Google Campaign Manager to Amazon S3

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Google Campaign Manager and load it into Amazon S3. (If this manual process sounds onerous, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)

What is Campaign Manager?

Campaign Manager (formerly DoubleClick Campaign Manager) is a web-based ad management system that advertisers and agencies use to manage creative assets and run ad campaigns.

What is S3?

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) provides cloud-based object storage through a web service interface. You can use S3 to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. S3 objects, which may be structured in any way, are stored in resources called buckets.

Getting data out of Campaign Manager

Campaign Manager has an API that you can use to get information about advertisers, campaigns, creative assets, and more. For example, to get information about a campaign for a given profile, you would call GET /userprofiles/{profileId}/campaigns/{id}.

Sample Campaign Manager data

Here's an example of the kind of response you might see with a query like the one above.

{
  "kind": "dfareporting#campaign",
  "id": long,
  "idDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
  "accountId": long,
  "subaccountId": long,
  "advertiserId": long,
  "advertiserIdDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
  "advertiserGroupId": long,
  "name": string,
  "archived": boolean,
  "startDate": date,
  "endDate": date,
  "comment": string,
  "billingInvoiceCode": string,
  "audienceSegmentGroups": [
    {
      "id": long,
      "name": string,
      "audienceSegments": [
        {
          "id": long,
          "name": string,
          "allocation": integer
        }
      ]
    }
  ],
  "eventTagOverrides": [
    {
      "id": long,
      "enabled": boolean
    }
  ],
  "clickThroughUrlSuffixProperties": {
    "overrideInheritedSuffix": boolean,
    "clickThroughUrlSuffix": string
  },
  "defaultClickThroughEventTagProperties": {
    "overrideInheritedEventTag": boolean,
    "defaultClickThroughEventTagId": long
  },
  "creativeGroupIds": [
    long
  ],
  "creativeOptimizationConfiguration": {
    "optimizationModel": string,
    "optimizationActivitys": [
      {
        "floodlightActivityId": long,
        "floodlightActivityIdDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
        "weight": integer
      }
    ],
    "id": long,
    "name": string
  },
  "additionalCreativeOptimizationConfigurations": [
    {
      "optimizationModel": string,
      "optimizationActivitys": [
        {
          "floodlightActivityId": long,
          "floodlightActivityIdDimensionValue": dimensionValues Resource,
          "weight": integer
        }
      ],
      "id": long,
      "name": string
    }
  ],
  "lookbackConfiguration": {
    "clickDuration": integer,
    "postImpressionActivitiesDuration": integer
  },
  "createInfo": {
    "time": long
  },
  "lastModifiedInfo": {
    "time": long
  },
  "traffickerEmails": [
    string
  ],
  "externalId": string,
  "nielsenOcrEnabled": boolean,
  "adBlockingConfiguration": {
    "enabled": boolean,
    "overrideClickThroughUrl": boolean,
    "clickThroughUrl": string,
    "creativeBundleId": long
  },
  "defaultLandingPageId": long
}

Loading data into Amazon S3

To upload files you must first create an S3 bucket. Once you have a bucket you can add an object to it. An object can be any kind of file: a text file, data file, photo, or anything else. You can optionally compress or encrypt the files before you load them.

Keeping Campaign Manager data up to date

Now what? You've built a script that pulls data from the Campaign Manager API and loads it into your data warehouse, but what happens tomorrow when you have new data?

The key is to build your script in such a way that it can identify incremental updates to your data. Thankfully, many of the API results include fields like createInfo that allow you to identify records that are new since your last update (or since the newest record you've copied). Once you've take new data into account, you can set your script up as a cron job or continuous loop to keep pulling down new data as it appears.

Other data warehouse options

S3 is great, but sometimes you want a more structured repository that can serve as a basis for BI reports and data analytics — in short, a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics, or Panoply, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To Redshift, To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Azure Synapse Analytics, and To Panoply.

Easier and faster alternatives

If all this sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t be alarmed. If you have all the skills necessary to go through this process, chances are building and maintaining a script like this isn’t a very high-leverage use of your time.

Thankfully, products like Stitch were built to move data from Google Campaign Manager to Amazon S3 automatically. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Google Campaign Manager data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into your Amazon S3 data warehouse.