Author: Nils Rooijmans

Yesterday, I came across this thread on /r/PPC: 
https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/vwn9bd/issues_with_googles_automated_extensions/

“Google’s Automated Extensions were enabled without knowledge or consent and stole thousands of dollars from our clients”

OUCH!

It reminded me of the fact that I could not create a script to monitor their performance and check if they are turned on or off. Unfortunately, Google Ads Scripts offers no support for automated extensions. We have to check things manually…

Google states:

“Automated extensions can improve the quality of your ad by including information about your business or changing the format of your ad. The Google Ads system includes automated extensions to your text ads when it predicts that the extensions can improve your ad’s performance.“

BUT… I don’t believe them. I’ve seen dynamic sitelinks sending traffic to the worst landers on the planet.

NOTE: Automated extensions are turned on by default.

Personally, by default, I like to turn them off (with the exception of seller ratings). Here’s how you can do this too:

1. Click Ads & extensions in the page menu, then click Extensions in the subpage menu.
2. Click Automated Extensions at the bottom of the page.
3. Click the three-dot menu on the right, then select Advanced options.
4. Select Turn off specific automated extensions and choose which extension to turn off.
5. Select your reason for turning off the extension and add additional comments.
6. Click Turn off.

How about you? Do you turn them off, or leave them on? I’m curious to learn, you can let me know at nils@nilsrooijmans.com.

– Nils

Performance Max is a different beast with different specifications.

As with all things new, it’s not easy to memorize all the details when you get started.

Here’s a nice simple overview of the different asset specifications for PMax campaigns, taken from the Google Ads API developer documentation:

SOURCE: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/api/docs/performance-max/assets

– Nils

The Kawasaki Z900 is an amazing bike. 

No-frills, bare-bones sport riding. 

I just got back from my vacation, trying to tame the Z900 in the Colorado Rocky mountains. What a blast!

Me and my buddies visit the US every year just for that. There’s no comparison between the US and Europe when it comes to  road tripping.  

We’ve been to Colorado before (a couple of times actually) and my buddy was a bit nervous; he “forgot” to pay his fine for the speeding ticket from one of our previous adventures. His “past violation” haunted him for the whole duration of our trip.

Which brings me to today’s topic. 

Before my vacation, we talked about “past violations” and how Google continues to not show ads that it had mistakenly disapproved in the past.

Here’s the thing: unless you notice “past violations” in your ads and take action, these ads will continue to not show.

I made a promise to create a script to alert you on any ad that has the status of being disapproved for “past violations,” so you can take action. Thanks to the help of many list members, the script is finally finished.

Here it is: https://nilsrooijmans.com/google-ads-script-past-violations-alert/

Thanks again to all of you who helped me test and fine-tune the code.

Happy scripting!

– Nils

As of April 2022, Google Ad Editor supports the creation and editing of Performance Max campaigns (version 2.0 and up).

This is all good and well, but there’s a sneaky little bug: if you copy-paste a PMax campaign that has Final URL expansion set to ‘Only send traffic to the URLs you’ve provided’, the copy will have this option set to the default ‘Send traffic to the most relevant URLs on your site’.

To fix this, you’ll need to go into the Google Ads interface and change this campaign setting manually.

H/T to Lyubomir Popov for pointing this out.

– Nils

Fellow list member Simonetta Azzarito sent in this question (shared with permission, question paraphrased for clarity):

“I am searching for a script that produces a Google Sheet with customized report for the auction insights for specific keywords. Can you help me?”

Auction Insights are subject to many questions amongst script kiddies. The BAD NEWS is, they are not supported via scripts!

Currently, there is no way to use Google Ads Scripts or the Report API to get the auction data from our accounts. (Believe me, I’ve tried it. Many times. Even more times than I tried to bench press a 100kg. Failed every time…)

Hopefully, Google will add support for auction insights data in the near future, but I wouldn’t place my bets on it.

That being said, I do have some tips on how to make life a little bit easier if you find yourself spending countless hours downloading auctions insights via the Google Ads interface.

1. Schedule downloads via scheduled reports:

2. Visualise the auction insights data via Optmyzr’s Auction Insights Visualizer. Here’s a nice short video by Frederick Vallaeys that demos this free tool -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgycHrR5diU

3. Automatically store auction insights data in Big Query. This one is for automation daredevils, but definitely a great solution to circumvent Google Ads scripts’ limitations: Stefan Neefischer’s solution that uses Cloud Functions and Cloud Storage to scrape and store your data. Here’s a link: https://www.pemavor.com/how-to-pull-google-auction-insight-data-in-an-automated-way/

Now, I am off to my gym for my bench press challenge. 🙂

Enjoy the weekend!

