Sunsetting the creation of target spend field for Maximize Clicks strategies in Google Ads API

On July 31st, 2019 we will begin to sunset the target spend field for Maximize Clicks bidding strategies in the API. This will affect all versions of both the AdWords API and Google Ads API. The following behaviors will be blocked:
  • Populating the target spend field on existing standard and portfolio strategies.
  • Attaching portfolio strategies that have the deprecated field set to campaigns.
Later this year, our systems will start ignoring the target spend field and instead use your daily budget to manage spend. In order to prepare for this change, you should start using your budgets to specify how much you’d like to spend for Maximize Clicks bidding strategies and migrate your campaigns off this field today.

Read on to see how this will affect your API usage.
Affected Target Spend Fields
Google Ads API campaign.target_spend.target_spend_micros
bidding_strategy.target_spend.target_spend_micros
AdWords API Campaign.BiddingStrategyConfiguration.TargetSpendBiddingScheme.spendTarget
SharedBiddingStrategy.TargetSpendBiddingScheme.spendTarget


Change Description
Any mutate operations that set a target spend field for the first time will return an error. You will be able to update a target spend field that currently contain a value, but you cannot set previously empty fields to a new value. Additionally, any operation attaching a bidding strategy to a campaign, where that bidding strategy has a value set for a target spend field, will throw an error. To manage Target Spend on any new campaigns, we recommend using a campaign budget. In each of these disallowed cases an error will be thrown.

Performing any of the disallowed actions above will generate one of the following errors:
  • OPERATION_NOT_PERMITTED_FOR_CONTEXT
  • UNSUPPORTED_FIELD_IS_SET
If you have any questions about this change or any other API feature, please contact us via the forum.
- Cory Liseno, Google Ads API Team