How To Integrate With Google Custome Audience

• What is Google Custom Audience
• Flow
• Pseudo Code

What is Google Custom Audience

Google custom audience is a great tool for advertisers to pin point ads to existence customers they have. You can easily filter the audiece on your end and then create the audience on Google Ads.

With the above, Google provide an option to extend your reach to "similar audiences". Google's algorithm will find audience who are similar to the audience you provided.

So if you have an audience of users who are Apple fans and purchase online a lot. Google will probably be able to find more users like that.

Flow

To be able to create a custom audience through api calls there are several steps that needs to be done.

You will need to create a "project" on console.developers.google.com

You will need to create a "credentials" for your project on console.developers.google.com/apis/credentials?project=PROJECT_NAME_HERE There are three types of "credentials": API key, Oauth client ID, Service account. I won't go over all of them as I have use them, as I use only the "Oauth client ID" as I needed to get access from different google accounts users.

Now you will need to create the flow for "Oauth client ID". That means we need to let users open a spefcific url with our app id and redirect uri. After the users approve our app, they will get redirected back to our app.

On the redirection back, google will provide a token that we will need to use for getting the "long term token" (refresh token). We will store the refresh token for future use for our api calls.

After we got the above token we can start doint our api calls with any user interaction.

Pseudo Code

I was initially thinking on adding code, but the code will change a lot between different languages. So not sure how useful that will be, but I'll just post some snippets with the language I used for that proejct.

    public function removeList($listId)
    {
        $userListService = $this->getUserListService();
        $userList = new CrmBasedUserList($listId);
        $userList->setStatus('CLOSED');
        
        $operation = new UserListOperation();
        $operation->setOperand($userList);
        $operation->setOperator(Operator::SET);

        $result = $userListService->mutate([$operation]);
        return $result;
    }

    /**
     * Undocumented function
     *
     * @param [type] $name
     * @param [type] $desc
     * @return UserListReturnValue
     */
    public function createList($name, $desc)
    {
        $userListService = $this->getUserListService();
        $userList = new CrmBasedUserList();
        $userList->setName($name.' '.date('m/d/Y h:i:s a', time()));
        $userList->setDescription($desc);

        $userList->setMembershipLifeSpan(30);
        $userList->setUploadKeyType(CustomerMatchUploadKeyType::CONTACT_INFO);

        $operation = new UserListOperation();
        $operation->setOperand($userList);
        $operation->setOperator(Operator::ADD);

        $result = $userListService->mutate([$operation]);
        return $result;
    }

    public function removeUsersFromList($listId, array $members)
    {
        $userListService = $this->getUserListService();
        $mutateMembersOperation = $this->getAlterListUsersOperation($listId, $members);
        $mutateMembersOperation->setOperator(Operator::REMOVE);
        $result = $userListService->mutateMembers([
            $mutateMembersOperation
        ]);
        return $result;
    }

    public function addUsersToList($listId, array $members)
    {
        $userListService = $this->getUserListService();
        $mutateMembersOperation = $this->getAlterListUsersOperation($listId, $members);
        $mutateMembersOperation->setOperator(Operator::ADD);
        $result = $userListService->mutateMembers([
            $mutateMembersOperation
        ]);
        return $result;
    }

    /**
     * validates if we can get authorized with google.
     * Returns true if so, or throws an exception.
     * @throws \Exception
     * @return bool
     */
    public function validate()
    {
        $res = $this->createList('cordial verify', 'marketplace verify, this can get removed');   
        return $res;
    }


    protected function getAlterListUsersOperation($listId, array $members)
    {
        $mutateMembersOperation = new MutateMembersOperation();
        $operand = new MutateMembersOperand();
        $operand->setUserListId($listId);

        // Add members to the operand and add the operation to the list.
        $operand->setMembersList($members);
        $mutateMembersOperation->setOperand($operand);
        return $mutateMembersOperation;
    }

    protected function getUserListService()
    {
        return $this->adWordsServices->get($this->session, AdwordsUserListService::class);
    }