Author: Nils Rooijmans

Many of us spend a lot of time analysing competition (e.g., via auction insights).

I think this is a poor move.

Competition only exists where you let it.

Worrying about competitors is a sign that you haven’t yet understood what makes you and/or your client unique.

Once you fully understand the uniqueness, you’ll never worry about competition again. (*)

– Nils

(*) I like to express uniqueness in terms of a truly unique value proposition for the right (narrow) target audience, and translate these into creatives and targeting settings of my campaigns. This encourages clicks from potential customers while discouraging clicks from people outside of the real target audience, leaving competitors on a different playing field.

Assuming you want to get the most out of your time, it makes tons of sense to find new ways to do your work quicker, better, and more easily.

This could mean building elaborate systems like complex script automations or mosaic Excel macros. Luckily, it doesn’t have to.

Here’s a simple setup that you can create in 30 minutes and will likely save you a lot of time in the long run.

Hotkeys and Text Expanders

Install a text expander application on your devices and load it up with text snippets that you frequently use. 

Inside Google Ads, I use it to easily paste the standard disclaimers that are required in my ad copy and to paste the default call-to-actions.

Outside of Google Ads, I use it to paste email signatures and some canned responses I frequently use in my email communications.

The tool I use is https://www.autohotkey.com/. (There are loads of other options, too.) 

To come up with your first batch of snippets, go to your recent ad creatives looking for anything repetitive. Even small things like the URL to your website, your top keyword, or a descriptive phrase can make a big difference. 

I also use AutoHotkey to create keyboard shortcuts.

Some examples of my keyboard shortcuts include:
– [Windows key + X], with X being a single digit, to open different browser profiles (since I use different profiles for different Google Ads accounts)
– [Windows key + ‘e’] to open Google Ads Editor
– [Windows key + ‘x’] to open Excel

What are your favorite shortcuts? I’m curious to know. You can email me about them at nils@nilsrooijmans.com.

– Nils 

FYI: Google has launched the full version of the new Google Ads scripts experience.

The beta has been running since June of last year. Now, the final batch of features to match the functionality of legacy scripts has been released.

Here’s an excerpt from this week’s notice:

“Starting soon, all new scripts will default to the new scripts experience, although you can still disable it on a script by script basis if necessary.

Existing scripts won’t be affected until September of 2022. After that, we will migrate all scripts to the new experience.

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

We’ve tried to implement backwards compatibility, but we can’t guarantee every script will work without changes, so definitely take some time to confirm yourself.“

More details here: https://ads-developers.googleblog.com/2022/03/new-google-ads-scripts-experience.html

Note that the previous beta experience did not support manager scripts (MCC level). This latest release does support manager scripts, so you can start testing and migrating these as well.

If you are already migrating your scripts, please do let me know how it goes for you. You can email me at nils@nilsrooijmans.com.

– Nils

Wouldn’t it be great if you knew that every new campaign would be a great success? This could mean:

– Next to your highly optimized STAG alpha campaigns, you run a broad match beta that delivers 20% more clicks at the same CPA.
– You expand your account with some display remarketing campaigns, and get thousands of dollars extra profit next month.
– For the latest product in your client’s shop, you launch a Performance Max campaign, and the product sells out in the first week. 

Unfortunately, things don’t work like this. Anything worth doing brings with it a certain risk. In our PPC world, this could be: a non-zero chance of you wasting some (or a lot) of the budget on clicks that don’t convert.

Yesterday, I had a client asking me to promote a new product.

I explained to the client my expectations are low; the product is relatively expensive compared to the alternatives, the USPs only resonate within a small set of the market, and the keywords used by the target audience are also used by a lot of people that are outside of the target audience.

Conflicting thoughts went through my head:

– There’s no way I am going to do this, the risk of disappointing my client is too high
– What will my colleagues think if this turns into one big failure?!
– But damn, this could be a nice opportunity to discover the effects of a new campaign setup I’ve been thinking about for weeks.

Yes, I do feel that some smart bidding magic just might be able to detect the right audience signals and zoom in on the clicks from the audience that will convert.

