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how-to-authenticate-ads-api.md

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How to authenticate Google Ads API

Regardless of a client you use you will need the following parameters to authenticate your Ads API calls:

  • developer_token - we can get developer_token from any of your Google Ads MCC account, see Prerequisites for details
  • client_id and client_secret - The OAuth2 client ID and client secret map your client app to a project in the Google API Console and are used for OAuth2 authentication
  • refresh_token - this is a value you should obtain before making any call, it's bound to your Google account, see below
  • login_customer_id (optional) - see https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/concepts/call-structure#cid (Id should be in 11111111 format, do not add dashes as separator)

Please note that client_id and client_secret aren't required if you use OAuth Service Account Flow. But please be aware that it requires using Google Workspace.

Useful Resources:

Steps

  1. Get Google Ads Developer Token

  2. Setup Google Cloud project and OAuth client id

You need a Google Cloud project with enabled Google Ads API. See details here: Configure a Google API Console Project for the Google Ads API

Create an OAuth credentials (for the first time you'll need to create a consent screen either). Please note you need to generate OAuth2 credentials for desktop application.

  1. Generate refresh token

Before proceeding with token generation you need to make sure that either your oauth brand made public (published) or you added yourself as a test user if it's in testing status (it's not recommended because refresh tokens will exprire in 7 days).

3.1. Generate refresh token using oauth2l

First you need to download oauth2l tool ("oauth tool"). For Windows and Linux please download pre-compiled binaries, for MacOS you can install via Homebrew: brew install oauth2l.

As soon as you generated OAuth2 credentials:

  • Click the download icon next to the credentials that you just created and save file to your computer
  • Copy the file name under which you saved secrets file - ~/client_secret_XXX.apps.googleusercontent.com.json where XXX will be values specific to your project (or just save it under client_secret.json name for simplicity)
  • Run desktop authentication with downloaded credentials file using oauth2l in the same folder where you put the downloaded secret file (assuming its name is client_secret.json):
oauth2l fetch --credentials ./client_secret.json  --scope adwords --output_format refresh_token

  • Copy a refresh token from the output

    3.2. Generate refresh token using OAuth Playground

Alternately (if you can't or don't want to download anything locally) you can use OAuth Playground. Please follow guidence in this video for setting up Web Flow with the OAuth Playground - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFICa7Ngzng&t=812s

Please note you'll need to use another OAuth2 credentials type - Web application, and set "https://developers.google.com/oauthplayground" as redirect url in it.

3.3. Generate refresh token using generate_user_credentials.py

If you have Python 3 installed on your machine, instead of downloading oauth2l tool you can use a Python script with the following one-liner (run it in a folder with client_secret.json file containing your OAuth client id or adapt the file name in the command):

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/googleads/google-ads-python/main/examples/authentication/generate_user_credentials.py | python3 - -c=client_secret.json
  1. What's next

Now you are all set. The only thing left is to put all parameters into a configuration file. It depends on what version you're using: Python or NodeJS. Both of them support google-ads.yaml file. And NodeJS support putting parameters into .gaarfrc as well. See its README.

Please note that all account ids (a.k.a customer ids) you put in configuration should be in 11111111 format, do not add dashes as separator.

Setting up using google-ads.yaml

You can create google-ads.yaml in you home directory and it'll be used authomatically. Or you can create it wherever you want and supply the path to it via --ads-config command line argument. If the file is in the same folder where you running your scripts with executing gaarf then google-ads.yaml will be found automatically also.

Create google-ads.yaml file with the following content:

developer_token:
client_id:
client_secret:
refresh_token:
login_customer_id:
client_customer_id:
use_proto_plus: True

See full description of fields at Configuration Fields.

client_customer_id is optional here, and can be provided directly via the command line argument --account.

Setting up using .gaarfrc

Inside your .gaarfrc create a section ads where put all parameters:

{
 "ads": {
    "developer_token": "",
    "client_id": "",
    "client_secret": "",
    "refresh_token": ""
 },
 ...
}