Several rumours that AdWords bulksheet uploads are to disappear are confirmed in an email to us yesterday from Google Support. We’re to use the AdWords Editor instead. Curiously Google didn’t recommend using the AdWords API.
Also missing was any announcement about a non-Windows version of the AdWords Editor. We use Windows purely for QA. Everyone here has a Mac or Linux box. Windows systems exist to check how MSIE6 and MSIE7 mangle standards compliant CSS.
We’ve mostly replaced our usage of bulksheet uploads with the API. However, bulksheets offer another function that Google probably hasn’t understood. If a client wants to mess with their account (e.g. it is quicker for them to indicate a stock outage by manually pausing a campaign or AdGroup than by phoning us and having us pause it) then they make changes that can’t be easily picked up in Google AdWords reports. “Invisible” changes, changes that don’t result in impressions, have to be picked by something that looks at the whole account. A bulksheet download does that, even though “Bulksheet download” isn’t an API operation, and must be done by hand. This download saves a crawl of the entire data structure to synchronise with manual changes. A crawl of a large account can cost a few dollars. So a bulksheet download represents a cost saving over the API of hundreds of dollars a year per account. Even for a small advertiser, using bulksheets to synchronise might represent a budget savings of about 5%. Money that could be usefully spent on adverts rather than overcoming a design defect in the API (or, less charitably, a further way to tax API usage).
Google isn’t really good on side effects, yet. Sigh.
p.s. this article written in a hurry - links will be added in an update.
