Mutate Best Practices

Temporary resource names

GoogleAdsService.Mutate supports temporary resource names that can be referenced later on in the same request. This lets you, for example, create a campaign and its associated ad groups, ads, keywords, etc. all in a single request.

You can do this by specifying the new resource's resource_name to use a negative ID. For example, if you create a campaign and specify its resource name as customers/<YOUR_CUSTOMER_ID>/campaigns/-1, then when you are creating the ad group in a later operation, you can reference it by that resource name and the -1 you specified will be replaced by the actual ID of the created campaign automatically.

Here are some things to keep in mind when using temporary resource names:

A temporary resource name can only be used after it's been defined in a resource. In the example below, the ad group operation would have to appear after the campaign operation in the list of operations.
Temporary resource names are not remembered across jobs; to reference a resource created in a previous job, use its actual resource name.
Each temporary resource name must use a unique negative number, even if they are from different resource types.

Example

To give a more concrete example to the situation mentioned above, suppose you want to add a campaign, an ad group, and an ad in a single API request. You would create a structure for your request analogous to the following:

mutate_operations: [
  {
    campaign_operation: {
      create: {
        resource_name: "customers/<YOUR_CUSTOMER_ID>/campaigns/-1",
        ...
      }
    }
  },
  {
    ad_group_operation: {
      create: {
        resource_name: "customers/<YOUR_CUSTOMER_ID>/adGroups/-2",
        campaign: "customers/<YOUR_CUSTOMER_ID>/campaigns/-1"
        ...
      }
    }
  },
  {
    ad_group_ad_operation: {
      create: {
        ad_group: "customers/<YOUR_CUSTOMER_ID>/adGroups/-2"
        ...
      }
    }
  },
]

Notice that a new temporary ID is used for the ad group, since we can't reuse the -1 that we used for the campaign, and we also reference this ad group when creating an ad group ad. The ad group itself references the resource name we established for the campaign in an earlier operation in the request, while resource_name in ad_group_ad_operation is not necessary since no further operation is referencing it.

Group same-type operations

When using GoogleAdsService.Mutate, it is important to group operations together according to their resource in the repeated operations array. This mutate method essentially serves as a way to automatically sequentially call each individual resource's own mutate method. To do this, it reads in operations until it finds one for a different type of resources, then batches all the same-type operations together in one request.

For example, if you have 5 campaign operations, followed by 10 ad group operations in the repeated operations field in your Mutate call, then the system will perform two total calls in the backend, one to the CampaignService for 5 operations, and the next to the AdGroupService for 10 operations. However, if you were to group them differently, performance could be a lot worse. If you only create 2 campaigns and 2 ad groups, but weave them so the operations are ordered as [campaign, ad group, campaign, ad group], then this will result in four total calls in the backend. This will result in slower API performance and in extreme cases can even lead to timeouts.

Retrieve mutable attributes from the response

Starting with v5 of the Google Ads API, if you set the response_content_type of your mutate request to MUTABLE_RESOURCE, the response will contain the values of all mutable fields for every object created or updated by the request. Use this feature to avoid an additional search or searchStream request after each mutate request.

If you do not set the response_content_type, then the Google Ads API defaults to RESOURCE_NAME_ONLY and the response will only contain the resource name of each created or updated resource.

Bulk mutates