The customer is at the top of the adCenter hierarchy; all advertising activity is organized by customer.

An account is the highest organizational level in Microsoft adCenter and the means by which advertising campaigns are managed and billed. Each customer can have one or more accounts. The adCenter API accounts are created by the Microsoft adCenter API Support Team.

A campaign is a group of ad groups that share one budget and run during a specified period of time. Each account can include one or more campaigns. An example of a campaign is "Holiday Toy Promotion."

An ad group is a grouping of individual advertisements. Separate ad groups within a campaign help distinguish ads in meaningful ways. For example, a "Holiday Toy Promotion" campaign might contain ad groups named "Toy Plane Ads" and "Doll Ads." Each ad group is associated with a campaign. Campaigns can have one or more ad groups.

Note:
The adCenter user interface uses the phrase ad group instead of order. Because many of the version 4 adCenter API element names use order (such as AdCenterOrder), the API documentation uses ad group and order interchangeably.

An ad is an individual advertisement that is presented to a user. An ad group consists of one or more ads. For search advertisements, each ad is associated with one or more keywords. All keywords in an ad group are associated with all the ads in that ad group.

A keyword is a word that, either singly or grouped with other keywords as a keyword phrase, causes an ad to be displayed when it matches criteria entered by a customer.

Note:
The adCenter user interface uses the phrase keyword instead of order item. Because many of the version 4 adCenter API element names use order item (as in AdCenterOrderItem), the API documentation uses keyword and order item interchangeably.

The adCenter API provides Web services, such as the Campaign Management Web service, that can create and modify the entities that correspond to campaigns, ad groups, ads, and so on. For example, the AddCampaigns service operation is used to create a campaign. The AddCampaigns service operation uses an array of Campaign objects that corresponds to a set of campaigns in the object model.

The following figure shows how the object model entities, such as a campaign, relate to the adCenter API entities, such as the Campaign object. The items within boxes show the adCenter API entities; the items to the left of the boxes show the corresponding adCenter API elements.

Object Model Entities

The AdCenterAccount object represents a Microsoft adCenter account. You can call the GetAccounts service operation to determine your account identifiers. They are used by various service operations, such as AddCampaigns.

The Campaign object represents an adCenter campaign. Create campaigns by calling the AddCampaigns service operation. Update campaigns by calling the UpdateCampaigns service operation.

The AdGroup object represents an ad group. Create ad groups by calling the AddAdGroups service operation. Update ad groups by calling the UpdateAdGroups service operation. You can delete ad groups by calling the DeleteAdGroups service operation.

Targeting is handled at the ad group level. Targets are created by the AddTarget service operation. For more information about targeting, see Ad Targeting.

The TextAd object represents an adCenter text advertisement. Create ads by calling the AddAds and UpdateAds service operations, respectively. You can delete ads by calling the DeleteAds service operation.

The Keyword object represents a keyword and its bid information. Create keywords by calling the AddKeywords service operation. Update keywords by calling the UpdateKeywords service operation. You can delete keywords by calling the DeleteKeywords service operation.

Concepts