Standard report with option Keyword/Placement
Are you affected?
If you have a Standard report with option Keyword/Placement configured for Adwords API, this help article is for you.
Problem
In Google Ads API there is no support to get Keyword/Placement in the Standard report. There is a report called Search Keyword but it does only contain Keyword, not Placement. In addition to this, there is a Placement report that has Placement but not Keyword.
In the Standard report you can get all rows independent of if keyword exist or not.
In the Search Keyword report you will only get rows that have a keyword. Rows without keyword will be omitted.
If you connect both reports it will result in double counting. All rows in the Search Keyword will also be in the Standard report. Search Keyword report is a subset of Standard report.
There are two possible workarounds to this issue:
First you need to find out what kind of criterion types you have. Select field "Criteria type" and look at the values. In the case below multiple criterion types is found (Keyword, Webpage, User List and Custom In-Market), option #2 would be your preferred choice.
Option #1 - no other criterion type than keyword
If you don't have any other criterion types than keyword you can create a custom dimension to filter out the Ad group "SEARCH_STANDARD".
Create a custom dimension to map data sources whose Data source definition label starts with "[Google Ads API] Ad" and Ad Group Type that matches "SEARCH_STANDARD" to the value "Exclude". All other values should map to "Include".
Add the custom dimension to your data explorer view.
To avoid double-counting rows, filter on the custom dimension field to only see "Include" values.
In the example above the values "Exclude" and "Include" can be chosen arbitrarily. The custom dimension was named "De-duplicate data", this name is free to choose.
Option #2 - multiple criterion types
If you have more criterion types than keyword there are no way to filter out duplicate rows. Our recommendation is to create two reports, one report for each criterion type and create a custom dimension to be able to select which report to see in data explorer. The custom dimension should be based on the "Data source definition label".