So, here’s what I did:

1. Coordinate clear expectations with the client (“this is a test, we need a separate test budget for this, with zero ROI expectations for the next 6 weeks”)
2. Formulate success criteria for the last week of the test, based on our main KPIs (“we aim for 50 transactions per week at a ROAS of 450% or higher”)
3. Come up with a reasonable strategy to test smart bidding for the new product
4. A detailed plan for the setup and daily/weekly optimizations for the new campaign

If you have these things in place, there’s really no reason not to take the risk. 

Here’s the thing: to grow your account without risk is to risk not growing your account at all.

– Nils

Yours,

– Nils

Do you like paying for clicks that go nowhere?

I don’t. 

So, whenever one of my clients’ websites goes down, I want to be in the know. Immediately.

That’s why I use Uptime Robot to monitor the uptime of all my clients’ websites.

Uptime Robot alerts me when a website goes down, so I can immediately pause campaigns and stop wasted spend.

When the site is up again, I re-enable the campaigns.

Our PPC friends at the Greenhouse Group even created a script to automate this process for us. Here it is:

Google Ads Uptime Robot Monitoring Script

URL: https://www.themarketingtechnologist.co/pause-your-adwords-campaigns-automatically-when-a-site-is-down/

What it does: 
Pause campaigns when your website is down, and re-enable them when your website is up again.

Why you care: 
Many things can cause your website to go offline (such as website maintenance, CMS problems, hardware failures, DNS issues, and malicious hackers). You do not want to spend money on clicks when it does.

Happy scripting!

– Nils

Fellow list member Erik Zomerhuis sent an email with a common question (shared with permission): 

“How to deal with the extremely slow loads of the Google Ads UI?”

A year ago, I had sent out an email to my subscribers, jokingly explaining the issue:

1969:
    “What are you doing with that 2KB of RAM?”
    “Sending people to the moon”

2021:
    “What are you doing with that 2.4GB of RAM?”
    “Running Google Ads in a Chrome tab”

Here’s the possible fix I had shared:

“Here’s the thing: want to speed up the loading of your Google Ads interface?

Increase both the number of CPU cores and your RAM. I have 4 and 16 GB. (*)

Best investment I made in a long time.”

(*) The Google Ads interface is very, very heavy on Javascript. 20MB (!) per tab. See screenshot from Lighthouse performance analysis below. The Javascript increases load times AND is also responsible for a big memory footprint as well as CPU hogging. Increasing CPU power and memory in your computer will increase performance and load times.

– Nils

– Nils

PS: Here’s a nice example of such a script –> https://nilsrooijmans.com/google-ads-script-trending-search-terms/

In an online presentation today, Google showed us their tool to upgrade your Smart Shopping and Local campaigns to Performance Max. Here’s the URL: https://adsonair.withgoogle.com/events/get-ready-to-upgrade-to-performance-max

You can upgrade your campaigns manually at the start of the upgrade period, or have Google automatically upgrade them for you. The upgrade period starts on April 2022 for Smart Shopping and June 2022 for Local campaigns. You will have until August/September to do this manually. After that, Google will automatically update both campaign types to Performance Max. This should be finished in September 2022.

Basically, the upgrade tool allows you to upgrade all campaigns in bulk or one-by-one with a few clicks. Nothing fancy. Be warned, the Smart Shopping and Local campaign types will cease to exist after September 2022.

Now, here’s a tip for those of you who might be scared by the extinction of Smart Shopping: asset groups are not required if you already have a Merchant Center product feed!

You can simply take your SSC and turn it into a PMax campaign, and if you do not add any additional ad assets like images, videos, headlines, or descriptions, it is still a Smart Shopping campaign — only it is called Performance Max now. This way, you can keep the same performance and don’t have to worry about losing traffic and conversions.

– Nils

In Google Ads, knowing what audiences are available for you to target is hard. Horribly hard, if you ask me.

You have to go into the Google Ads interface (which still loads terribly slow) and use the tiny little search box to search for available audiences, just to know all that is available! 

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a complete list of every single audience inside Google Ads that you can target?

Enter the Google Ads Developer website:
https://developers.google.com/adwords/api/docs/appendix/codes-formats

Look under ‘Affinity categories’ and ‘In-market categories’. 

