Maxim's blog
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...
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