Reporting FAQ

What should my report scope be?

For most reports, we recommend that you set Reports.reportScope to a specific engine account or advertiser. For very large reports—such as keyword reports, conversion reports, or finely-segmented reports—we recommend limiting the scope to a specific engine account. The API may return errors for reports larger than 10 million rows.

How do I find IDs for agencies and advertisers?

If you don't already have the IDs for the agencies and advertisers you have permission to view, request an advertiser report with the agencyId and advertiserId columns, but don't specify the reportScope. DoubleClick Search will return a list of all agency and advertiser IDs that your Google Account has permission to view.

Here's an example request:

POST  https://www.googleapis.com/doubleclicksearch/v2/reports/generate
Authorization: Bearer your OAuth 2.0 access token
Content-type: application/json
{
  "reportType": "advertiser",
  "columns": [
    { "columnName": "agency" },
    { "columnName": "agencyId" },
    { "columnName": "advertiser" },
    { "columnName": "advertiserId" }
  ],
  "statisticsCurrency": "usd"
}

Use the DoubleClick Search utility script to send this request

To send a raw JSON POST request, you can use the dsApi.py script as follows:

Copy the JSON object in the box below (everything between and including the two curly brackets) into a new text file named request.txt.
Change the agency ID that's in the JSON code to your own agency ID.
Remove any comments, such as // The date column segments the report by individual days.
Assemble your OAuth 2.0 credentials into a single, comma-delimited string as follows:
client-ID,client-secret,refresh-token
(This is the same string that dsApi.py outputs when you run dsApi.py --login as described in Set Up Authorization.)
Invoke dsApi.py as follows:
dsApi.py --cred CREDENTIALS --server API-method --post < request.txt
In the command above, substitute the string you assembled in the previous step for CREDENTIALS.
Substitute the name of the POST method in the box below for API-method.
For example:
dsApi.py --cred 123456789123.apps.googleusercontent.com,ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQR_abcdef,1/HIJklM01OPQR23NOP456rst890uvw --server https://www.googleapis.com/doubleclicksearch/v2/reports/generate --post < request.txt

How fresh is the reporting data?

Some metrics are fresher than others. For details, see how fresh is the reporting data in DS?

To make sure your reports contain all available metrics, we recommend waiting about 4 hours after midnight (engine account time zone) before requesting reports of yesterday's metrics; for the conversion report, we recommend waiting for 12 hours after midnight (DFA advertiser time zone). If you use the API to upload conversion data, see insert.operation for details about the availability of uploaded data.

Even after several days, a metric can still change due to engine spam filters or offline conversions being uploaded via the API. To incrementally download these changes, request reports on the data that has changed since your last download. If you download incremental changes, we recommend that you request a full report every once in awhile. For example, you might download incremental changes every few days and then request a full report once a month.

When will attribute changes appear in reports?

It takes about a minute for attribute changes that someone makes in DoubleClick Search (DS) to appear in reports that you download via the API. Changes made directly on the external engine (not through DS) will need to be imported into DS first using inbound sync.

We recommend returning only the data that has changed to determine which entities have attribute changes.

What are unattributed ads?

Sometimes DS cannot attribute metrics to a specific ad. For example, an ad with an unsupported format or a clickserver URL with an error can prevent DS from attributing metrics to an ad. For each ad group, DS reports any unattributed metrics as belonging to an "unattributed ad." To request these metrics in a report, set includeRemovedEntities to true. To make it easy to see which ads are unattributed, include the isUnattributedAd column in the request.

Why do raw conversions not sum up to aggregated metric X?

In the rare event that aggregated metrics disagree with raw events in DS, trust the aggregated metric. When computing metric aggregates, DS attempts to sanitize data sources by removing conversions that it suspects are duplicates.

What if my question isn't answered here?

If there's a problem that you can't solve after reading the resources on this site, send a message to ds-support@google.com with the following information:

DoubleClick Search Agency ID and Advertiser ID you are trying to access
Project Number from Google Developers Console
The username of the Google Account that you’re using to access the API.
This is the account that has been given permission to access DoubleClick Search, which is the same account you use to set up authorization.
Code snippet of your request
JSON response
If the response is an error, be sure to include the error message, not just the numeric error code.

This email list is monitored by Google employees during regular business hours in the United States. For coverage after hours, contact DoubleClick support.

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