I’ve worked at some big agencies on some very big accounts. Some of those accounts had literally hundreds of accounts that had to me managed; imagine having to manage separate AdWords accounts for Jamba Juice, each with their own keywords, ads, geo-targeting, demographics, etc, etc. Some of the keywords and ads the same, some different. You get the point? It’s an extremely hairy thing to do. I was busting out thousands of edits on thousands of AdWords campaigns. And one by one, I had to do the same 3 or 4 clicks to do this one thing on every ad, among thousands of ads. It wasn’t long into my first big account with multiple locations that I myself at my desk almost banging my head against the keyboard trying to find time to truly make an impact on any one account, and that’s sad. Often while each of these small accounts don’t mean much to that agency’s bottom line, but it means the world to each of the account owners.

Anyway after doing this for a a few months, I realized my head was fried by the end of the day. I’m the type that eats all the food he doesn’t like first knowing the good stuff comes later. So I got by all the menial work thinking about my dessert, time when I could make strategic optimization on each account that would improve the business’s bottom line. Sadly, most people running AdWords never get their dessert because they simply do the day-to-day. A monkey could look through search query reports and find negatives.  AdWords specialists often find themselves wasting weeks of work simply doing things manually.

My stomach turns for them and for their clients. Just thinking about the years these people have been grinding at the wheels when their brain power could have been used on more strategic developments and mitigating costly errors. Poor fellows just didn’t know better. Lucky you for being here, you will know better.

What AdWords Scripts Can Do For You ​

• Save Time (LOTS of time)
• Automate menial tasks
• Fix account wide errors quickly, and thoroughly
• Automate reporting
• Automate optimizations
• Create alerts for certain conditions
• Scale your business

Save time. Automate your AdWords (at least some of it) ​

You can literally turn a week’s worth of work into minutes, just by running a script. And the best thing is that it is repeatable. Once you have the script this optimization on workload will be with you forever. The task is history.

Fix stuff in AdWords fast ​

We are human and hey, we make mistakes, but we aren’t called Pantelope for nothing. I once accidentally loaded ad copy for one product onto another. And I noticed this a day or two later. By that time I had 24 ads floating around with the wrong ad copy. When you have a large number of accounts, campaigns, or ad groups, it can turn really messy, as you can be checking accounts or campaigns that have nothing wrong with them just to track the mistakes. This is tedious, and even then, you can miss some of the mistakes. How did I know there was 24 ads with this problem? I had a script run through all the ad groups to find them and then paused them. This could have been a big problem, but a quick script turned it to smoke. Yeah, I put out a fire.

Get AdWords reporting automated ​

Did you know scripts can write emails and populate Google Sheets? That means you have automated reporting, and you can have those reports sent to you or someone else without having to do anything. So if you have clients or a boss that requires reports, this can be very helpful. Even internally, having access to daily updated reports comes in handy for keeping track of progress on your accounts.

Automate regular AdWords optimizations ​

My favorite automation: optimizing optimizations. Going through accounts and doing repetitive tasks becomes that much more of a daunting task when you actually have to think things through every time you make a move. Like for example, deciding which ad to keep after a split test. Many times the decision is not black and white but you can’t be taking 5 minutes on every ad or you would never finish. That means the optimization is left imperfect for the sake of time. But time isn’t a problem for a computer that calculates at the speed of light.

Get alerts for when things go dark ​

Account hiccups should rarely creep up if you have alerts for precarious events. Broken links, disapproved ads, high account CPL, over-pacing, under-pacing, all these events can be taken care of ahead of time before they start growing hairs. I have scripts set to send me emails on certain events so I’m always in the loop. A healthy account is easy once you have this setup.

Scale your time and business ​

I leave the best for last. This one encompasses all the previous points as this advantage is the aggregate of the other points. At one point everyone hopes their business will reach some kind of exponential growth. And many businesses do, but because of lack of experience, they have their cake and have too much, so the business drowns on its own success. This happens because complexity is also exponential. Scripts will help take care of complexity by scaling your workload. So as you get more work it’s not as much as it should be. If all your reporting, optimization, etc is automated, you can focus on onboarding clients and client acquisition, for example.

So as you see, scripting has lots of benefits. Now that’s a lot of good news, and the bad new is that many people don’t script because they either don’t know programming or they don’t want to hire someone that knows because developers can be expensive. Well, it’s gonna cost you either now or later is what I say. But another good news is that we are currently developing an automation software that is capable of doing all the magic scripting does in an easy to use UI. So you don’t need to know scripting! Sign up for news on this offer.