StupidScript - 9:18 pm on Nov 1, 2004 (gmt 0)

It's the erratic column layout in the .csv reports that's burning our mustard.

On Thursday, 10/28, we had one column order.
Reports for Friday, 10/29, used the "new" format with a different column order.
This morning, 11/1. yet another column order.

Am I going to have to rewrite our scripts for integrating daily Google data into our inhouse system EVERY DAY?

Pick a column order and stick with it. They should be able to figure that out even when changing ("improving") the rest of the reporting system.

Plus, I haven't had an email notification since Thursday, despite repeatedly re-setting our daily report specifications. They all end up with "email notification: off", regardless of what we specify.

So now: I must login to AdWords, go to Custom Reports, create a new Custom Report nearly* the same as the Custom Report we've been getting for over a year, wait for the thing to generate, click the download link, investigate the most recent column order changes, rewrite our scripts to accomodate the daily column order changes, and then run our intergation routine. Last week, this took about 5 minutes per day. Now we need to spend over an hour each day.

*We used to get all of our ad text in addition to click data, however since Google changed their .csv reports to use commas instead of tabs, we can no longer integrate ad text into our inhouse system without a few hours of clean-up work per report.

Does anyone use tabs in their ad text? Didn't think so. So why did they switch to the comma-delimited format with quotes around entries with commas in the text? There was no problem getting rid of the quotes and converting the tabs into commas for our web-based inhouse system. Now, it's an entirely different clean-up task.

Not much of an "improvement".

I used to enjoy the flexibility of the Google reporting system, but now we're trying to figure out how to keep our inhouse system up to date with these new reports. Not pleased.