Features

Note: This library is a minimal, low-level implementation for calling the Google Ads API with gRPC Protocol Buffers. For a more feature-complete and easier-to-use library, try our Javascript client library.

• Fully matches the lastest Google Ads API documentation
• Faster than using JSON (uses gRPC and Protocol Buffers)
• Includes Typescript definitions

Installation

$ yarn add google-ads-node

Example

import {
  GoogleAdsClient,
  SearchGoogleAdsRequest,
  SearchGoogleAdsResponse,
  Campaign,
  Metrics
} from "google-ads-node"

// 1. Create a new client with valid authentication
const client = new GoogleAdsClient({
  access_token: "<ACCESS_TOKEN>",
  developer_token: "<DEVELOPER_TOKEN>",
  login_customer_id: "<LOGIN_CUSTOMER_ID>",
});
const customerId = "1234567890";

async function example() {
  // 2. Load a Google Ads service
  const service = client.getService("GoogleAdsService");

  // 3. Create a request
  const request = new SearchGoogleAdsRequest();
  request.setQuery(`
    SELECT
      campaign.id,
      campaign.name,
      campaign.status,
      segments.device,
      metrics.impressions,
      metrics.clicks,
      metrics.ctr,
      metrics.average_cpc,
      metrics.cost_micros
    FROM campaign
  `);
  request.setCustomerId(customerId);
  request.setPageSize(12);

  // 4. Get the results
  const result: SearchGoogleAdsResponse = await service.search(request)
    .catch((err: Error) => {
      console.log("--- Error in search ---");
      console.log(err);
    });

  // 5. Inspect the data!
  for (const row of result.getResultsList()) {
    const campaign: Campaign = row.getCampaign() as Campaign;
    const metrics: Metrics = row.getMetrics() as Metrics;

    if ((metrics.getClicks() as any) > 0) {
      console.log(`Campaign "${campaign.getName()}" has ${metrics.getClicks()} clicks.`);
    } else {
      console.log(`Campaign "${campaign.getName()}" has no clicks.`);
    }
  }
}

example();

Usage

Client Options

| Field | Type | Required | Notes | | --------------------- | ----------------- | -------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | developer_token | string | ✅ | Google Ads developer token. Obtained from API Center. | | access_token | string | ➖ | Obtained after completing Google Ads Auth Flow. Only required if using No Internal Authentication. | | client_id | string | ➖ | Obtained from Google Developer console. Required if using library Token Generation & Refresh Handling. | | client_secret | string | ➖ | Same as above. Obtained from Google Developer console. | | refresh_token | string | ➖ | Same as above. Obtained from OAuth2 flow. | | accessTokenGetter() | Promise<string> | ❌ | Function to retrieve access token per request. See Access Token Getter. | | parseResults | boolean | ❌ | Formats Protobuf responses as objects. See Results. | | preventMutations | boolean | ❌ | Safe mode to prevent accidental mutations. See Safe Mode. | | logging | object | ❌ | See Logging. | | login_customer_id | string | ❌ | See login_customer_id. | | linked_customer_id | string | ❌ | See linked_customer_id. |

Authentication

1. No internal authentication

A valid Google Ads access_token must be provided. This usage depends on the access_token being refreshed and generated outside of the client. If the token isn't valid, an UNAUTHENTICATED error will be thrown. It's recommended to follow the instructions here for generating tokens.

const client = new GoogleAdsClient({
  developer_token: "<DEVELOPER_TOKEN>",
  access_token: "<ACCESS_TOKEN>",
});

2. Token generation and refresh handling

This approach, which is recommended, internally handles access token generation and refreshing. A valid client_id, client_secret and refresh_token must be provided.

const client = new GoogleAdsClient({
  client_id: "<CLIENT_ID>",
  client_secret: "<CLIENT_SECRET>",
  refresh_token: "<REFRESH_TOKEN>",
  developer_token: "<DEVELOPER_TOKEN>",
});

