Ad groups, budgets, excel sheets, tracking keywords – managing a PPC campaign is a full-time job. But it shouldn’t be – that’s not the only thing you hired your marketing manager for.
How can you have a successful Adwords campaign if you don’t stay on top of every detail? You can’t, but you can automate the most monotonous tasks.
Using AdWords scripts will free up your marketing employee to do other things, like write high-quality copy. They will no longer dread spending the first day of every week a slave to the Adwords campaigns page.
Keep reading to learn more about AdWords scripts and why you should use them below.
What are Adwords Scripts?
Essentially, they’re online software programs that automate a task related to your Google PPC campaign. It’s all code that some developer came up with that handles “when A, then B” type situations.
If you’re not spending your entire budget, and you have a budget script enabled, it can fix that on its own. Yes, you have to install it and decide the tasks it does at first, but then it’s relatively pain-free.
Installing and setting up the scripts is user-friendly as well. You don’t need anything but entry-level Java knowledge to figure it out. What you do need to figure out is which script is right for you.
We’ll go over specific script types in a moment, but first take a minute to assess your current Adwords situation. If you’re not the one that manages it, ask the employee that does what their pain points are.
Once you know that, you know which scripts you need to prioritize. How could they be using their time better if these repetitive tasks were taken care of?
A Word of Caution
When you talk to this employee about automating PPC tasks, make sure you don’t make them think you’re phasing them out. This is to help them do more with their time, not to automate their job.
Unless it’s your plan to phase humans out of marketing entirely, which we wouldn’t recommend. If that’s your plan, be kind and let the employee know what to expect.
What Type of Scripts Exist?
Take a look at your budget, your pain points from your employee, and your marketing goals. How do the pain points impede your success? Maybe your employee spends so much time reading Adwords reports that they aren’t writing as-long blog articles.
You know that blog articles impact SEO, so it’s important to get their energy back there. You should look for a script that makes results easier to gather and understand.
Or, perhaps your pain point is that you waste time chasing down problems with broken links. Or you think everything is fine and it turns out your campaign was accidentally turned off for a month.
Scripts can help with all these things. Check out this big table of Adwords scripts for a more comprehensive list.
Script Examples
If you’re wondering where to start, that’s okay. Adwords is a complex animal. Here are a few of our favorite starter scripts.
Auction Insights
When you first start out using Adwords, the auction system is one of the hardest things to understand. Someone can outspend you, but you can still rank higher than them for the same search terms?
Whenever it feels like Google doesn’t make any sense – try to remember it’s because they write and then don’t distribute their own rule book.
Anyway, there’s a script that gives auction insights on your campaigns. With it, you can spend less time starting at competitors websites and wondering how they ranked above you.
This script not only gives you insight for your own campaigns and auctions, but it gives your competitor information as well. That’s something that would take an employee at least two days to put together – competently automated.
Pricing Updates Scripts
Imagine that you’ve set up sixteen different campaigns, and now you just lowered your prices on all the items. Do you really want to go back through and change every single copy text?
We wouldn’t. That’s what this Adwords script was developed for. It’s not quite as easy to use as the other beginning scripts, but if your prices fluctuate or you have a lot of sales, it’s worth figuring out.
The script doesn’t work with Adwords UI.
Campaign Pausing Script
Finally, our last featured script will not only save you time and employee-pay money but direct money too. This script only cares about one thing, and that’s your maximum monthly budget.
If you forget to set parameters or turn a campaign on accidentally – this script can shut everything off. Once you’ve reached your maximum spend for the month, it pauses all campaigns.
Unfortunately, it’s only text and basic ad campaigns right now. We’re sure the developers are working on an update, but you can’t use it to pause photo or video campaigns at the moment.
Wrapping Up
The best Google Adwords scripts advice that we can give you is to spend time finding your pain points. Whether that’s alone or with an employee, you want the automation programs to save you time – not cost you more trying to figure them out.
Once you install the first couple of scripts, keep an eye on your ad spend budget. Is it lower or more consistent than usual? How are your click numbers?
Keep in contact with your marketing employee, if you have one, and ask them what kind of time the script has freed up. What are they doing instead?
Finally, remember that your Adwords account is constantly growing and changing – and it should be. Keep an eye on it and the current trends – which you can read about here.