Amazing, right? 

That’s actually one of the benefits of creating Google Ads Scripts yourselves: you will learn some quirky details about the Google Ads platform that aren’t exposed via the standard support docs.

You want something even better?

Here’s the ZATO Google Ads Audience Targeting List of Affinity Categories & In-Market Segments. It is one super easy-to-read, color-coded, and completely filterable Google Sheet with all the audiences right at your disposal.

Great job guys!

– Nils

Some Google Ads campaign managers say that ROAS or CPA targets safeguard your smart bidding campaigns. In my experience, this is only true if your target is very close to past averages.

If a ROAS target is set, say 1.5x or 2x your last_30_days average (or any realistic ROAS altogether), it is likely to stop the campaign from generating any clicks. In the other way around, set it at 70% or even 50% of your last_30_days average, and your campaign will spend like crazy with hardly any extra conversions.

ROAS targets don’t safeguard your campaigns. A decent setup does. 

If your campaign manager says that a ROAS or CPA target is necessary to “safeguard smart bidding,” politely suggest that if they really want to safeguard smart bidding, they should invest some time in a proper setup.

My $0.02. Your ROAS may vary.

– Nils

Starting today, standard shopping campaigns will no longer show on Gmail, Discover, and YouTube. 

However, you can still continue showing your Shopping ads on YouTube Search by opting into the Search Partner Network (SPN); the YouTube Search inventory has been moved to SPN!

If you have already opted into SPN, no action is required; your ads will automatically show on YouTube Search.

If want to exclude YouTube Search, then you need to opt out of SPN entirely.

Here’s the thing: depending on your specific Shopping campaign Networks targeting setting, you might see some drastic changes in the performance of the SPN for your shopping campaigns.

My advice would be to monitor your SPN performance like a hawk next few weeks.

I’m working on a script to do this for us as we speak, and I hope to share this with this list in a few days.

In the past, the search partner network and YouTube, Gmail, and Discover used to be separated:

As of today, not anymore (this is what I see in my accounts):

Yours,

– Nils

One of our friends in the /r/PPC Reddit community just posted this the other day:

“I’ve been at Google’s throat for the last week about weird headlines appearing in fully pinned RSAs. They claimed that they were headlines I’d chosen or pinned, or blamed DSAs etc but I knew this wasn’t the case.

Anyway, finally a helpful Google rep instantly identified the issue properly and showed me the longer headlines automated extension which takes random text from ad copy and puts it in the headline. In this case it was a very janky looking “PotsTotsandDots.com” (not a real url for anonymity) url prepended at the start of all of my brand ads.

For anybody that may have dealt with this issue with little success, go to:

Extensions > automated extensions > more > advanced settings > longer ad headlines > turn off

Hope this helps somebody at some point!“

Here’s the link to the source: https://www.reddit.com/r/PPC/comments/skajx6/today_i_found_out_about_the_longer_ad_headlines/

– Nils

-Nils

Do you want to keep your finger on the pulse of your accounts, with zero effort? If so, this script might be worth your time.

Automatic Report – Anomalies in your campaign spending 

URL:
https://searchengineland.com/find-anomalies-in-your-campaign-spending-with-this-google-ads-script-304853

What it does: 
This script will let you check for unusual behavior in your account by finding campaigns that show significant changes in today’s spending compared to expected spending based on prior performance.

Why you’d care: 
There can be many reasons why campaign behavior changes drastically. Some of them can be due to changes in search behavior. Others can be caused by your competitors’ bidding. Others are caused by our own mistakes. Best be alerted on the spot.

Here’s some good news for those of you who are already familiar with making small changes to scripts: you can add some functions to the script to report anomalies in any of these metrics below. 

• impressions
• clicks
• avg CPC
• conversions
• conversion rate
• conversion value
• CPA
• ROAS

Happy scripting!

– Nils

Due to my elite auditing skills, I figured out how to save 30 PERCENT of ad spend without reducing conversion value.

Want an optimization tip?

End the broad match campaign experiment you added a month ago and forgot about.

– Nils

Simple keyword repetitions in your headlines are boring.

Boring gets skipped.

Conflict creates interest.

Interest gets clicked.

– Nils