Google Ads API sunset schedule is too aggressive

2 points

4 years ago

My company builds on top of the Google Ads API. We are having serious issues with the iteration speed of the API and the aggressive deprecation and sunset schedule. Every few months we get emails warning us that the version of the API that we are currently using is going to sunset shortly and we need to migrate to the latest version. For example we are currently on V9 of the API. We migrated to it almost as soon as it was released on November 3, 2021. The sunset date for this version of the API is February 9, 2022. This is a grand total of 3 months and 6 days between release and sunset.

Three months between release of an API version and sunset is insane to me. Luckily we are an agile startup and can switch to a new API version fairly quickly (when there aren't breaking changes, which sometimes there are). I have no idea how a bigger company who has to go through layers of QA, release planning, and red tape could possibly keep up. By the time you develop and launch support for a new version of the API you would literally have to start all over and work on upgrading to the next version.

You can see the release and sunset schedule on this page of the docs: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/sunset-dates

Here are a few of the release schedules:

Version: V7 Release Date: April 28, 2021 Sunset Date: September 8, 2021

Version: V8 Release Date: June 9, 2021 Sunset Date: November 3, 2021

Version: V9 Release Date: November 3, 2021 Sunset Date: February 9, 2022