3. Access token getter

You can also additionaly pass in an async access token getter method to the client instance. This will be called on every request. The main purpose is to allow you to handle authentication yourself, and cache tokens/use cached tokens from elsewhere. The method expects a return type of Promise<string> e.g. Promise.resolve("<access-token>"). An example of how you might use the accessTokenGetter option is provided below:

const client = new GoogleAdsClient({
  client_id: "<CLIENT_ID>",
  client_secret: "<CLIENT_SECRET>",
  refresh_token: "<REFRESH_TOKEN>",
  developer_token: "<DEVELOPER_TOKEN>",
  // You can optionally use the parameters
  async accessTokenGetter(clientId?: string, clientSecret?: string, refreshToken?: string) {
    await logger.someLoggingFunction();

    if (cache.checkTokenExists()) {
      return cache.getCachedToken();
    }

    const accessToken = await auth.someCallToGetAccessToken();
    return accessToken;
  },
});

The returned token string will be used in the gRPC metadata per request, as the Authorization header. You don't need to include the Bearer: part of the token, this is appended automatically.

4. Load GoogleAdsClient options from configuration file

For convenience, you can store the required settings in a configuration file. Copy the sample googleads.config.js file (the library also accepts a .googleadsrc file in JSON or YAML format) to your project root or home directory, and modify it to include the client ID, client secret, and refresh token.

The client will automatically read it from the configuration file if instantiated with no arguments:

const client = new GoogleAdsClient();

Alternatively, if you prefer to keep the file elsewhere, you can instantiate the client by passing the path to where you keep this file:

const client = new GoogleAdsClient("path/to/googleads.config.js");

Services

To load a Google Ads service, simply use the getService method. It supports a single string, being the name of the service. For a full list of avaiable services, check out the Google Ads service reference.

const service = client.getService("AdGroupAdService");

From here, you can then use all the available methods for the service e.g. getAdGroupAd() and mutateAdGroupAds(). The parameters and return value match the format specified in the Google Ads documentation.

import { GetAdGroupAdRequest } from "google-ads-node";

const request = new GetAdGroupAdRequest();
const ad = await service.getAdGroupAd(request);

Note: Service methods use camelCase in this library, whereas the Google Ads documentation uses TitleCase, so if a service method was called GetCampaign(), in this library it would be getCampaign()

Mutations

to-do: make this section of the docs better

As it can be quite verbose to create a new gRPC message, especially entities in the Google Ads API which can have many fields, this library provides a buildResource method to handle this for you.

// This is a regular js object, and can't be used in gRPC requests
const campaign = {
  name: "Interplanetary Cruises",
  campaignBudget: "customers/123/campaignBudgets/123",
  status: CampaignStatusEnum.CampaignStatus.ENABLED,
  advertisingChannelType: AdvertisingChannelTypeEnum.AdvertisingChannelType.SEARCH,
};

/*
  The buildResource method takes two arguments:
    1. The message type to construct (matches the Google Ads API docs)
    2. The object to convert
  
  It returns the object converted into a gRPC message instance,
  which can then be used in mutate requests/operations
*/
const pb = client.buildResource("Campaign", campaign);
console.log(pb.getName()); // "Interplanetary Cruises"

Safe Mode

To prevent accidental mutations, particularly in the case of working with the library in a development or test environment, we provide a preventMutations client option. This essentially intercepts all requests, and sets the validateOnly field to true. This means no mutations will be performed when the request is recieved by the Google Ads API. Any mutation requests will simply return an empty response, but importantly, are still validated by the API, meaning you will still be aware of any errors in the request body.

Any read only API methods, such as get/list/generate, are unaffected. For example, GoogleAdsService.search will still function as expected, whilst GoogleAdsService.mutate will only validate the request. Mutations will also be prevented for more unusual services, e.g. MutateJobService or RecommendationService.

Results

By default, since this library is implemented with gRPC, any calls via a service return an object in the protocol buffer format. This is a binary format object, which is difficult to understand, especially if you're not using the Typescript definitions.

