A change to currency formatting in report downloads

Tuesday, November 02, 2010


If you're using the new AdWords API ReportDefinitionService, you may have noticed that monetary values in reports are returned as conventional currency instead of micros. At the request of the developer community, we'll be changing the format to micros on February 1, 2011 to make reporting more consistent with other AdWords API services.

A micro value is equal to one million times the conventional currency value, and is a standard we use throughout the AdWords API (including v13 reports) to represent money. For example, values currently returned as "1.50" (which would represent $1.50 for a USD account) will be returned as 1500000.

To help you with this change, we've introduced a new HTTP header flag (available immediately) that allows you to explicitly request the micros format. If you've written code that expects conventional currency values in reports, it's important that you update your code to expect micros and set the HTTP header "returnMoneyInMicros: true" when requesting a report download. Additionally, if you're just beginning to migrate from v13 reports, you should set this header on all your download requests.

To learn more about the new way to run reports via the API, see our blog post from this summer. As always, please post questions to the AdWords API Forum.

- Eric Koleda, AdWords API Team