Google to enforce EU Political ads rules in ads API and scripts

ByEditor

Google is tightening compliance ahead of the EU’s new political advertising regulation, which takes effect in October.

Starting Sept. 3, enforcements in the Google Ads API and Google Ads scripts will require advertisers to self-declare whether campaigns contain EU political ads – or risk failed API calls and blocked campaign updates.

Why we care. Advertisers running campaigns in the EU need to update their workflows now, or they could face disruptions in campaign creation, targeting changes, and experiment scheduling.

What’s new:

  • A new campaign field – contains_eu_political_advertising – is now supported in API versions v19.2, v20.1, and v21.
  • Values include: CONTAINS_EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING, DOES_NOT_CONTAIN_EU_POLITICAL_ADVERTISING, and UNSPECIFIED.
  • From Sept. 3, creating or updating campaigns without this declaration will trigger errors in both the API and Ads scripts.
  • Targeting changes, proximity/location edits, and experiment scheduling will also fail if the declaration is missing.

The enforcement timeline:

Bottom line. Advertisers using the Google Ads API or scripts must implement the new self-declaration field before Sept. 3 to avoid campaign disruptions. Any campaign marked as political will automatically be blocked from serving in the EU later in the month.

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About the Author

Anu Adegbola

Anu Adegbola has been Paid Media Editor of Search Engine Land since 2024. She covers paid search, paid social, retail media, video and more. In 2008, Anu’s career started with delivering digital marketing campaigns (mostly but not exclusively Paid Search) by building strategies, maximising ROI, automating repetitive processes and bringing efficiency from every part of marketing departments through inspiring leadership both on agency, client and marketing tech side. Outside editing Search Engine Land article she is the founder of PPC networking event – PPC Live and host of weekly podcast PPC Live The Podcast.
She is also an international speaker with some of the stages she has presented on being SMX (US, UK, Munich, Berlin), Friends of Search (Amsterdam, NL), brightonSEO, The Marketing Meetup, HeroConf (PPC Hero), SearchLove, BiddableWorld, SESLondon, PPC Chat Live, AdWorld Experience (Bologna, IT) and more.

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