REST Interface Design

This page assumes a familiarity with the Resource Oriented Design and Resource Names developer guides and complements them with specific implementation details of the Google Ads API.

Key Point: The examples throughout this guide use HTTP protocol to demonstrate how to call the API. See the Examples page for how you can make these same API calls using the curl command line utility.

Resource-oriented design

Generally, the Google Ads API follows a resource-oriented design, modeled as collections of individually-addressable resources (the nouns of the API). Resources are referenced with their resource names and manipulated using a small set of methods (also known as verbs or operations).

These resource names and methods, combined with a specific API version prefix, comprise the URLs of the REST interface. For example, the URL below can be broken down into these individual components according to the following table:

https://googleads.googleapis.com/v21/customers/1234567890:mutate

API Version Prefix	Resource Name (relative)	Method
https://googleads.googleapis.com/v21	customers/1234567890	mutate

All REST URLs for a particular version of the API (e.g., v21) share a common API version prefix. The resource name and method together identifies which API service is being called.

The Google Ads API makes heavy use of custom methods, as opposed to most traditional REST APIs that use standard REST methods such as list, get, create, update, and delete. Examples of custom methods in the Google Ads API include search, searchStream, and mutate.

The following pages go into more details about the Google Ads API's resource names, service methods, and JSON naming conventions to illustrate how they're used together to define REST interface endpoints.