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.
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.
Discovery document
To facilitate and automate the discovery of available methods in the Google Ads API, you can use the discovery document published for each version.
It is available at https://googleads.googleapis.com/$discovery/rest?version=<API_VERSION>.
So, for example, this
is the discovery document for the latest version of the Google Ads API.
The discovery document contains information about all the services, methods, resources and entities used in the Google Ads API, like the reference documentation, but in a machine-readable, JSON format.