For all of our clients we got great news: Refined Ads qualified for Google Preferred AdWords API pricing!

What this means for us:

• Refined Ads is in compliance with the AdWords API
• We meet the required minimum functionality (RMF), actually we exceed it
• We have a certain amount of free API quota that we can use for our clients

What this means for you as a (potential) client:

• Using Refined Ads is even more cost efficient
• You know that you have a high quality search technology
• You have a comprehensive software to manage your AdWords accounts

Over the next days/weeks we will send you an update if there are any necessary changes.

We worked very closely with Google on this topic over the last years and are happy that this idea finally got implemented. Being among the very first companies worldwide that got this qualification underlines our strong demand to have a leading product that helps our clients to be even more efficient with their performance marketing campaigns.

Not only did our engineering team together with QA work very hard on it, but also we got excellent support from Googlers across the world, so we’d like to thank all people involved for their ongoing efforts.

This time a more technical blog-post:
As the guys who deal with the Google-AdWords-API probably have noticed, a new version (V11) of the AdWords-Webservice was released on Oct 11, 2007, so V10 and V11 are co-existing at the moment. Especially the redesigned reporting-system with the new DefinedReportJob-feature provides more flexibility in retrieving exactly the stats you need.

After the API-team was able to solve some critical bugs in the beginning, the service now is stable enough to be integrated in existing system-architectures.

We already did that (and it works fine for us), because our customers deserve the most up-to-date products and services offered by Refined Labs.

Nevertheless there are lots of guys that are not happy with the new release, because their well-working-software is affected by the way, the retrieval of IDs for campaigns/adGroups/criterionKeywords/… is handled now by the various types of reports.

The API-team responded promptly to all the complaints and assured that there would be an internal talk about how these problems might be solved.

The important background-information is: It’s planned to shut down the currently running V10 in Feb, 2008.

I am very curious to see, if the API-team is able to cope with the current complaints till then and/or if the shutdown of V10 will be postponed and/or the users have to accept the effort to modify their existing software in bigger dimensions, and/or …

Tino

Btw: If you think about applying for a JAVA-job at Refined Labs, don’t forget to mention your perfect Nexuiz-skills. At the moment, the Java-backend has no chance against the Ajax-GUI-Guys