Our Guide to Scripts in Adwords

Google Ads allows you to add scripts onto an account under “Bulk Actions” in the main navigation.You can programmatically control your Google Ads data by implementing these scripts. Using simple JavaScript in a browser-based IDE – a software suite that combines basic tools needed to write and test software – you can automate common procedures and interact with data.
There are quite a few benefits to utilizing scripting on your accounts. Scripts can shave hours off the time you take to go through search term reports. Budgeting can also be tedious, whether it’s for the month, or even the day. Scripting can aid in this monotonous task. Ideally, you’d be able to watch your campaigns every minute of the day. With scripting, you can have some help managing the campaign 24/7. If a campaign hits its budget at 3am, you still have a script checking in to pause it. Scripting can even help with reporting. There are some scripts that create a visual heatmap of high performing days or hours.

So how do scripts work? Scripts create, edit, or remove items in your account using internal or external data to direct Javascript coding to make changes to, or report on your account. For example, you can scan keyword data and increase the CPC bids by 30% for all keywords that generated over 100 conversions last week. You can also utilize external conversion data to make campaign adjustments.

Many scripts are already created, all the user has to do is copy and paste and make adjustments relevant to their account. Some popular free script sites are Free Adwords Scripts, Brain Labs, and Google even offers free scripts Google Scripts. There are membership options
Here are some of our recommended scripts:

Budget Scripts

Google is able to spend an additional 100% of your daily budget. With this extra spend, managing a strict daily budget can be tricky. We recommend using a script like the one here. This script when implemented can scan your spend for the day, week, month, and pause when it hits a certain threshold. You can set it to run hourly to manage your budgets. This can save you time constantly checking budgets to make sure they don’t overspend. You also should make sure you are monitoring that the budget is being spent evenly throughout the month, but this script serves as a fail-safe to make sure the budget isn’t surpassed.

Pausing 0 Impression Keywords Script

When testing out keywords, you want to make sure that you’re only looking at active keywords running in the account. If a term is only cluttering the account without helping performance, it may be time to pause the term to “trim the fat” on the account. We wouldn’t recommend running this script daily or even weekly if you’re actively adding new terms. Before adding new keywords to test, you may want to run this script. It will take a look at all your terms and pause those that haven’t served any impressions at all – cleaning up your account for easier management.

Broken Link Checker

Have you ever suddenly received a notice that your ads or keywords have been disapproved because of a broken destination URL? When managing a client’s website, or even managing one yourself, it’s easy for another user to change the URL of a page or remove it without checking with the Ads team. This script can help stay on top of this and catch it before many users end up clicking an ad leading no where (wasting your bid). You will receive an email report that lets you know if there are any error codes coming from your landing page. This is another great safeguard to avoid broken links.

Although scripts may seem daunting, there are tons of resources out there for both paid and free scripts. Contact us at Legal Marketing Arm if you think your account can benefit from a script.