Flights Feed

An inventory feed generator for airlines. Enables building, configuring and connecting route based inventory data in multiple languages into Search Ads 360. Inventory data generated by Flights feed enables advertisers to automate the creation of thousands of route based inventory campaigns, ad groups, and ad copies. The inventory feed can also be used to update business data on Search Ads 360.

More information on inventory management in SA360.

Overview

This is an Google Apps Script, Google Big Query based tool. An Apps Script is hosted on your Google Drive and orchestrates the process of multiplying and joining airline data sources via Big Query.

How it works

1. Apps Script picks up statically defined data (in Google Sheets) around enabled airline routes, country and city translations, landing page URLs etc.. and copies that data into BQ tables.
2. The apps script sets up query views for processing the data and triggers the BQ views to run asynchronously in sequence.
3. The output of the final view gets exported as a CSV file into Google Cloud Storage.
4. The feed generator script can be scheduled to run in Apps Script based on triggers, such as daily every hour. The script can be extended to listen to changes on the source sheet by the user to trigger an update on the BQ tables (data copy) and execute the BQ views.
5. Once the final feed CSV file is exported to Google Cloud Storage, contact SA360's support to help you connect it into your SA360 account.

Setup instructions

• Create a new Google Cloud Platform Project save the project ID generated in the cloud console for later configuration.

• Enable the following APIs on your Google Cloud project from the API Manager page:

  • Cloud Storage
  • Big Query

• Access your project's Big Query via https://bigquery.cloud.google.com/queries/[YOUR-PROJECT-ID] and create a new Data set.

• Create an empty sheet in your Google Drive and keep track of it's URL for later configuration

• Create a new Google Apps Script in your Google Drive and paste in all the source code files in this repository into their respective files in the script.

• Set the Apps Script to the correct Google Cloud project via Resources -> Cloud Platform project. Make sure to set it to the new Google Cloud project you just created

• Enable the BigQuery API (v3) via Resources -> Advanced Google Services.

• In order to configure your Apps Script, navigate to File -> Project properties and select the Script properties tab. In this section, you can set script wide key value pairs that can be used as a configuration for the script. Fill into the table the following properties:

  • cloudStorageDest - The final GCS destination where the generate feed CSV resides. Format example: gs://[YOUR-BUCKET-NAME]/[FEED-FILE-NAME].csv
  • bqDatasetID - Name of the BQ data set created in the previous steps
  • cloudProjectID - ID of the cloud project created in the previous steps
  • routesSheet - URL of the data source sheet for routes
  • cityTranslationsSheet - URL of the data source sheet for city
  • countryTranslationsSheet - URL of the data source sheet for city
  • countryLanguagesSheet - URL of the data source sheet for country languages
  • landingPagesSheet - URL of the data source sheet for landing pages
  • classesSheet - URL of the data source sheet for classes

Usage instructions

Initial data setup

• At this point, the script should be able to run.
• Before generating any data, the new sheet needs to be initialized with a structure and some data. To initialize the sheet with the recommended data structure, run the initSheet function from within the apps script.
• This will create the required tabs and columns needed for the script to run as intended.
• Fill in the airline specific data into the generates sheets. For more information on the columns, check the DATA.md file for data structure definitions to understand what each column is meant for.

Generating and updating the feed

• Once the data is filled into the sheet and ready to generate, there are mainly 2 Apps Script functions to run after this point:

  1. setup(): This function generates all the needed tables in Big Query based on the sheet's data structure and sets up the query views. The function should be ran only once on a new BQ data set, or in case the data structure changes. i.e. Columns changes or query views are updated.

  2. run(): This function copies all table data from the sheets into the BQ data set (overwrites existing table data in BQ) then triggers a run on the top BQ view, which as a result triggers the rest of the views to generate the final feed result. Once these queries are executed, the result gets delivered as a CSV into Cloud Storage via a BQ export (also triggered by this function). For frequest updates, this function can be either run manually, from a sheet (via custom menu) or through an Apps Script time trigger

• After generating the feed based on your data, contact your Google gTech or sales specialist to connect the generated CSV file to the requred SA360 advertiser account.

• More details on leveraging inventory feeds in SA360 can be found on the help center.

Disclaimer

This is not an official Google product.