4 Ways to Use Automated Rules in Google Adwords

Google AdWords has a powerful feature that even the most seasoned PPC managers underutilize or let go by the wayside altogether – Automated Rules. AdWords scripts fall into the category of automation, but if scripts seem like a daunting task and beyond your level of comfort, you can still take advantage of automation features that are natively baked into the AdWords interface. There are hundreds of ways you can use these to run many areas of your account on autopilot (not our recommendation). Since we believe in a healthy mix of automation and human intervention, let’s talk about 4 powerful ways you can use automated rules today!

1. Change campaign budgets by day of the week

This awesome tip comes from AgencyPPC’s How To Set Up Automated Rules In Google AdWords. These guys regularly put out quality PPC tips on their digital marketing blog. I highly recommend you check it out.

Let’s say you’ve been running your campaigns for a while and you have some historical data to work with. You’ve noticed a trend that your conversion rate and cost per conversion are far better on Mondays than any other day of the week. With automated rules, you can set up a budget increase for Monday morning, then set up a decrease for Monday night. Unless you are changing the budget of these campaigns frequently, try adjust your bids by dollar amounts rather than percentages to avoid slight changes week after week.

2. Change keyword bids based on performance

Automated rules are a great way to manage your keyword bids very precisely. For example, you may want to raise bids based on how many conversions they have had in the last week or month. Or perhaps, keywords below a certain position or search impression share could use a bump up in bids. Another great use-case would be to slightly lower all keyword bids if your campaign has hit its budget, allowing you to maximize click volume to that campaign.

3. Time sensitive messaging in your ads

Have you ever stayed up to change ad text for a sale that’s ending or some other time sensitive event? Those days are over. Simply create a rule to pause text ads that contain certain words, display urls, or final urls. You can use this same logic to enable ads that contain similar criteria. We like to keep this in consideration when writing time sensitive ads in the first place (i.e. all ad texts around a certain promotion will either have the same display url or “25% off” language). To take it a step further, create your new ads beforehand and pause them. Then, set up a rule to enable those ads at the same time as the others are being paused.

4. Trigger an email based on performance

If you want to know when your account is behaving abnormally (good or bad), you can trigger an email for such events. This can be done for performance at the campaign, ad group, or keyword level, so almost any metric can be the trigger. This is especially useful if you want to be able to make manually changes based on events in almost real-time. Maybe, you have an abnormal amount of conversion one day because of something happening in the world (news article, etc.) and you want to be aware of it, but not necessarily act on it until you’ve assessed. Triggering an email sometimes a better option than automatically triggering a reaction.

The Possibilities Are Endless

These 4 methods are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the power and flexibility of automated rules. For even more advanced automation or data extraction, AdWords scripts are an excellent option, but require a bit more involvement to get set up. For most cases and users, Google AdWords’ native automated rules can accomplish almost all the major triggers one needs to get started with automation.

Comments are closed.