Because of this, retrieving the results you want can be quite verbose. An example of this is below, where we show two methods for acquiring the id of a campaign.

const results = await service.search(request);

// Method 1
const { resultsList } = results.toObject();
const id = resultsList[0].campaign.id.value;

// Method 2
const row = results.getResultsList();
const campaign = row.getCampaign();
const id = campaign.getId().value;

If you don't wish to work directly with protocol buffers, are unfamiliar with gRPC, or just want an easier way to retrieve the data, we recommend using the parseResults client option. Setting this option to true will internally handle parsing the results in a more javascript friendly way, and return the desired entities/metrics/segments as objects (with all types correctly handled, e.g. name as a string, id as a number, etc.).

const client = new GoogleAdsClient({
  client_id: "<CLIENT_ID>",
  client_secret: "<CLIENT_SECRET>",
  refresh_token: "<REFRESH_TOKEN>",
  developer_token: "<DEVELOPER_TOKEN>",
  parseResults: true,
});

// ...

const { resultsList } = await service.search(request);
console.log(resultsList[0].campaign.id); // 123

Streaming Results

The Google Ads API supports streaming results via the GoogleAdsService.searchStream method. Importantly, you must enable the useStreaming option when calling getService, as this configures gRPC correctly.

const service = client.getService("GoogleAdsService", { useStreaming: true });

Note: Streaming is only supported for GoogleAdsService, see the official docs for more information.

A full example of using streaming to retrieve search terms for an account is shown below:

import {
  GoogleAdsClient,
  SearchGoogleAdsStreamRequest,
  SearchGoogleAdsStreamResponse,
  ClientReadableStream,
} from "google-ads-node";

const client = new GoogleAdsClient({
  access_token: "ACCESS_TOKEN",
  developer_token: "DEVELOPER_TOKEN",
  parseResults: true,
});

// The useStreaming setting must be enableds
const service = client.getService("GoogleAdsService", { useStreaming: true });

// Requests are built with SearchGoogleAdsStreamRequest
// Not the usual SearchGoogleAdsRequest
const request = new SearchGoogleAdsStreamRequest();
request.setQuery(`
    SELECT
      campaign.resource_name,
      metrics.impressions,
      segments.date
    FROM 
      campaign
    WHERE 
      segments.date BETWEEN "2019-01-01" AND "2020-01-01"
  `);
request.setCustomerId("CUSTOMER_ID");

// Start the stream (of type grpc.ClientReadableStream)
const call: ClientReadableStream<SearchGoogleAdsStreamResponse> = service.searchStream(request);

// Listen for errors
call.on("error", err => console.error(err));

// Listen for data (max 10,000 rows per chunk)
call.on("data", (chunk: SearchGoogleAdsStreamResponse.AsObject) => {
  console.log(chunk.resultsList);
});

// Called when the stream has finished
call.on("end", () => {
  console.log("Finished streaming data");
});

If you don't want to work with callbacks, a helper method can easily be constructed to allow the use of await with streaming data:

async function getStreamedResults(
  request: SearchGoogleAdsStreamRequest
): Promise<SearchGoogleAdsStreamResponse[]> {
  return new Promise(async (resolve, reject) => {
    const call: ClientReadableStream<SearchGoogleAdsStreamResponse> = service.searchStream(request);
    const chunks: SearchGoogleAdsStreamResponse[] = [];

    call.on("error", err => reject(err));
    call.on("data", (chunk: SearchGoogleAdsStreamResponse) => chunks.push(chunk));
    call.on("end", () => resolve(chunks));
  });
}

// This starts the stream, and resolves when all data is recieved
const allResults = await getStreamedResults(streamRequest);
console.log(allResults);

For more information on streaming, check out the official documentation for more information.

Logging

This library also includes support for logging all requests made to the Google Ads API. The logging functionality was directly inspired by the official client libraries, namely google-ads-python. The logging field of the client constructor has the following configurable settings:

// src/logger.ts
export interface LogOptions {
  output?: "stderr" | "stdout" | "none";
  verbosity?: "debug" | "info" | "warning";
  callback?: (message: RequestLog) => void;
}

The default output is stderr, and verbosity level info. We also provide a callback function if you don't want to log to stdout or stderr, which is fired on every single request. In here, you could pipe the logs to your own database, or other logging solution. Log messages follow this interface definition:

// src/logger.ts
export interface RequestLog {
  request?: {
    method?: string;
    headers?: any;
    body?: any;
  };
  response?: {
    headers?: any;
    body?: any;
    status?: any;
  };
  meta?: {
    is_mutation?: boolean;
    elapsed_ms?: number;
  };
}

Request

The request field contains details of the request made to the Google Ads API, including the service method called, the headers passed (which includes your authentication tokens), and the body of the gRPC request (converted to a standard object, from the raw binary stream).

