Handle partial failures in Google Ads API batch mutate operations
domain: developers.google.com · 6 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Set partial_failure to true in your MutateAsync or batch mutate request; this allows successful operations in the batch to be applied even when others fail.
Check the top-level partial_failure_error field in the response; a non-null value indicates that at least one operation in the batch failed.
Iterate over the mutate_operations results and examine each result's status; failed operations return an error in the result's error field, while successful ones return the resource name or ID.
Decode the partial_failure_error using the GoogleAdsFailure proto to extract individual GoogleAdsError objects, each containing an error_code, message, and the operation_index identifying which input operation failed.
Log the operation_index alongside the original request payload so you can identify and resubmit the failed items without re-processing successful ones.
Do not retry the entire batch after a partial failure; extract only the failed operations by operation_index and submit them as a separate batch to avoid creating duplicates of already-successful operations.
Known gotchas
If partial_failure is set to false (the default), any single error in the batch causes the entire batch to roll back; enable partial_failure explicitly for production bulk operations to maximize throughput.
The operation_index in the error is a zero-based index into the original mutate_operations array; ensure your index tracking accounts for any reordering or filtering you applied before sending the request.
Partial failure errors are encoded as a serialized proto in the response; you must use the GoogleAdsFailure proto deserializer (available in the client libraries) rather than plain JSON parsing to extract individual error details.
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