CODEWITHSUNDEEP
rgoogle-ads-apircurl
info_seekeR
info_seekeR

Reputation: 1326

RCurl for use in Google Adwords

I'd like to download data pertaining to keywords straight into/from R. I understand that RCurl would most probably be the way to go, but I am not sure how to proceed with the task. Perhaps anybody here could put me on the right track?

PS. I may slightly edit this question as answers pour in because I have some ideas of how I could possibly download Adwords data using R; however, the ideas are unclear, and any answers would probably make them clearer.

Many thanks.

EDIT: My attempt

The following is what I tried until now.

1. apply getURL on the login URL to identify the ids of the Email and Password fields

require(RCurl)
loginURL<- "https://accounts.google.com/ServiceLogin?service=adwords"
ch<- getCurlHandle()
curlSetOpt(curl=ch,ssl.verifypeer=FALSE,cainfo=system.file("CurlSSL", "cacert.pem", package = "RCurl"),cookiejar="./cookies.txt",cookiefile="./cookies.txt",verbose=TRUE,header=TRUE,followlocation=TRUE,autoreferer=TRUE)

try1<- getURL(loginURL,curl=ch)

2. I identified what the ids for the important fields (email & password) were

<div class="email-div">
  <label for="Email"><strong class="email-label">Email</strong></label>
  <input type="email" spellcheck="false"  

  name="Email" id="Email" value=""

    >
</div>
<div class="passwd-div">
  <label for="Passwd"><strong class="passwd-label">Password</strong></label>
  <input type="password" name="Passwd" id="Passwd"

3. I then used the above fields to apply the postForm function at the loginURL in order to log into Google Adwords

params<- list(
"Email"="myemail",
"Passwd"="mypassword",
"GALX"="3b6rR7Jvk30")

loggedIn<- postForm(loginURL,.params=params,curl=ch)

However, I have no idea how to verify that I have successfully logged in.

Plus, the URL for Kyeword planner tool in Google Adwords UI is:

https://adwords.google.com/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home?__c=XXXXXXXXXX&__u=XXXXXXXXXX&__o=cues

where the c= reflects the customer id and the u= reflects the user id. What I thought about doing, given this, was to log in using my browser, paste the URL shown above into R, and then try to find out the ids for fields that I will be of relevance to me, such as the id for the keywords text box in the Keyword planner tool, to which I could possibly send keywords from R.

But when I try to apply getURL on the aforesaid website, I do not get the required/expected xml tags or key value pairs. Instead:

<html><head><noscript><meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=https://adwords.google.com/select/interstitial_short_js.html"></noscript></head><body><script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">var jsRedirect = true;var url = "/um/StartNewLogin?dst=/ko/KeywordPlanner/Home?__c%3D7857647860%26__u%3D4575929980%26__o%3Dcues";
if (self.document.location.hash) {url = url + ((url.indexOf('?') == -1)? '?' : '&') + "frag=" + self.document.location.hash.substring(1); }
window.location.assign(url);
</script> </body> </html>

This leads me to think that I am probably dealing with Javascript or AJAX here. So, how to extract data from Javascript or AJAX using RCurl, and is this the correct question to ask?

Thanks & apologies for the lengthy edit.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 1991

Answers (2)

jburkhardt
jburkhardt

Reputation: 675

Have you seen our RAdwords package in the meantime?

It provides an authentication process for R with the Adwords API and an interface to load data from the Adwords API directly into R.

Example code to load keyword data:

#install package from CRAN
install.packages('RAdwords')
#load package
library(RAdwords)
#start authentication process
google_auth <- doAuth()
#build statement object
body <- statement(select=c('AccountDescriptiveName','Date', 'CampaignName', 'AdGroupName','KeywordText', 'KeywordMatchType', 'Clicks', 'Cost'),
                  report="KEYWORDS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT",
                  start="20140320",
                  end="20140321")
#download data as data frame
data <- getData(clientCustomerId='xxx-xxx-xxxx',
                google_auth = google_auth,
                statement=body,
                transformation = T)
#all available report types
reports()
#all available metrics of specific report type
metrics("KEYWORDS_PERFORMANCE_REPORT")

Upvotes: 3

Aleksandr Blekh
Aleksandr Blekh

Reputation: 2482

I don't have enough reputation to comment (ridiculous!), hence this answer.

My answer pertains to your question's part on how to verify the result of logging in. I would do it this way:

loggedIn<- postForm(loginURL, .params=params, curl=ch)

info <- getCurlInfo(ch)

# 1) check the value of info$response.code here and act accordingly
# 2) you probably need the value to be 200 or between 200 and 300, but for more details
# on HTTP status codes, see this page: http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec10.html

Upvotes: 2

Related Questions