– Nils

– Nils

I got approached for this today:

– Nils

Looking for some creative inspiration for your next ad copy?

Or maybe you’re just curious about what copy your competitors are using?

If so, here’s a Chrome extension I discovered just today, and I am already in love with it. It scrapes text ads and related keywords from the Google SERP. You can then download the aggregated data as an Excel file. The file will contain all your competitors’ headlines and descriptions in one single sheet!

PRO TIP: 
1) Conduct searches for the top 10 or top 20 related keywords
2) Download the scraped data in your Excel sheet
3) Copy-paste all your competitors’ headlines in a single text file and feed it to an n-gram analyzer like http://guidetodatamining.com/ngramAnalyzer/ 

This will give you some great insights you can use to create and test some ads!

Here’s the link to the Chrome extension:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ppc-ad-editor-adminer%C2%AE/omhnpaidepkhbjngmhjkphmlofoiocna

“Beter goed gejat, dan slecht bedacht!” (A Dutch proverb.)

– Nils

I just got back from a trip to France, enjoying the Champagne region and its lovely drink. Or drinkSSS, I might better say… 😉

For some reason, this afternoon, my brain wasn’t yet ready to come up with some new callout extensions to test in one of my accounts. (Them bubbles…)

So I did what I normally do in such situations: ask Google for help.

Here’s a list with some creative examples that showed up in the result and could benefit you as well:

Ecommerce

Attractive & Affordable 
    Guaranteed Satisfaction 
    30% Off Clearance Items
    Customization leader 
    1-2 day shipping
    Free shipping
    Over 250,000 Team Items 
    Officially Licensed Gear 
    Satisfaction Guarantee
    Spring Arrivals are Here 
    Shop Best Sellers 
    Top Designer Collections
    Price Matching

Service Industry

    Workmanship Guaranteed 
    Upfront Pricing 
    Licensed Plumbing Experts
    Trusted For 67 Years 
    Local Plumbers Since 1947 
    Always Available 24/7
    Electrical Experts 
    Local Service 
    Fast Response 
    Affordable Pricing
    Save $350 Before Dec. 25
    Financing Available
    Liposuction Specialists
    History of Results 
    20yrs Combined Experience
    Handle Complex Cases
    No Service Fees

Accommodations
    
    Free Cancellation 
    24/7 Customer Service 
    Read Real Guest Reviews
    Save Time and Money 
    700,000+ Hotels Worldwide
    No Ads or Pop-ups
    Best Price Guarantee 
    11+ Million Hotel Reviews 
    No Change or Cancel Fees
    Over 300,000 Rentals 
    Listings in 190 Countries
    1,000,000 Unique Listings
    24/7 Customer Service
    Insurance Up to $10,000 
    Peace of Mind Guarantee
    Pet Friendly Rentals 
    Homes with Private Pools 
    Oceanfront Rentals

Insurance

    Multiple policy discount
    Many discount offerings 
    Switch and save $498/year
    Save up to 40%
    Free online quotes
    24/7 service
    Local agents
    Fast, Easy Payments
    State Minimum Rates 
    Free Quote in Minutes
    75+ Years of Savings 
    Free Quotes 
    24/7 Service & Claims 
    Mobile App
    Live Reps to Assist 
    Save on Average $540 
    Quotes in 5 Mins. or Less

Software

    No Strings Attached 
    Where Work Gets Done 
    Easy to Use 
    Make Things Easy
    Easy To Use 
    Trusted By Over 5,000,000 
    Collaborate Online 
    Try It Free
    World class support 
    Deliver projects on time 
    Portfolio management
    Over 10 Million Users 
    Best Way to Manage Social 
    All-In-One Social Tool
    Listen, Engage & Publish 
    Collaborate at Scale
    Unbeatable Value 
    Everything is Hosted 
    Pay As You Go 
    Easily Customizable
    Free Product Tours 
    100% Cloud Platform 
    Real-Time Data
    Save time billing 
    Easy to use 
    Work anywhere 
    Free trial
    6 Million Users Worldwide  
    Auto Syncs Across Devices
    Complete Security 
    Connect on any device 
    Flexible plans

SOURCE: https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/rr29cm/name_the_google_ads_extensions_that_you_use/

ACTION: Why not test 4 new callouts in your account today? It only takes a few minutes!

