computer-broad-synonyms-adult-keywords.csv and computer-broad-adult-keywords.csv
[computer] yielded results which i downloaded the csv of and stored in computer-exact-synonyms-adult-keywords.csv and computer-exact-adult-keywords.csv
When i did the API call a.obtain("computer","true","Broad")
I got back the broad results, the SOAP request and responses were saved in workspace and I consumed 20 api units
the synonyms came back in section called additionalToConsider; expansions came back in morespecific section. both were contained in a single XML response file
total combined morespecific and additionaltoconsider words returned was 200 from both the GUI and API (confirm)

You can't trust the language designation in the XML because 40 of the 200 words were non-english according to the language element but every one of them was based on csv inspection (confirm). Maybe it's more accurate if you do non computer words?

This begs the question why they even come back since i specify a language and country??
-more SOAP_6750_getKeywordVariations_response.xml | grep -ic <language>
-more SOAP_6750_getKeywordVariations_response.xml | grep -ic <language>en

Advertisercompetition comes back on a scale of 1 to 5 (5 being the highest); this maps to the web gui of 0 to 1 (1 being the highest)

I confirmed in the GUI that turning synonyms on or off gives you a different set of words (neither a pure superset or subset). In fact, turning synonyms off resulted in less than 200 words total returned (confirm)

TODO

need to confirm that using exact works in API