With the release of v201309, sitelink descriptions are out of beta and available to all users. Adding more information to your sitelinks can make your ads even more useful and significantly increase ad clickthrough rate. You can now use feed services to retrieve or modify two descriptive lines of text in each of your sitelinks.

If you are already retrieving feed mappings or sitelinks through the API, make sure your code can handle the new placeholder field IDs of 3 and 4. The new IDs may appear in responses from the FeedMappingService for sitelink feed mappings (mappings with placeholder type 1).

As an example of how to improve your sitelinks by using these fields, let's say you have a pizza shop with special offers that you want to display along with your sitelinks. In addition, you want to periodically update the special offers as the seasons change.

Before adding the new description fields, your sitelinks appear as follows.



You modify your feed attributes, feed items, and feed mapping to use the new field types, and now your sitelinks can show with helpful descriptions.



In the month of November you want to to change things up with modified descriptions under "Order Online Now" and "Deals In Your Area". All it takes is updating the feed items mapped to your Campaign or Ad Group, and voila!



Note that the description lines or the sitelinks themselves may not always appear in your Ads or the format that appears could vary.

To update your existing feeds to include these new fields, you'll need to make the following changes.

• Use the FeedService to add two new FeedAttributes to your feed
• Use the FeedItemService to set these new attribute values on your FeedItems
• Use the FeedMappingService to replace the existing FeedMapping with a new one that contains the existing FeedMapping's fields and the two new fields
• As your specials change over time, use the FeedItemService to update your FeedItems with the latest information

Refer to our Java code sample for more details.

Concerned about losing reporting stats on your ads when you make changes to your sitelink descriptions? Don't worry - as with other sitelink values, AdWords will retain stats when you update your feed items.

Not using feed services? Check out the following resources to get started.

• Guide for creating feed services
• Client libraries that support various feed services
• A complete code example to create a feed and map it to the sitelink extensions for a campaign
• The Placeholder Feed Item Report to gather statistics on your extensions

Still have questions? Please contact us on the AdWords API Forum or Google+ page.

- Josh Radcliff, AdWords API Team

Today we are releasing the AdWords API v201309. This latest release introduces offline conversion import, adds new reports and also makes several Beta features available to all API users. We've also reworked the AdWords API Developers site making it more friendly and easier to navigate. Take a look and let us know what you think!

v201309 Highlights:

• Offline conversions import. This previously announced AdWords feature is now also available via the API with a new OfflineConversionFeedService and Upload Conversion tracker.
• Configurable Conversion Tracker lookback window. New Conversion tracker field allows to configure click-through conversion lookback window for AdWords and Offline conversion trackers.
• Reporting updates. Gender Performance and Age Range Performance reports have been added, Keywordless and Campaign Location Target reports are now available to all users. We’ve also included automatic placements into Placement Performance report.
• Five AdWords API features are now out of Beta. The following features are now available to all API users: Dynamic Search Ads, Display Criteria bid adjustments, Flexible (shared) Bidding Strategies, Ad Group Level Feeds and Location bid adjustments.
• Stat fields are now only available in reports. From this version and onwards the API will not return stats data via services anymore. Reporting can be used instead.
• Creating individual budgets. AdWords API v201309 now allows you to create individual (non-shared) budgets that can only be used by one campaign and are not displayed in the AdWords User Interface.

A complete list of changes is available in the release notes. Note, as previously described, AdWords API v201309 is the last version to support the ClientLogin authorization method.

If you are still using v201302 of the AdWords API, please note that it is being sunset on November 8, 2013. We encourage you to skip v201306 and migrate straight to v201309. If you’re using v201306, be aware it is now marked deprecated and will be sunset on Mar 31st, 2014. With this release, we have also updated the Required Minimum Functionality document to include some of the newly added features that are now required in third-party tools.

As with every new version of the AdWords API, we encourage you to carefully review all changes in the release notes and the v201309 migration guide. The updated client libraries and code examples will be published shortly. If you have any questions or need help with migration, please post on the forum or the Ads Developers Plus Page.

- The AdWords API Team