Response

The response field contains everything recieved from the API after the call was made, regardless if it was successful or not. The headers field contains the response headers, notably including the request-id. This value is useful when sending a bug report to the Google Ads API support team. The body contains the raw results from the query, and status contains details of whether the gRPC service call was successful or not. If an error did occur in the request, response.status will be a descriptive error message.

An example of a successful log message as JSON (with authentication tokens removed) is shown below:

{
  "request": {
    "method": "/google.ads.googleads.v4.services.GoogleAdsService/Search",
    "headers": {
      "authorization": "[REMOVED]",
      "developer-token": "[REMOVED]",
      "login-customer-id": "[REMOVED]"
    },
    "body": {
      "customerId": "123",
      "query": "SELECT campaign.id, campaign.name FROM campaign LIMIT 1",
      "pageToken": "",
      "pageSize": 0,
      "validateOnly": false,
      "returnSummaryRow": false
    }
  },
  "response": {
    "headers": {
      "content-disposition": "attachment",
      "request-id": "zRvYunvw1zXMcAi0b1rx-A",
      "date": "Fri, 15 Nov 2019 11:47:14 GMT",
      "alt-svc": "quic=\":443\"; ma=2592000; v=\"46,43\",h3-Q050=\":443\"; ma=2592000,h3-Q049=\":443\"; ma=2592000,h3-Q048=\":443\"; ma=2592000,h3-Q046=\":443\"; ma=2592000,h3-Q043=\":443\"; ma=2592000"
    },
    "body": {
      "resultsList": [
        {
          "campaign": {
            "resourceName": "customers/123/campaigns/708736728",
            "id": {
              "value": 123
            },
            "name": {
              "value": "Campaign #1"
            },
            "status": 0,
            "servingStatus": 0,
            "adServingOptimizationStatus": 0,
            "advertisingChannelType": 0,
            "advertisingChannelSubType": 0,
            "urlCustomParametersList": [],
            "labelsList": [],
            "experimentType": 0,
            "biddingStrategyType": 0,
            "frequencyCapsList": [],
            "videoBrandSafetySuitability": 0,
            "paymentMode": 0
          }
        }
      ],
      "nextPageToken": "",
      "totalResultsCount": 154,
      "fieldMask": {
        "pathsList": ["campaign.id", "campaign.name"]
      }
    },
    "status": {
      "code": 0,
      "details": "",
      "metadata": {
        "_internal_repr": {
          "content-disposition": ["attachment"],
          "request-id": ["zRvYunvw1zXMcAi0b1rx-A"]
        },
        "flags": 0
      }
    }
  },
  "meta": {
    "is_mutation": false,
    "elapsed_ms": 502
  }
}

If logging to stdout, or stderr (which is the default), you can pipe messages via the command line to a log file, or any other data dump.

node google-ads-node-example.js 2> example.log

Changelog

• Release Notes
• Google Ads API Release Notes

Contributing

Protocol Buffers

To update the Google Ads API version, the latest proto files (from the googleapis repo) must be compiled.

Requirements:

• Docker

Steps:

1. Make sure that the opteo/protoc-all image has been built and pushed after googleapis/googleapis has been updated. Remember to upgrade the image tag in the Dockerfile
2. If it's major version update, change ADS_VERSION in Makefile and the FAILURE_KEY within interceptor.ts e.g. ADS_VERSION=v4
3. Run make protos within the google-ads-node/ directory
4. Update any README instances of the Google Ads API version number, e.g. the NPM badge URL

Note: there may be some errors in the newly generated src/lib/struct.ts which require a manual fix.

There should now be a bunch of changes in the src/protos folder. Package these changes up into a single commit, using the following template commit message:

git commit -m "feat(api): upgraded google ads api to v3.0.0"

If there are any upgrade issues, the make debug-protos command may be useful.