This page explains how SimpliCity Real Estate uses the Google Ads API. It is published for transparency and for Google’s API review, and it describes an internal tool rather than a product we sell.
Who we are
SimpliCity Real Estate is a small independent residential real estate brokerage founded in 2015 and based in Lincoln, Nebraska. We serve buyers and sellers across southeast Nebraska. We earn our revenue from real estate commissions on the homes we help people buy and sell. We do not sell software, we do not sell advertising, and we do not sell data.
We advertise our own services in a single Google Ads account. We are an advertiser, not an agency. We do not manage advertising for any other business, and there are no client accounts involved anywhere in this application. The Google Ads manager account named in our API application was created only because Google requires a developer token to be issued from a manager account. It manages exactly one account, our own.
What we are building
An internal, read-only script that retrieves keyword search volume so we can decide which pages to write on this website.
Why we need it
We publish informational pages for people buying and selling homes in Lincoln: what houses actually sell for, what it costs to live here, which builders build in which neighborhoods, how Nebraska property tax exemptions work for disabled veterans. Until recently we chose those topics from intuition.
In August 2026 we checked that assumption and found it was wrong. We had been tracking 116 search phrases. Sixty-eight of them had no evidence that anyone searches them at all. They were phrases we had written to describe ourselves, not language real people type into a search box. Meanwhile the questions that genuinely bring people to us, things like average home price and cost of living, were not on our list.
We correct this today by opening Keyword Planner and typing phrases in by hand. That works, and it is how we found the problem, but it cannot be scheduled and it does not scale to a recurring check. API access lets the same lookups run on their own.
Exactly what we call, and what we do not
Services we intend to use:
- KeywordPlanIdeaService – historical search volume and keyword ideas for a list of phrases we supply.
- SearchTermViewService – the search terms that triggered our own ads, so we can learn how people really phrase things.
- CustomerService – resolving our own accessible customer ID when the script starts.
Services we will not use: we will not create, modify, pause or remove campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, budgets, bids or assets. We will not call any mutate operation at all. Our use is limited to read requests plus the keyword planning service above.
Volume is very low. We expect on the order of tens of requests per month, on a roughly quarterly schedule plus the occasional one-off lookup. There is a single user, the business owner, and no multi-tenant component.
How it works
A scheduled script on a private server sends our tracked list of phrases to the Google Ads API, receives search volume and competition for each one, and compares the result against the pages we have already published. It produces a plain-text report for the business owner in two parts: phrases we track that nobody actually searches, and phrases people do search that we are not writing for.
The tool already exists and runs today against two other sources: Google Search Console, using the same Google Cloud project, and Google Autocomplete. Neither of those returns a search-volume number, which is the specific gap the Google Ads API fills.
There is no user interface. The script is run on a schedule and its output is a text report read by one person.
Authentication and data handling
We authenticate with OAuth2 and a refresh token under our existing Google Cloud project, the same project already authorized for Search Console and Google Analytics read access for this business. Credentials live in an environment file on a private server and are never committed to source control.
The only data we retrieve is aggregate keyword volume and our own account’s search terms. No personal data, no end-user data, and no data belonging to any other advertiser is involved. Results are written to a local report. We do not resell, redistribute, or publicly expose Google Ads data.
Compliance summary
- Single advertiser, using the API for its own account only.
- Read-only. No mutate operations, so no possibility of unintended spend or campaign change.
- No reselling or redistribution of Google Ads data.
- No third-party, client, or agency accounts accessed.
- Expected call volume far below any published quota.
Contact
SimpliCity Real Estate, Lincoln, Nebraska
API contact: [email protected]
Phone: 402-796-6136
See also our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.