One of the biggest down-sides aspects of Google Ads campaign management is the time we often have to spend in labour-heavy, manual tasks.
Whether that’s reporting, bid management, or ad monitoring, there are a few things we just wish we could automate.
Luckily, if you’re familiar with Google Ads scripts, you can do just that – and you can actually use them for about anything you’d like.
In this post, we’ll cover 7 of the scripts we most commonly use in our accounts and why you should give them a try, too.
Let’s get to it.
What Are Google Ads Scripts?
Google Ads Scripts are snippets of code you can add to your accounts that automate different aspects of your campaigns and help with account management processes such as bid management, quality score tracking, search query mining, or reporting.
There are plenty of scripts available out there that can help you out with a lot of different processes.
Why Should You Use Them?
As Google has explained, these scripts allow you to create, edit or erase items from your account.
They quickly go through your account and uncover optimization opportunities that a busy campaign manager might have missed.
By automating run-of-the-mill processes and simplifying your account’s data for you, scripts allow you to focus your time on what’s actually important and save time and money for you, or your clients.
How to Use Google Ad Scripts
Now, it all seems great but how do you actually use these scripts?
If you’re not used to code, or come from a coding background, scripts might seem scary at first. However, unless you want to be developing your own scripts, these can be used by anyone with ease.
Access the Script Panel
To start, access the scripts panel under “Tools & Settings > Bulk Actions > Scripts”.
Once in there, you can click on the plus “+” icon on the top and create your first script.
Input Your Settings
You will then need to follow some simple steps before you’re ready to run.
- Name your script: this is usually the name of the script you’re using. You can change its name to something you like, though.
- Paste the script: once you’ve copied the script from the author’s page, just paste it into the box.
- Authorise the script: authorise the script to access your account and to make changes on your behalf. Make sure you only run scripts from trusted sources.
- Preview: before you run the script, make sure you hit the “Preview” button and check if any error pops up.
Set Your Script’s Frequency
Finally, you’ll need to specify how frequently you want to run your script.
This varies between each script – some are required to run automatically everyday, others will only need to run whenever you want them to.
This should be detailed on the script’s instructions.
7 Best Google Ad Scripts
There are plenty of ready-to-use scripts to choose from, and we’ve tried quite a few of them.
In this post, we’ll go over 7 scripts we commonly use and detail exactly why you should, too.
1) Quality Score Tracker
Our list starts with one of our most commonly used scripts: the Quality Score Tracker.
Quality score is one of Google’s most important metrics, yet despite Google’s efforts to improve quality score reporting by allowing advertisers to see ad relevance, expected CTR and Landing Page experience, it still isn’t possible to analyze the evolution of your account’s quality score on a daily basis over a specific period of time.
Now, since quality score has a direct impact on your CPC, it is an important metric to keep a close eye on.
By using this script, you can easily see the impact of your optimizations on a day-to-day basis, on an easy to comprehend dashboard hosted on Google Sheets.
What we love about it is that not only does it allow you to look at your account’s quality score evolution over time, but it does so by analyzing your weighted quality score – and not just the average of all keywords. scri
For instructions on how to use this script, check out how this script works and how it allows you to visualize quality score data.
2) Ad Component Report
Have you ever wondered why a particular ad is working well, when you have other similar ads that are underperforming?
It could be that a particular component of that ad – whether that’s one of the headlines, or a description – that’s consistently outperforming other ones across different campaigns and keywords.
But which component is that, and how can you replicate it?
The Ad Component Report script, created by Frederick Vallaeys, goes through your account and analyzes which elements in your ads are the ones responsible for making your ads rise above the noise.
This allows you to then combine the best performing components into one single ad, or include them in a responsive search ad.
This is also great to clean up your house and keep a lower amount of well-performing ads as opposed to a large amount of average-performing ads.
You can find the instructions on how to use this script in its’ original source at Search Engine Land.
3) URL Checker
This is not only a useful script but it can help you save a lot of money.
Campaigns go hand-in-hand with the website which is the last – and most important – stop on the users’ path.
But websites are constantly evolving and pages get created and deleted all the time. This is, unfortunately, out of your control, and without realising it you might end up redirecting your users to deleted pages that generate 404 errors.
