Author: Nils Rooijmans

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

“Nils, what are the top scripts we should be using for pacing our budgets?”

Budget management can be annoying as hell, especially when your client is limited by budget.

Google’s overdelivery algorithm, allowing it to spend 2x your daily budget, doesn’t really make life easier, does it?

Here’s a very basic script to help you out:

Limit AdWords Overdelivery to Any Amount You Want

URL: http://www.freeadwordsscripts.com/2017/10/limit-adwords-overdelivery-to-any.html

What it does: 
The script fetches every active campaign’s daily budget and accrued cost for the day. If the cost exceeds the daily budget plus the allowed percentage of overdelivery, it will label that campaign and pause it.

Why you’d care: 
Back in 2017, Google introduced a feature that allows it to spend up to 2x your daily budgets. This overdelivery mechanism makes it harder to limit spend to the amount you want, unless you use this script.

Unfortunately, this script has its limitations as it cannot work with shared budgets. Modifications are also needed to make it work with shopping or video campaigns. And for re-enabling paused campaigns, setting up an additional rule or script (in addition to this script) is a must. All these are possible, just not with the standard version of the script.

If you’re interested in any of the advanced options for this script, contact me for details on how I can help you. My email address is nils@nilsrooijmans.com.

– Nils

PS: Here are some more ideas for your inspiration and to get a feel of what is possible with scripts: https://nilsrooijmans.com/top-5-google-ads-scripts-for-budget-management/

What would you think about someone who wanted to become a world-class surfer BUT without ever having an epic wipeout that beats all air out of their lungs?

That’d be unrealistic, right?

Part of the deal with becoming a world-class surfer is that you’re absolutely definitely for sure going to massively wipeout.

Repeatedly.

I myself have sort of been unrealistic the last few weeks.

Trying to maneuver my foil like a pro while wing foiling WITHOUT having my board crush my skull, my wing ripping my tendons is beyond reasonable.

Here’s what I’m aiming for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJUlf0588Xk

Wish me luck 😉

So, I learned the hard way… crashing and getting all parts of my body hurt is part of the deal.

Expecting otherwise would be foolish.

Here’s the thing: if you want to be at the top of your PPC game or make a difference to your client or really matter much at all, you DEFINITELY ARE going to wipeout.

Repeatedly.

There’s no reason to worry that it MIGHT happen once you realize that it MUST happen for you to get to where you want to go (beat competition, make more profits).

Sure, you’re going to make mistakes.

Yes, it’s going to hurt.

Even worse: your boss or client might temporarily hate you for it.

But that’s part of the deal.

Expecting otherwise would be foolish.

– Nils

Google Rep business logic:

“Never spend $500 today on 10 leads that you can contact tomorrow, if you can spend $10000 this week to let the machine learn how you can contact 50 leads next week.”

– Nils

Do you want to know where your ads show in Performance Max campaigns?

As you are probably already aware, Performance Max is a new campaign type that shows your ads on all of Google’s networks: Google Search, Google Shopping, Google Display Network (GDN), Google Discover (Newsfeed), YouTube, Gmail, and Maps. 

I am still experimenting with this new campaign type, but here’s an early lesson I think is worth sharing:

You can create placement reports for your Performance Max campaigns that show where your ads are shown!

SOURCE: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/11465047?hl=en

In theory, you could use that information to exclude BAD placements at the account level (like we do with Smart Shopping) to prevent wasted ad spend on sites like parked domains.

The great PPC Kirk shows us just how to do this here: https://zatomarketing.com/blog/how-to-exclude-placements-in-google-smart-shopping-campaigns

Let’s test if this works for your Performance Max campaigns?

– Nils

PS: If you are experimenting with Perf Max campaigns, please let me know. I would like to create a small community of PPC freaks that are on the fringe of testing this new campaign type.

“Man, you’ve got so many scripts in your list. Please tell me, which ones are must-have scripts for any Google Ads account?“

long time list member Karl

This is a question that pops up in my inbox like wayside lodgings on route 66.

So, let’s create a list of must-have scripts together, shall we?

Here’s my first:

Script to Check If Account Is Offline

URL: https://bitbucket.org/snippets/fvallaeys/nLEoj/check-if-account-is-offline

What it does: 
Checks whether a Google Ads account has gone offline, possibly due to a declined credit card, or accidentally pausing all campaigns, or suspensions, or…

Why you’d care: 
Accounts go offline for many reasons. Billing issues are a well-known problem in managing Google Ads accounts, especially for advertisers with smaller budgets. When this happens, you want to be alerted straight away so your client does not unnecessarily miss any leads and/or revenue.

What scripts do you think should be on the list? Share by hitting reply.

– Nils

PS: The list mentioned by Karl is the list of all freely-available scripts I have found. You can find it here. If you’re already subscribed to the list and enjoy some of the scripts in the sheet, please consider sharing this link with some of your colleagues:  https://nilsrooijmans.com/free-google-ads-scripts-the-ultimate-list/