Resource Names

  • In the Google Ads API, entities are uniquely identified by a predictable string format called a resource name.

  • Helper methods on Service objects can be used to generate these resource names if you know the required components.

  • Services offer path methods like campaign_path to build resource names and parse_campaign_path to break them down into individual segments.

  • Composite resource names, such as those for AdGroupCriterion, are constructed by path helpers using multiple ID segments as parameters.

The unique identifier for an entity in the Google Ads API is called a resource name, and is represented as a string with a predictable format. If you know the constituent components of a resource name, you can generate resource names using helper methods present on many Service objects.

Service path methods

All Services that are designed to handle reading or mutating specific types of objects in the API have helper methods to construct resource_names. For example, you can create a resource name for a Campaign object:

from google.ads.googleads.client import GoogleAdsClient

client = GoogleAdsClient.load_from_storage()
customer_id = "7892134783"
campaign_id = "1234567890"
campaign_service = client.get_service("CampaignService")
resource_name = campaign_service.campaign_path(customer_id, campaign_id)

Each service also has an accompanying parse_*_path method that deconstructs a resource_name into its individual segments, for example:

from google.ads.googleads.client import GoogleAdsClient

client = GoogleAdsClient.load_from_storage()
resource_name = "customers/7892134783/campaigns/1234567890"
campaign_service = client.get_service('CampaignService')
segments = campaign_service.parse_campaign_path(resource_name)
customer_id = segments["customer_id"]
campaign_id = segments["campaign_id"]

Composite resource names

Path helpers on services construct composite segments of a resource name. The different segments of the composite ID are accepted as individual parameters in the method:

from google.ads.google_ads.client import GoogleAdsClient

customer_id = "0987654321"
ad_group_id = "1234567890"
criterion_id = "74932"

client = GoogleAdsClient.load_from_storage()
ad_group_criterion_service = client.get_service("AdGroupCriterionService")

# An AdGroupCriterion resource name that uses the above IDs looks like this:
# "customers/0987654321/adGroupCriteria/1234567890~74932"
resource_name = ad_group_criterion_service.ad_group_criterion_path(
    customer_id, ad_group_id, criterion_id
)