Re: AdWords API Re: Adwords Editor beta - Richard Jones - com.googlegroups.adwords-api

11 messages in com.googlegroups.adwords-apiRe: AdWords API Re: Adwords Editor beta

From	Sent On	Attachments
Richard Jones	26 Jan 2006 03:03
Peer	26 Jan 2006 05:42
Peer	26 Jan 2006 06:00
Kunaal	26 Jan 2006 14:30
davidzhawk	26 Jan 2006 17:28
Peer	27 Jan 2006 00:28
davidzhawk	27 Jan 2006 07:50
Peer	27 Jan 2006 08:06
Jon Tara	27 Jan 2006 09:40
Richard Jones	28 Jan 2006 04:27
Peer	30 Jan 2006 01:20

Subject:	Re: AdWords API Re: Adwords Editor beta
From:	Richard Jones (r....@annexia.org)
Date:	01/28/2006 04:27:00 AM
List:	com.googlegroups.adwords-api

On Fri, Jan 27, 2006 at 03:50:32PM -0000, davidzhawk wrote:

I don't think the AdWords Editor is intended to replace the API for big companies. You would have to create a pretty nifty hack to emulate API functionality with this desktop tool. Put it this way, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being the Yahoo Search Marketing UI and 10 being API integration with Google, this is probably a 5 - at least currently. As I noted on my blog, the system is super-slow and anything over a few thousand changes at once causes it to freeze up.

I'm looking forwards to trying out this adwords editor.

We had an internal project where we wrote a similar editor using Gtk+ for the front-end and the API at the back-end. We got to the stage where you could view all your campaigns/adgroups in a collapsible tree, and edit creatives and keywords, and make new campaigns and so on. It was a bit slow because it did operations synchronously through the API, but with a bit of care it wouldn't have been hard to change it so it would "queue up" changes and run them in the background.

The problem with all this, and the reason why we abandoned this project, was that actually it didn't really help very much. Most of what is useful about the API is that you can, for example, create hundreds of adverts from a script with small variations in message and upload them in one go. Or as another example, you can algorithmically change bids across thousands of keywords based on your own complicated formulae involving position, cost, conversion rate, and whatever.

Having a desktop application which just reimplements the ordinary Adwords UI doesn't help you very much. It's perhaps a bit faster than using the Adwords UI. But without all the algorithmic stuff, the real benefits of the API are not realised.

So that's basically why I'm interested in seeing Google's Adwords editor. I want to know if it's just a slightly quicker version of the Adwords UI (from David's message, it sounds like it might be a slightly _slower_ version of the UI :-), or if it has great scripting capabilities letting you exploit the full power of the API.

Rich.