Announcing v201607 of the AdWords API

Today we’re announcing the release of AdWords API v201607. Here are the highlights:

• Expanded text ads. The AdWords API now supports creating these ads in production accounts. Previously, creation of ExpandedTextAds was only supported in test accounts.
• Greater transparency in quality score. To improve transparency, QualityScore in Keywords Performance and Criteria Performance will report a value of two dashes (--) when there aren’t enough impressions or clicks to accurately determine a keyword’s quality score. The HasQualityScore field introduced in v201605 will now return false for any row without a QualityScore. Finally, for criteria without a quality score, the qualityInfo attribute will no longer be returned by AdGroupCriterionService get and query requests.
• Price extensions. The new PriceFeedItem type allows you to showcase your services and range of products, along with their costs, with your mobile text ads. Read more about price extensions in this Inside AdWords blog post.
• Converted clicks is deprecated. ConvertedClicks and its related fields have been removed from all reports in favor of Conversions. Conversions is the ideal way to measure valuable actions, and most advertisers already use Conversions as their primary reporting and bidding metric. Conversions is more flexible and is capable of measuring behavior that spans multiple conversion events or multiple clicks. Check out the recent Inside AdWords blog post for more details.
• Platform bid modifiers. Bid modifiers specific to desktop and tablet have been added to the campaign and ad group performance reports. Also, managing bid modifiers for desktop and tablet is currently only available in test accounts, but we will be rolling it out to live accounts for all versions over the coming weeks.
• CustomerService.get is deprecated. The get method of CustomerService has been replaced with the more flexible getCustomers method. Check out our migration guide for details.

If you’re using v201601 or v201603 of the AdWords API, please note that they’re now deprecated and will be sunset on August 27, 2016 and October 25, 2016, respectively. We encourage you to skip v201605 and migrate straight to v201607.

As with every new version of the AdWords API, we encourage you to carefully review all changes in the release notes and the v201607 migration guide. The updated client libraries and code examples will be published shortly.

If you have any questions or need help with migration, please post on the forum or the Ads Developers Plus Page.

- Josh Radcliff on behalf of the AdWords API Team