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Welcome to Google Ads for Grown Ups, the podcast that helps PPC advertisers get beyond the basics and boost Google Ads performance. I am your host Nils, and I am here to share my experiences in optimizing Google Ads.
Hey PPC friends! Welcome to Google Ads for Grown Ups, the podcast that helps PPC advertisers get beyond the basics and boost Google Ads performance. I'm your host Nils and I'm here to share my experiences in optimizing Google Ads. This is episode one, why each and every Google Ads account should be running scripts. Yes, it's true.
Nils:Google is adding a lot of automations to the Google Ads platform to optimize your account performance and reduce some of the work in managing our accounts. Think dynamic search ads that reduce the work involved with keyword research, keyword targeting, smart bidding that removes the Excel calculations for bid management, auto generated headlines and descriptions to remove our writer's block, AI generated images, videos, etc. These are all good, but the truth is that none of these shiny features can save your account from actual real life threats. Human mistakes that spike CPCs, broken websites that send clicks nowhere, overspending of budgets, bad conversion data that throws off the smart bidding, bad placements that violate your brand safety, the list goes on and on. And that's exactly where Google Ads scripts go in.
Nils:It's the main reason that I'm convinced every account should be running Google Ads scripts. Scripts prevent costly mistakes for each and every account. A small set of the right scripts alerts you before a minor issue in your account becomes a 5 figure disaster. Before we dive into the concrete examples, a short introduction on scripts. Google Ads scripts, they are basically pieces of JavaScript code that run inside the Google Ads platform that are able to analyze and manipulate your Google Ads account.
Nils:Now don't worry if you have no experience with coding you don't need to know anything about JavaScript to use them. It is as simple as copy pasting the code inside the Google Ads platform and then previewing it so that you can actually see what a script would do before you actually run it. And based on the preview, you can decide whether or not you wanna run the script. So previewing a script is a way to safely test it before you actually run it. Using scripts is as simple as copy pasting of code, previewing, and then scheduling it to run on an hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
Nils:Now there are many reasons why I think every Google Ads account needs to be running scripts. Let's focus on three main categories. Scripts are time savers. Scripts can remove boring repetitive tasks that take forever and suck up all your time and energy. Scripts are money savers.
Nils:Scripts reduce wasted ad spend that only contributes to Google's profit, not yours. And the most important one in my opinion, scripts are lifesavers. Scripts prevent mistakes that can kill your account or even worse your career. Let's go in the first category, time savers. Scripts remove repetitive work that drains your attention.
Nils:In spite of AI and all the automations inside Google Ads, PPC work still contains a lot of manual actions. Think adding keywords and creatives to your account, budget pacing in accounts that run on strict budgets, optimizing product feeds for e commerce accounts, updating price assets, creating reports for clients and bosses, the list goes on and on. All these tasks still require a lot of manual repetitive work that can be very tedious and is definitely time consuming. If you're serious about the performance of your Google Ads accounts, these things need to be done. Scripts can help you get more stuff done in less time and keep your mind sane.
Nils:The second category, the money savers. Scripts reduce wasted spend. Google likes to make money, and they do so by selling you clicks. Therefore, they will try to show your ads anywhere possible as long as it keeps you spending. Therefore, waste creeps in everywhere.
Nils:Think about all the irrelevant search terms that are showing up in your search query report. They are slipping through whenever Google is making changes to these match type algorithms for the keywords. Or you would have ads sending traffic to out of stock products. Yes, it's true. If a product goes out of stock and you have your Merchant Center product feed set up correctly, Google will stop showing shopping ads, but the same is not true for your text ads.
Nils:The text ads will continue to run and send clicks that's making cost even though the product is out of stock. Another example would be click fraud and lead fraud from clicks, from bad placements in the display network, or clicks from kids games or mobile apps. These are all sort of examples of clicks that cost money, deliver nothing, wasted spend. Now let's go into the third category, the lifesavers. The real reason why I think every Google Ads account needs to be running scripts.
Nils:Scripts can see problems before humans do. Think broken links. Nobody wants to send clicks to pages that don't exist. Or if the website is completely down, you want to know immediately. Another example would be conversion tracking monitor.
Nils:If conversion tracking is off, that can have a dramatic impact on your smart bidding algorithms. Smart bidding might think that conversions aren't happening anymore if you're not sending conversion data, Although the conversions are still happening, it's just that the tracking is off. Thus, sending zero conversions to Google Ads, thus smart bidding will reduce bids, thus less clicks, less conversions, less revenue. Another example would be negative keyword conflicts. It might be that you or your teammate accidentally added a negative keyword that blocks highly converting search terms.
Nils:If that happens, the number of conversions might drop significantly without you knowing what is the cause. For humans it's relatively hard to spot these kind of issues. Scripts are great for that. Now if these examples haven't convinced you yet, let me share two examples, real life examples of what happened in my business lately. A few weeks ago on a Friday afternoon, an account alert popped into one of my clients' accounts inside the Google Ads interface.
Nils:The message showed: your ads have stopped running. You reached your monthly account spend limit. To get your ads running again, increase your ad spend. Now this message arrived late on a Friday. No one was looking inside the Google Ads interface at the account at the time.
Nils:Google also didn't send out an email. If it weren't for my script, we wouldn't have noticed the issue until Monday and the client would lose out on the weekend's revenue. That's why I like to use scripts to alert me when the account stops serving or when the billing fails or the spend caps are hit or when Google's suspension policies trigger so that the account was suspended or for whatever reason campaigns unexpectedly shut off. You have to remember Google's notifications, if any, aren't always timely. Scripts are.
Nils:Here's another example of what happened to one of my clients lately. The client installed a third party tracking tool on a Saturday afternoon. The tracking tool modified the tracking templates inside different ad groups in the account. Now by changing these tracking templates, our tracking was off. It broke our conversion tracking.
Nils:The offline conversion imports that we were using, they were offset. If we hadn't detected that issue with the scripts and it would have been running for days or maybe even weeks, smart bidding would have gone haywire. Luckily for us, my change history alert script flagged the edit and instantly and luckily warned us before real damage was done. So the change history alert script sent an alert because someone out of my team made a change inside the Google Ads account When that happens, we want to be the first to know because many times these changes aren't in line with the strategy that we've implemented. Monitoring changes by someone else, that's not paranoia, it's survival.
Nils:So there you have it, Three reasons to start using scripts. They're time savers, money savers, and can be lifesavers. Also, there's no excuse not to use scripts. There's literally no downside. Scripts are free.
Nils:On my website, you will find a list with over 400 scripts that are completely free for you to copy paste and run-in your own accounts. They are safe. If you run them in preview mode, you can see what will happen and what the script will do before you actually run it. They are easy to use, simply copy paste. And these days, with the help of an LLM, an AI, you can easily understand what is going on even if you don't know any JavaScript code, and you make can make small modifications to the script to modify the script workings and customize it to your own needs.
Nils:You can use my Google Ads script Sensei to help you modify, create, and fix scripts for you. Now when you open up your Google Ads account today, I want you to install one simple script. Just pick one. Conversion tracking monitor, account down monitor, anomaly detection. Find one in the list, copy paste the code, preview it, test it, set it to run hourly.
Nils:Give yourself the gift of the confidence that your account is running smoothly day and night. And that wraps it up for today. Thanks so much for joining me. If you have a question, email me at questions@nilsweilmans.com. This is Nilsweilmans signing off.
Nils:Join me again next week for another episode of Google Ads for grownups.