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Dan Dryfhout is an avid digital marketer from Ontario. Dan loves snowboarding, mountain biking and in some occasions, long walks on the beach. He moved out west to better serve these passions, especially the beach walking...

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AdWords Automation: How to Increase Your Efficiency With Scripts!

AdWords Automation

Adwords Scripts are a mighty tool for advertisers! With nearly endless functions, scripts can help with an array of tasks such as ensuring final URLs are working, understanding which ad copy works best, and even changing keyword bids based on the weather patterns. Today I will highlight some of my favourite scripts that I like to use in the campaigns I manage.

AdWords Scripts and Automation

Bid On Weather Patterns

With many industries, demand for products can change based on the weather. For example, users may feel more inclined to shop online during rainy days instead of enjoying the outdoors. With this knowledge in hand, you can leverage the weather script in order to decrease bids on outdoor activities, and increase bids on the ecommerce opportunities. You can also get very granular with optimizations by implementing options such as varying degree of wind strength, or the amount of precipitation. You can find more about this script here.

Broken URLs

Website updates during a digital campaign can cause URLs on the site to change. This is problematic if you have paid ads pointing to those URLs, as you would essentially be paying to drive people to a dead end. Landing a user on a 404 page is obviously a frustrating user experience and results in wasted ad spend. With the Broken URL Script, final URLs can be checked hourly to ensure that the user is landing on a working page. Another benefit of this script is that the HTTP status codes can be changed as 404 errors aren’t the only issue prevalent when making website changes. The most popular codes that I look for are: 500, 503, 404, 403, and 401. For more information and many more useful scripts, I would strongly recommend Russell Savage’s website.

Master Negative List

Search query optimization is a common technique in Adwords and allows you to build up a list of keywords that are not relevant to the company, and also to exclude these specific keywords from your campaigns. Negative Keyword Lists can build up quickly, making it difficult to organize and tough to implement into different campaigns. With the master negative list script, Adwords can import negative keywords from a Google Doc. This allows you to easily monitor what keywords you are excluding across the accounts, and allows you to get creative with your cross exclusions. If you are an agency who deals with multiple industries, you may want to create a specific script for each industry category.

Advanced Budgets

The Advanced Budgets Script from Optmyzr is easily one of my favourites! This script is highly customizable and is easy to implement; however, but you need to be a paying Optmyzr customer to leverage it. This script allows you to define your overall budget, set which items to check in on, and also what your budget period is. This allows you to create a monthly budget for the whole account, or to create two different budgets based on specific campaigns. If you want to add new keywords into a campaign and you’re not sure how they will perform, you can also set a specific budget limit and this way you will get a notification for when they’ve spent their limit. I personally find the ultimate power is within the monthly budget style, in which I do not need to worry about what my media spend is for the last days of the month.

That’s it for now folks! I hope you’ll try out some of the scripts and AdWords automations that I have highlighted today. When the little things are automated it definitely allows me to focus on the bigger picture and to make the optimizations that only a human eye can see. What are your favourite AdWords scripts? Comment below!