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More on Ask Advertiser API
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Sat Aug 04, 2007 6:05 am
As I mentioned in a previous post, the V3 of the API is now in SOAP rather the servlets-based version I was using couple of years ago. There are still no adgroups. Basically, what Ask people pitched as modern and cutting edge API is stripped-down version of what Yahoo API was doing 2 years ago: the difference is that Yahoo had "listings" (i.e. each keyword had a title, description and targetURL associated with it), and Ask can associate a separate ad with a number of keywords, so there's a sort of a many-to-many relationship between them. In addition, it is possible to buy same keyword with same ad with different match types by creating multiple associations. There's no deduping of campaigns by name or ads by title/description - unlike in Google or MSN APIs.
There is a sandbox environment and a sandbox UI. The data is copied from production, so you do get a chance to play with real-world data in the sandbox. But accounts are synced only once or twice a month, and it's scheduled, so if you messed up your account during testing it won't be reset until scheduled sync. Your only option is to create new campaigns within the account and play with them.
The API is slow, so in Version 3 they now offer methods to paginate long SOAP responses. Ask also suggests to use "reasonable" SOAP timeouts (1 hour is recommended) and retry API calls if they fail.
While I was experimenting my application I found a lot of bugs... both in my application AND Ask API: in 3 days I found out a bug in keyword insertion in URL (an error is sent where it shouldn't), and even in their WSDL (all elements appear to be declared mandatory while not all of them actually are). Ask admitted the bugs. Some API calls fail (connection drops) before the set timeout. Apparently their service crashes in an ungraceful way.
Something to work on...
Posted By: msenin 0 Comments (Post your comment) |
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Google AdWords API: getting KeywordVariations
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Mon Jul 23, 2007 9:35 pm
Google AdWords API V10 has methods for retrieving keyword suggestions: either from seed keywords, or from a website. Turned out the getKeywordVariations() for seed keywords may take minutes to return results. This is very unexpected because all other methods in this API usually return results in a few hundred milliseconds.
Yahoo has a similar API, but works rather fast.
I am looking into trying concurrent requests, but I am afraid I may flood Google's servers with too many.
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Ask API
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Wed Jul 11, 2007 11:55 pm
I am giving the Ask (Jeeves) advertising API a 2nd look. First time I looked at it was about a year and a half ago.
Back then the API was servlet-based: an API client would invoke an API method by accessing a URL with a bunch of parameters and get some XML as a response. They did not have ad groups back then and listings were in the same format as they were on the "old" Yahoo: a 1:1 between keywords and ads. The traffic quality was terrible. A large part of it appeared to be generated by the same few IP adresses, probably some one in China or Thailand just clicking on those ads: same IP adresses that never converted.
A year and a half later the structure of the account is about the same: Account->Campaigns->Ads->keywords. But the API is now SOAP. There's still no control through API over the distribution of the campaign. All API does is let you add/change keywords and ads and get reports that don't even include number of impressions, although it seems to be possible to get an approximate number via CTR and click counts.
Tomorrow we'll be talking to Ask people and try to investigate viability of managing our traffic purchasing with them through the API.
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MSN AdCenter URL insertion is broken
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Sun Jul 08, 2007 9:17 pm
Although MSN said the issue with {QueryString} URL insertion has been resolved, we are still seeing that it's not. Our workaround is to drop {QueryString} insertion from the URL.
The problem was first reported on June 20th and MSN said they fixed it on June 25th. Still broken.
The issue: when a user searches for something on MSN, the relevant ads would be displayed on the right. When user clicks on the ad, the link on the ad points to MSN re-director, rd01.msn.com for example, which logs the click so MSN can later bill the advertiser for it, and redirects the user to the URL associated with the ad in AdCenter using HTTP redirect code (CONTENT_MOVED_PERMANENTLY). But the redirected URL will be broken is {QueryString} insertion is used: the {QueryString} insertion is replaced with random characters. Since the server part of the redirect URL is still OK, the advertiser's server will be responsible for handling the URL. Note that IE and FireFox handle the problem differently: FireFox will try to fix the URL by converting those random characters into Unicode or try to escape those characters.
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MSN is dropping several websites from their SEM program.
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Sun Apr 01, 2007 11:21 pm
MSN has let us know on Friday that they are closing several large customer accounts for their SEM program known as AdCenter.
The official reason for excluding such accounts as Business.com and eBay from AdCenter is lack of content on the websites that buy traffic from MSN search and content networks.
We asked MSN, why are they cutting off such a big customers? Don't they want all that revenue? The answer was an unexpected one: "we are a software company and do not care about advertising revenue".
One one hand they are right: they are a sixty billion dollar business and loosing thirty million from large advertising clients is no big deal. They appear to care about user experience too: they don't want advertisers to buy traffic to pages that "lack content".
But the real reason, I think, is very pragmatic: competition with Google. All major SEM programs, Google, Yahoo and MSN (or GYM), have exclusive clauses in the contract with advertisers: if you want to buy their traffic, you must not display ads of their competitors.
While large advertisers that MSN decided to drop may lose significant amount of traffic (and, hence, revenue), I wonder if other Yahoo and Google will follow.
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