When I first started doing any type of analysis of Adwords, I began mainly by using Google Sheets and programatically pulling data in with Google Apps Script. That worked for a while, but at some point became very limiting. That’s when I began to use R more for my analysis.

In this series, I’d like to share with you how I do this. Today’s post will be about getting set up to begin your own analysis.

You can do this same process without any of the next steps, but for you own sanity, I DO NOT RECOMMEND IT! It is much easier to go with the programmatic method.

Questions to answer: If you can answer yes to these two questions then you’ll be able to follow the rest of this tutorial.

1. Do you currently have a My Client Center account with Google Adwords?
2. Do you currently have a Google Cloud account?

Steps to get started:

1. You’ll need to download the RAdwords package by Johannes Burkhardt.
   • Install it in your R enviornment with the command devtools::install_github('jburkhardt/RAdwords').
2. You’ll need to sign up for a Adwords developer token using your MCC account.
3. You’ll also need to sign up for a OAuth 2.0 Client I.D. Be sure to record your Client ID and Client Secret, you’ll use it when authorizing the RAdwords package. More details can be found here..

Once you have the package installed, have a developer token and Oauth access, you can begin by using the following commands:

library(RAdwords)
google_auth <- doAuth()

In the next post, we’ll look at some of the report types, the data you can pull from them and what you can do with it.