If you are looking at this post, you know about Scripts. AdWords scripts have been around for several years now so I really don't think they need any introduction. At this stage you should have taken the vital baby steps and are efficiently tracking your Quality Score, you've cleaned up your account and do not have any empty ad groups and you know how to see which of the competitors are on your tail quickly. That’s enough right? Well – maybe and maybe not. As I am sure you are aware, Google is always making new changes & updates. Well if you're anything like me, some of those updates just don’t suit you & you find the way Google manages the account makes me spend in areas you really don’t want to? Well – I am going to give you 5 more scripts to efficiently monitor that and ensure you don’t spend a penny where you don’t need to. Again click on title to be taken to the full script.
Do you remember the script that allows you to pause a campaign when it has reached a budget limit? Well, this one is similar, but it was created in defence against a Google dark art. A few years ago Google announced that they can overspend your budget by 2x – automatically. That’s a whole 100% more than what you set it. This nifty script circumvents that. Copy and paste this script into an empty Script editor and change what % it should be and the script will pause the campaign and label it, so you remember to set it back live as needed. ​
Another script to fight against another Google update. A couple of years ago Google started on a journey of changing what the Exact match type is (and yes – I don’t believe that journey is over yet). It could include plurals, the phrase in a different order, and other variations – that I did not like. Within some industries that can really change the customer intent. Our close variant script helps to fight against that unwanted traffic. It is a negative adding script that analyses which search terms have driven traffic to your website due to close variant, and it adds that search terms as a negative. You will also get a report of the new negatives that have been added so that you know exactly what changes have been made.
Now when you create a highly granular shopping campaign, some of the terms that match to certain products I have found just do not make sense. Depending on your product feed adding negatives on a regular basis for each of the ad groups you have created can be very time-consuming, but very much needed. Wouldn't it be great if you could define which terms directly show which products? Yes – that’s right, there is a script that allows you to keyword target your shopping products, ensuring only a term related to a product actually triggers the relevant product listing ad. Extra tip - when you are creating your file for it to analyse search terms based on click limits - if you want it to check search terms with zero clicks, make sure you enter "-1" in the relevant cell. You'll know which one when you get there!
Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) can be an excellent tool for ensuring you are showing for keywords that you haven't thought of that are highly relevant to your landing pages & website. You will usually find that because of all your hard work & optimisations that the keywords you have created into their campaigns and highly targeted ad groups have better click through rate and cost per click. So if you already have your keyword in the great campaign/ad group structure – surely you don’t want that coming through the DSA campaign. We have a script for that! This script will compare your DSA campaign and search campaigns – and if the keyword already exists in a campaign, adds it as an exact negative in your DSA campaign.
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With large accounts, it is vital to ensure that all your ads/keywords are being driven to live landing pages. Because whether they work or not – you are going to pay for that click. With this script, one of the first I was introduced to and loved, you will get a regular report of any URL in your account that is leading to a 404 error page. That way you can immediately update the URL, or pause/delete the keyword/ads affected. Saving you on a lot of possible wasted spend traffic.
Conclusion
There are plenty more intelligent scripts that do more to save you money, build reports, report anomalies in your website & fight against annoying Google ads updates. But get started on these ones, and you will feel like a ninja when you start digging into the more complicated ones. Here are 153 AdWord Scripts that will now be not daunting at all to get your teeth sunk into. Have fun.