SEM Development

YSM and Google’s account management APIs look incredibly different but do, essentially, the same thing. That is, allow you to manage your SEM campaigns through a web service. Ask Jeeves has a sponsored listings product with an API for larger advertisers and MSN will soon be releasing it sponsored search product. So, how are you going to keep a similar programming interface across all of these products? I’ll tell you how I’m doing it.

Essentially, these web services boil down to a CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Destroy) service for your search advertising campaigns. So, why not create a class that does all of these things for each part of a campaign?

Firstly, I want to express the way of handling CRUD that is the most intuitive to me. I use four methods in all of my classes. There are:

new() or new(ID):
Instantiates an empty object or tries to instantiate a populated object if an ID is supplied. Dies if the ID does not exist.

exists(ID):
Instantiates an object with the ID supplied or returns false.

remove():
Deletes the object.

save():
Creates the object if none exists yet or updates it if it already exists.

For Google, I’ve written 5 classes:

• Account
• Campaign
• AdGroup
• Creative
• Keyword

For YSM, there are only 3 classes:

• Account
• Category
• Listing

This allows for code that looks kind of like this (in Perl, by the way):

#Get the ad group
my @ags = Google::AdGroup->getAll;
my $ag = pop @ags;



#Make the keyword
my $kw = new Google::Keyword;
$kw->maxCpc(40000); #microns, remember
$kw->text('somethin');
$kw->destinationUrl('http://www.example.com');



#Save the keyword in the ad group
$ag->addKeyword($kw);


More intuitive, don’t you think?