Updating the Adwords Extension for Excel to v201109
On the 29th February, 2011 Google will be “sunsetting” Adwords API versions v13, v200909, v201003, v201008 and v201101. This will affect our old Google Adwords API extension (documentation here), so, Tom’s had his sleeves rolled up over the weekend and built us a shiny new version.
From now, our Adwords API extension supports V201109 and, if you’re still using the old plugin by then, you’ll get errors from the 29th February. Eek!
How to replace the old Adwords API extension
Replacing the currently installed version is remarkably easy. Here’s how, in 6 simple steps:
1) Download and save the ZIP file (found in this post) on your desktop. Open the ZIP and decompress the “distribution” folder like this:
2) Go ahead and open the setup.xlsx file. You’ll need to click the “Enable Content” button, just here:
3) See those uninstall buttons? Click either – the first one if you intend to keep the same API credentials, the second if you want to start from scratch. After completing this step, close down Excel and re-open the setup.xlsx file.
4) Reopen the setup.xlsx file, and click “Add API Credentials” (if you’d deleted them previously) and follow the instructions in the dialogue:
5) Click “Install Add-in” – if you’re successful, you’ll see this dialogue:
Congratulations, you’re done!
The update itself offers only a little step change in functionality for now, in that it now offers support for the country codes found in the API documentation here. Instead of specifying say, “GB” in your queries, you can specify “2826″ if you wish to. All of the original codes have been hardcoded, so you can continue with your standard alphabetical country codes if you wish to.
What we were hoping for (and to be honest we’re scratching our heads over this) is there’s a gorgeous list of city codes. Unfortunately (though the adwords API accepts the digits), we’re getting “0″ back as search volumes when we specify a city. The fact that it’s a 0 (as opposed to an error response) tells me the API is returning these values, as opposed to there being a problem elsewhere. That’s a massive shame, as the targeting service would be enormously powerful if it supported this level of granularity. Needless to say, I’ll update you should we learn more on the topic in the near future.
Reach
While updating the core code, Tom built a new helper function: =SEOGadget_locationDetails(“LOCATION”)
This helper is designed to fetch the correct geo-location code for an area name. For example, =SEOGadget_locationDetails(“PARIS”) would yield the following response:
Note the “reach” value, which is defined as: Approximate user population that will be targeted, rounded to the nearest 100. * This field can be selected using the value “Reach”. This field is read only and should not be set. If this field is sent to the API, it will be ignored. How Google calculate the approximate user population is anyone’s guess, my guess would be a normalised count of searches from unique users in a 30 day period.
I’ll publish more on this targeting issue as I get more information. If you’re reading this, and you have experience with the support (or lack of) in the Adwords API targeting service for city codes, give me a shout!
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