– Nils

Our friends from PPCsurvey.com have released their “State of PPC Global Report for 2022.” It reports insights from more than 500 PPC specialists, surveyed around the globe, on a broad range of topics. 

One paragraph that particularly caught my attention describes adoption of automation in Google Ads (paragraph 4.2):

“We see that 68% of PPC specialists use scripts. While that is a majority, it also means that nearly one in three specialists aren’t using any scripts. With 400 free scripts available online, there should be something for everyone to copy, paste, and adjust to their needs.”

I couldn’t agree more. 🙂 

The report also has some nice confirmation for us scripts fanatics. The survey asked specialists how satisfied they were with using different forms of automation. Below, they’re ranked from the lowest dissatisfaction score to the highest:

Using scripts is the top satisfying form of automation in PPC!

No surprise here 😉

ACTION: If you want to learn what you can do to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the latest PPC topics -> grab your free copy of the report on PPCsurvey.com. 

Trust me, it’s great company for your next lunch break.

– Nils

Do you want to pay less for existing customers?

If so, good news: Google’s Smart Shopping campaigns now allow you to prioritize _new_ customer acquisition over selling products to existing customers.

This feature will be available for Performance Max campaigns as well, sometime in the next few months.

If you’re new to this feature, be sure to check it out: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9918441?hl=en

Today, I noticed a Conversion action setting that you need to change to help Google discriminate between existing customers and new customers.

Go to Conversions > Settings and change these settings:

You can select any audience from the Audience Manager — i.e., you can upload a Customer Match list of your existing customers and then select the list.

So, if you are running Smart Shopping and want to prioritize _new_ customer acquisition over selling products to existing customers, change these settings now. It only takes 5 minutes!

– Nils

PS: Beware of the inflated conversion value of the new customers if you use this feature. More entertaining thoughts on this by our friend PPC Kirk -> https://zatomarketing.com/blog/read-before-using-new-customer-acquisition-in-google-smart-shopping-campaigns

This morning, I stumbled upon a small and slightly-hidden ‘new’ feature in Google Ads. It’s not really new, but then I realised it is not widely adopted either, so why not share it with you?

Dynamic Image Extensions

I’ve been testing image extensions for a while now and recommend you do the same. You can expect a higher CTR because an image is better at grabbing a searcher’s attention.

In theory, it could also reduce the number of clicks that go to (organic) competitors, since the ad with the image extension takes up more real estate on the Google SERP.

In my A/B tests, the campaigns with image extensions almost always show higher CTRs, where conversion rates stay the same or are slightly lower. In most cases, this results in a small increase in the number of conversions at similar CPAs. Who doesn’t want that?

As always, YMMV, but if you haven’t considered testing image extension yet, this feature might be of interest to you.

It only takes 5 minutes to set up a test!

More details from Google:
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/9566341?hl=en 
https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/10109688?hl=en

If you are already using image extensions, how are they working out for you? I’d love to know. You can email me at nils@nilsrooijmans.com. 🙂

– Nils

Do you want to improve the performance of your Broad Match keywords?

Think about the countless times you’ve looked at your search term reports only to discover how badly Google is matching user queries to your broad keywords. (I mean, really, “leather handbag” being the same as a leather wallet?! Come on Google…)

Still, sometimes broad match does work like magic. I remember one of my clients had gone through a rebranding, with the new brand name being completely different from the old brand name. Google’s broad match was able to match search terms containing the new brand to the old brand keywords. Pretty impressive.

Imagine being able to reap the benefits of Broad Match without a lot of irrelevant search terms showing up in your reports.

Here’s a tactic that will help you reduce the number of irrelevant clicks from broad match keywords: add converting search terms as new keywords to the ad group that generated the conversion. (*)

Why does this work? Well, according to Google, “Broad Match is able to leverage unique signals not available in other Match types.” These signals include other keywords in your ad group.

SOURCE: https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/apl_strategic_recommendations_with_optiscore_aar.pdf

(*) In case you’re wondering: yes, I use scripts to do this for me. 🙂

– Nils

This morning, my inbox surprised me with a message that I had to read 3 times. It made me laugh and cry at the same time.

Here it is (I faked his name for privacy reasons):

Hey Nils,

[…] 

I have been working as a fake Google Ads specialist for 9 months by only running Smart Shopping for some retail clients.

