How to get negative keyword list from a campaing using Google Adwords API

Question

When you set up a campaign in google adwords you can add negative keywords to it so that the searchquery may not match your campaign if it has the negative keyword.

I want to extract the list of the negative keywords per each campaign. In the documentation I was able to find this example:

def retrieve_negative_keywords(report_utils)
  report_definition = {
    :selector => {
      :fields => ['CampaignId', 'Id', 'KeywordMatchType', 'KeywordText']
    },
    :report_name => 'Negative campaign keywords',
    :report_type => 'CAMPAIGN_NEGATIVE_KEYWORDS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT',
    :download_format => 'CSV',
    :date_range_type => 'TODAY',
    :include_zero_impressions => true
  }

  campaigns = {}

  report = report_utils.download_report(report_definition)
  # Slice off the first row (report name).
  report.slice!(0..report.index("\n"))

  CSV.parse(report, { :headers => true }) do |row|
    campaign_id = row['Campaign ID']

    # Ignore totals row.
    if row[0] != 'Total'
      campaigns[campaign_id] ||= Campaign.new(campaign_id)
      negative = Negative.from_csv_row(row)
      campaigns[campaign_id].negatives << negative
    end
  end

  return campaigns
end

Which is written in Ruby and there are no Python examples for this task. There is also a report for the negative keywords but it holds no metrics and I can't use it to retrieve the list of negative keywords per each campaign.

I am using this structure to query the database:

report_query = (adwords.ReportQueryBuilder()
                        .Select('CampaignId', 'Id', 'KeywordMatchType', 'KeywordText')
                        .From('CAMPAIGN_NEGATIVE_KEYWORDS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT')
                        .During('LAST_7_DAYS')
                        .Build())

But querying it gives an error:

googleads.errors.AdWordsReportBadRequestError: Type: QueryError.DURING_CLAUSE_REQUIRES_DATE_COLUMN

When I add Date it throws the same error.

Has anyone been able to extract the negative keyword list per campaign using Python with the Google Adwords API reports?

Answer 1

You can't use a DURING clause when querying CAMPAIGN_NEGATIVE_KEYWORDS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT as that report is a structure report, meaning it doesn't contain statistics. If you remove the During() call and just do

report_query = (googleads.adwords.ReportQueryBuilder()
                .Select('CampaignId', 'Id', 'KeywordMatchType', 'Criteria')
                .From('CAMPAIGN_NEGATIVE_KEYWORDS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT')
                .Build())

you'll get the list of all negative keywords per campaign.

If you think about it, this makes sense—negative keywords prevent your ads from being shown, so metrics like impressions or clicks would be meaningless.