One of the limitations for Google Ads scripts is that these cannot be scheduled to run multiple times per hour. The smallest interval that’s available when scheduling a script to run is “hourly.” And even when setting a script to run hourly, you cannot set the exact minute when that script would run.
Why is there an hourly limit?
Short answer:
Because Google decided so.
Bit longer answer:
From a technical perspective, setting a ‘run-once-per-hour limit’ for the use of each Google Ads script makes sense. Considering that it’s a free service, this prevents a large amount of requests from flooding Google’s servers and overloading them. To compare, some of Google’s cloud services have more generous limits, but they do charge users for each action taken on the server.
NOTE: A single account Google Ads script can also run for a maximum of 30 minutes before getting cancelled. Meanwhile, scripts set at the manager (MCC) level can run up to a maximum of 60 minutes if using the executeInParallel method. See the documentation for more details on this.
Workarounds
While technically you can create two versions of the same Google Ads script, then set them to run hourly, there is no guarantee they will run at different times within the same hour. In practice though, we find that very often the scripts runs at the same minute of the hour that you used to set the scheduling. So for instance, if you create a new script, and at 2.14PM decide to schedule it to run hourly, most often the script will start at minute 14 of every hour. So you can just create copies and schedule them at different minutes in the hour.
There is no guarantee this will continue to work though, so…
Another trick to schedule scripts to run at a specific minute of an hour is to edit the Google Ads script to “sleep” for a certain time period using the Date() object in JavaScript. More information about this possible workaround in this FAQ.
A third alternative is to build a solution using the Google Ads API instead, since it doesn’t have an hourly limit. This is a bigger technical challenge though and out of the scope of Google Ads scripts.
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