Google Ads API vs Snapchat Ads API

Google Ads API

Test accounts are free and need no approval, and validate_only checks a change without running it. Production access needs a Google Cloud project approved at Explorer level or above and a person to set up OAuth. One OAuth scope covers both reads and writes. The official MCP server is read-only, self-hosted and at version 0.0.4.

Snapchat Ads API

The docs are served as Markdown with an llms.txt index, rate limits are published as 20 requests a second per app and 10 per token, and test ad accounts never serve live ads. No OpenAPI specification, status page, SLA, idempotency key or Ads API SDK was found, and one OAuth scope covers both reads and writes.

Google Ads API

1. Send validateOnly: true on a mutate first. It returns errors without making the change. Batch jobs don't support it
2. Create campaigns with status PAUSED and enable them in a separate step, since an enabled campaign with a budget can spend
3. Send login-customer-id (digits only, no hyphens) when you reach a client account through a manager account
4. A failed request still counts against the daily operation quota. Paging with a valid next_page_token doesn't
5. Wait at least 12 hours between account budget changes on one account, and use the Data Manager API for new Customer Match or offline conversion work

Snapchat Ads API

1. Refresh the access token every 60 minutes with the refresh token. An expired token returns 401 with WWW-Authenticate: Bearer error="invalid_token"
2. Create a test ad account with "test": true and build there first, and create campaigns with "status": "PAUSED"
3. Change one field with PATCH (JSON Patch). A PUT that omits attributes resets them to their defaults
4. Send money as micro-currency, where 1.00 of the account currency is 1,000,000
5. Page lists with limit (50 to 1,000) and follow paging.next_link. Use async=true for large stats pulls, since an oversized response fails with E9001 and a retry does not help