I want to learn how to manage Google Ads properly and become a real PPC specialist. What should I do?

Jake

Seriously, what should I tell him? 

– Nils

Do you want to steal away some of your competitors’ potential clients? If so, this little trick might be for you.

In the past, we used to run all of our competitor campaigns(*) on manual bidding with a CPC bid, and made sure we ranked at the top of the page.

We noticed that it was very hard to make these kinds of campaigns profitable because Quality Scores, CTRs, and Conversion Rates tend to be really low compared to the generic keywords in our accounts. This resulted in CPAs that were mostly too high.

Not anymore.

A few months ago, we started testing smart bidding on competitor campaigns, and the results have been very compelling.

Here’s the data from one of the latest experiments:

Note that the only difference between the original and the experiment is the bidding strategy. Search term analyses did not show a significant difference in the types of searches our ads showed for.

What this tells me is that Google’s target CPA bidding has learned how to discriminate between clicks from people who are open to an alternative, versus the people who are specifically looking to buy from the competitor.

Great job Google, smart bidding FTW!

(*) Note that competitor campaigns are campaigns that only contain competitor brand names as keywords.

– Nils

One of the new students in my Google Ads Scripts training asked a question that I know a lot of PPC specialists struggle with before running their first scripts:

“Is anyone here worried about scripts breaking things in their Google Ads account?”

The critical phrase here is “in their Google Ads account,” and the good news is: you don’t have to be worried!

Enter the ‘Google Ads Scripts Preview Mode’.

When scripts are executed in preview mode, they make no changes to the account or actual campaign data. Instead, script execution shows the changes that would have been made had the script been executed. Once you’re satisfied with the output, you can start the live execution of a script or schedule it.

Preview mode is a powerful feature, as it allows you to develop and debug a script without worrying about erroneous changes being made to your Google Ads data.

Note, however, that if the script is programmed to make changes to anything outside of Google Ads (like for example adding data to a spreadsheet), the Preview mode will make this happen.

So, no need to fear. You can start testing one of these 400+ free Google Ads scripts today!

– Nils

ICYMI: We all need to migrate our Google Ads Scripts to the new scripts experience before October 31, 2022.

Any scripts left unmigrated will be automatically migrated and may be paused on October 31, when legacy scripts sunset.

You should manually move your scripts over to the new experience before then to ensure continued functionality. 

Luckily for us, most scripts do not require any changes to the code.

Take note: Google has tried to implement backwards compatibility, but it can’t guarantee every script will work without changes, so definitely take some time to confirm yourself.

Here’s more info: https://developers.google.com/google-ads/scripts/docs/migration

Having trouble migrating? Let me know.

– Nils

Last month, I sent out an email requesting my newsletter subscribers to participate in this year’s PPC Salary Survey.

If you participated in the survey, on behalf of Duane (the driving force behind the initiative) and myself: a big Thank You!

Data like this gives us PPC peepz some bargaining power!

You can (re)negotiate salary for your current role (or a new one) with your employer, or use it in negotiations with a new employer.

Last week, Duane shared the results. Here you go:

Final Report: PPC Salary Survey 2022
https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/tk2tc0/final_report_ppc_salary_survey_2022/

Here’s one comment that stood out for me:

Thank you Duane for this great piece of work!

– Nils

Are you curious to learn about duplicate search terms in your account?

Duplicate search terms occur whenever the same search term is being triggered by different keywords, in ad groups you didn’t intend them to.

Bad news: duplicate search terms make it harder to optimize your account.

Good news: there’s a free Google Ads script you can use to help you quickly resolve the issues.

Here it is:

Duplicate Query Checker for Multiple Accounts

URL: https://adsscripts.com/scripts/google-ads-scripts/duplicate-query-checker-across-accounts

What it does: 
The script checks if a user query is matched to multiple keywords. This could be in the same ad group, across ad groups, and across accounts. If it finds a duplicate, the script then writes the results to a Google Sheet. This way, you can easily spot duplicates and create negative keywords to prevent them.

Why you’d care: 
Having the same search query leading to different ad groups can be bad news (unless you intentionally use different targeting settings). The data about that query isn’t all in one place, making it harder to see how it is performing. It also gets in the way of managing bids: if some queries do badly, turning the bids down in one group can mean the search term will just pop up again in a different group that now has the higher bid, continuing to waste your money.  

Happy scripting!

– Nils