// the find
googleads/googleads-python-lib
The Python client library for Google's Ads APIs
Official Google-maintained Python client for the Ad Manager SOAP API (formerly DFP). If you're building automation against Google's publisher ad platform — trafficking line items, pulling reports, managing inventory — this is the library you'd use. It's narrowly scoped: Ad Manager only, no Google Ads API.
The versioned example tree is genuinely useful — examples are organized by API version (v202511, v202602) and service, so you can find a working template for almost any operation without reading docs first. WSDL caching via zeep's SqliteCache is handled out of the box, which matters because parsing those WSDLs cold is slow. The library correctly separates auth concerns — service account, refresh token, and access token flows each have their own example. It's actively maintained by Google and tracks the quarterly API versioning cadence.
It still depends on oauth2client, which Google themselves deprecated years ago in favor of google-auth. Anyone who's hit the oauth2client/httplib2 dependency hell on a modern project knows this is a real friction point. The SOAP underpinning means you're working with zeep-generated objects that are awkward to inspect and serialize — debugging a failed request means reading XML envelopes, not clean Python dicts. The library dropped support for Google Ads API entirely (it was split out), so if you need both Ad Manager and Ads API in one project you're managing two separate auth stacks. Error messages from the SOAP layer are often cryptic SOAP faults that don't map cleanly to what actually went wrong.