What's changed?
There are three major changes being announced in this post:

• Accountstatuses now returns aggregated product statistics.
• Accountstatuses now includes the new format for product-level issues.
• itemLevelIssues objects now contain human-readable descriptions.

Aggregated product statistics in Accountstatuses
The number of products in a given account can now be retrieved directly from Accountstatuses. Like the Merchant Center, you can retrieve the following aggregated statistics: active products, expiring products, disapproved products, and pending products. These statistics are given separately for each combination of destination, channel, and target country. For example:

"products": [{
  "country": "US",
  "destination": "Shopping",
  "channel": "online",
  "statistics": {
    "active": "1542",
    "expiring": "14",
    "disapproved": "152",
    "pending": "743"
  },
  ...
}]

Here, there are 1542 active products that target the USA that can be used in online Shopping campaigns, 14 active but expiring products, 152 disapproved products, and 743 pending products.

Product-level issues in Accountstatuses
In addition to the new product statistics, the "products" field also contains an itemLevelIssues field similar to the itemLevelIssues field added to Productstatuses earlier this year. Using the contents of this field, you can now see explicitly whether a given issue is impacting the servability of a product and whether the issue needs your attention or just further processing on Google's part.

Human-readable descriptions in itemLevelIssues
In both Productstatuses and Accountstatuses, the objects in the itemLevelIssues field now have some additional fields, which contain English descriptions and helpful links for issues that are suitable for surfacing to clients. The following fields have been added:

• description contains a short English description of the issue.
• detail contains a detailed English description of the issue.
• documentation contains a URL for a web page that can help resolve the issue.

Here is an example itemLevelIssues object that includes these fields:

{
  "attributeName": "image link",
  "code": "image_link_pending_crawl",
  "description": "Image not retrieved (crawl pending)",
  "destination": "Shopping",
  "detail": "Wait for the product image to be crawled (up to 3 days)",
  "documentation": "https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/160640",
  "resolution": "pending_processing",
  "servability": "disapproved"
}

What do you need to do?
Now that the human-readable information is available for itemLevelIssues in both systems, we now consider the old dataQualityIssues fields deprecated. We will no longer include them in Productstatus or Accountstatus resources on Dec 1, 2018, therefore you should migrate to the new itemLevelIssues fields as soon as possible.

If you have any questions or feedback about this change, or any other questions about the Content API for Shopping, please let us know on the forum.
 - Stevie Strickland, Content API for Shopping Team

Source: Google Ads Developer Blog

There have been some smaller API updates and announcements that we'd like to let you know about!

• We've published a new Getting started with Local Inventory Ads guide to walk you through the process of using the new LIA onboarding features in the Content API.
• There's a new codelab available on creating and linking AdWords and Merchant Center sub-accounts!
• You can now filter results by destination for Productstatuses and Accountstatuses method calls with the new destinations query parameter. If you don't specify a destination, you'll still only get Shopping-related issues, so there is no change to the default functionality.
• You can specify holiday shipping cut-offs for shipping services as well. The supported holidays are available via the Shippingsettings.getsupportedholidays method.
• You can specify when a particular shipping service is eligible for products. The new services[].eligibility field allows you to specify whether the shipping service applies to products bought via Shopping Actions and/or when bought in some other manner, such as via your own storefront.
• We've added a new Datafeeds.fetchnow method to request an immediate fetch of a scheduled feed. Use this method to get feedback on a newly scheduled feed faster than waiting for the first scheduled fetch.

If you have any questions or feedback about these items or any other questions about the Content API for Shopping, please let us know on the forum.
 - Stevie Strickland, Content API for Shopping Team

Source: Google Ads Developer Blog

Today, we're announcing the ability to configure your local inventory ads (LIA) settings and link Google My Business (GMB) accounts via the Content API for Shopping. This allows you to onboard accounts for LIA programmatically, instead of needing to manually configure each account separately via the Merchant Center website.

The new Liasettings service lets you perform the following actions via the Content API:

• Set your target countries for LIA service and their About pages (if needed)
• Add and check the status of contacts for local inventory verification
• Request access to a GMB account
• Request available business accounts from a linked GMB account
• Request and check the status of local inventory verification

In addition, the new googleMyBusinessLink field in the Accounts resource states which business account should be linked. After setting this field, you can provide inventory information for the locations in that business account by uploading product and inventory information either through local product feeds and local product inventory feeds or through the Content API for Shopping with the channel field set to "local".

If you have any questions or feedback about these new features or any other questions about the Content API for Shopping, please let us know on the forum.
 - Stevie Strickland, Content API for Shopping Team

Source: Google Ads Developer Blog