This causes you to loose traffic and worst of all, money.
This script goes through your ads and identifies broken links, preventing you from sending users into a blank page. More than broken links, if set up in a specific way, the script can also signal pages in which the content has changed, making the page no longer relevant for your campaign.
This is the case with product pages with “discontinued product” or “out of stock” messages, for example.
Here’s where you can find the script for the link checker.
4) Duplicate Query Checker
A duplicated query is a search term that is present across two (or more) different ad groups, or campaigns.
In other words, it’s a search query that has been triggered by different keywords.
But why is that a bad thing?
The very short explanation is that by having duplicated queries, you lose control over which ad the user should see when searching for that query – which might result in lower quality scores, and get in the way of relevancy.
To make matters worse, Google doesn’t exactly make it easy to detect these duplicate search queries. With Google Ads Editor, you can easily identify duplicate keywords – but what about duplicate search queries?
Fortunately, the very smart people at BrainLabs have come up with an incredibly easy way to do exactly that with the Duplicate Query Checker script.
This awesome script identifies repeated queries among ad groups and organizes the information in a spreadsheet so you can easily see if and where that query is repeated.
You can access the script and check it’s installation instructions here.
5) Pause Ads With Low CTR
Yet another simple, but effective script, this script is a major time-saver for account managers-
Usually best for larger accounts with too many ad variations to manually handle, this script quickly analyzes your running ads and pauses the ones with low CTR, according to your benchmarks, while making sure at least one ad variation will be left enabled.
Combine this script with a custom rule within the Google Ads Editor rule to find ad groups with only one ad enabled, and you’ll have found yourself a time efficient way to optimize your ads.
Just make sure you review the ads paused by the script often to make sure you didn’t pause any ads with low CTR’s but decent conversion rates.
6) 24 Hour Bidding Schedule
We know, automation is taking over a lot of a campaign managers’ daily optimization tasks – including bidding.
However, for the old-schoolers and control-freaks like us out there, it’s good to have that extra control with our manual bids.
Yet another script by BrainLabs, the 24-Hour Bidding Schedule allows you to customize bids across the entire 24-hour window within every single day of the week.
In some cases, there are accounts that have specific windows where conversions are more likely to happen. This is especially true for lead generation accounts that work only during office-hours, or other accounts that depend on external factors to adjust their bids – such as sports gambling operators, that need to adjust bids on ads depending on real-time results.
Unfortunately, Google Ads only allows you to set six different bidding schedules – so if you do want to adjust bids frequently, this can become extremely time-consuming.
With this script, you can link your account to a spreadsheet where you’re able to set the bid adjustments for every single hour, on any given day of the week.
What’s not to love?
You can find the script and its instructions here.
7) N-Gram
Last, but definitely not the least, we bring you what is likely the most advanced script in this list – and one of the most useful ones, too.
An N-Gram is a word sequence where N stands for the number of words within that work. A three-letter word contains multiple different n-grams.
Let’s take the search query “best productivity software”.
- Two 2-grams: “best productivity” and “productivity software”
- One 3-gram: “best productivity software”
The script breaks down all search queries within the account in different n-grams, and adds up impressions, clicks, cost, and conversions for each one.
But why is this useful to know?
By looking at the n-grams within your account, you’ll be able to find different non-converting search queries that you can exclude from your account and save a lot of precious investment.
Furthermore, you can identify top performers and add them into your account – or plug them directly into your ads for added relevance.
You can get started with the N-Gram script here.
BONUS SCRIPT!
The 24 hour bidding schedule script is pretty awesome on its own but in order to know which days and hours to bid higher, you need to know which schedules convert better.
That’s where the Hours of Days Bidding Heat Maps comes in. This script uses heatmaps to help you visualize conversion schedules and show you which time periods on which days of the week convert better and which convert less.
See how this script presents the data it collects.
Closing Thoughts
All these scripts and many others available out there were created with the purpose of simplifying the daily processes of Google Ads campaign managers.
With automation gaining more momentum by the day, these scripts can be a great ally to complement your management processes, and leave you with more time to focus on other tasks that take your marketing efforts to the next level.
What are some of your favorite Google Ads Scripts?
