This post is part of our series, Get Your Time Back: A Little PPC Automation Goes A Long Way.
AdWords scripts offer a wide range of potential uses, from error flagging to reporting to bulk campaign management. Taking the lead beyond what automated rules can handle, scripts provide a powerful way to access behind-the-scenes controls in AdWords. You don’t even have to be a developer or understand Javascript, as countless prebuilt scripts exist to copy and paste into your account.
If you aren’t familiar with applying scripts to your account, here are instructions for getting started. In this post, I’ll highlight a few favorite scripts you can begin testing today.
Link Checker
Based on a schedule of your choice, this script will regularly scan accounts for broken ad URLs, preventing wasted money on ads leading to nonfunctional pages. While AdWords will generally disapprove ads going to 404 pages, some error pages may not be caught by the system. A Google spreadsheet will track the broken links, letting you know which ads need to be fixed. You can receive an email notification, either whenever the script runs or only when errors are caught.
See more details about configuring the Link Checker script. Note that Google provides options for both single and Manager account level, allowing agencies to check all accounts at once.
Flexible Budgets
When a client has a set monthly budget to spend, allocating that amount by the daily budget required in AdWords isn’t always an exact science. More search activity may occur on certain days of the week, or the majority of business may happen earlier in the month.
This script allows you to define a target amount to spend for the month and ensure that it’s distributed evenly. For instance, if you’re spending at a higher rate earlier in the month when more customers are searching, the script can turn the daily budget down later in the month to ensure you don’t overspend.
See the script along with details on configuration.
Quality Score Tracker
While quality score shouldn’t be an end-all metric for PPC management, monitoring long term increases or decreases can help diagnose AdWords account health. Pinpointing specific keywords that have seen drastic changes can highlight where you should focus for optimization. This script tracks historical quality score and shows change over time for keywords you select. In addition, you can see graphs breaking down aggregate data for quality score across your account.
Get the script and see detailed instructions for setting it up at PPC Epiphany.
Hourly Bidding Script
This script helps to overcome the limitations in AdWords’ built-in hourly bidding settings, which only let you configure up to 6 bidding blocks of time in a day. Especially in larger accounts, performance can vary hour by hour. Setting granular bid adjustments lets you take maximum advantage of peak times, while lowering bids when users are less likely to convert.
This script will automatically reset bids every hour to ensure that you can effectively have bid adjustments correlated with 24 separate hour blocks each day. You start by building a spreadsheet with your desired bid adjustments (which you can adjust over time as performance changes), and the script will pull from what you’ve configured.
See the script and configuration instructions at Brainlabs.
Start Using Scripts
If you haven’t yet used AdWords scripts, take the time to set up one (or more) of these in an account today. Spend a little time now setting them up and save a lot of time later! If you are using scripts, let us know about your favorite ones in the comment section below.
Don’t forget to check out the rest of our series, Get Your Time Back: A Little PPC Automation Goes A Long Way.
