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Local

Prerequisites

  • Google Ads API access and google-ads.yaml file - follow documentation on API authentication.
  • Python 3.9+

  • Service account created and service account key downloaded in order to write data to BigQuery.

  • Once you downloaded service account key export it as an environmental variable

    export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=path/to/service_account.json

  • If authenticating via service account is not possible you can authenticate with the following command: 

    gcloud auth application-default login

Installation

In order to run App Reporting Pack locally please follow the steps outlined below:

  1. clone this repository 
    git clone https://github.com/google-marketing-solutions/app-reporting-pack
cd app-reporting-pack
  2. (Recommended) configure virtual environment if you starting testing the solution: 
    python -m venv app-reporting-pack
source app-reporting-pack/bin/activate

  3. install dependencies: pip install -r --require-hashes app/requirements.txt

  4. Run run-local.sh script in a terminal to generate all necessary tables for App Reporting Pack:

./app/run-local.sh

It will guide you through a series of questions to get all necessary parameters to run the scripts:

  • account_id - id of Google Ads MCC account (no dashes, 111111111 format)
  • BigQuery project_id - id of BigQuery project where script will store the data (i.e. my_project)
  • BigQuery dataset - id of BigQuery dataset where script will store the data (i.e. my_dataset)
  • Reporting window - Number of days (i.e. 90) for performance data fetching.
  • end date - last date from which you want to get performance data (i.e., 2022-12-31). Relative dates are supported see more.
  • Ads config - path to google-ads.yaml file. After the initial run of run-local.sh command it will generate app_reporting_pack.yaml config file with all necessary information to be used for future runs. When you run ./run-local.sh next time it will automatically pick up the created configuration.

Schedule running run-local.sh as a cronjob

When running run-local.sh scripts you can specify two options which are useful when running queries periodically (i.e. as a cron job):

  • -c <config>- path to app_reporting_pack.yaml config file. Comes handy when you have multiple config files or the configuration is located outside of current folder.
  • -q - skips all confirmation prompts and starts running scripts based on config file.

run-local.sh support --legacy command line flag which is used to generate dashboard in the format compatible with existing dashboard. If you're migrating existing datasources --legacy option might be extremely handy.

If you installed all requirements in a virtual environment you can use the trick below to run the proper cronjob:

* 1 * * * /usr/bin/env bash -c "source /path/to/your/venv/bin/activate \
  && bash /path/to/app-reporting-pack/app/run-local.sh \
  -c /path/to/app_reporting_pack.yaml -g /path/to/google-ads.yaml -q"

This command will execute App Reporting Pack queries every day at 1 AM.