According to many digital marketing specialists, marketing automation has increased their sales productivity by nearly 15%. With less time spent on repetitive tasks, companies that use martech tools have been able to reduce marketing overheard by 12%.
Martech refers to marketing technology tools and software that automate some marketing functions. Some common uses of marketing automation are social media management and email sequences.
What many digital marketers don’t know is that you can take advantage of marketing automation to manage your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns as well. Read on to learn about all the extra time you’ll have once you incorporate Google AdWords Scripts into your search engine marketing campaigns.
Ways Google AdWords Scripts Will Save You So Much Time
We know what you’re thinking. Scripts??
Does that mean I need to learn to code? The answer is not at all.
For the most part, these scripts, although they are pieces of code, require no technical expertise whatsoever. You simply search for the script you want and then copy and paste it into your account. We’ve even saved you some time by collecting the best Google Ads automation scripts for 2018 in one place.
Get an Alert When There are Problems With Your Account
Monitoring your account’s performance is a crucial part of PPC campaign management but it can get a bit tedious when nothing changes from hour to hour. Setting up scripts that alert you when something is going wrong will save you from having to mindlessly monitor the account.
The best thing about these alert scripts is that they give you functionality that even Google Ads doesn’t provide. For example, you can set a spending limit per keyword or product group in the Automated Rules section of the interface, but this option can only be used once a day. This means that a second keyword or category could continue overspending. The right script, on the other hand, can perform an hourly check on as many keywords and product groups as necessary.
Ensure Your Ads Match Your Current Inventory
Is there anything more frustrating than realizing that you’re running ads for inventory that the company no longer carries or have temporarily run out of stock?
There are inventory scripts that update your ads based on the prices advertised on your website and then stop running ads for products that are currently unavailable.
Another type of inventory script can build your campaign based on data from a spreadsheet. This is a huge timesaver for digital marketers who manage the PPC campaigns for stores with a large inventory. The script uses the data about each item in the inventory to build our ad groups and suggest relevant keywords.
Spend Less Time Managing Your Text Ads
Before you get excited, let just clarify that this does not include ad creation. Writing ads that engage your audience is something that cannot be automated. But if you’ve had your campaign for a long time, you likely have stacks of advertisements that are no longer relevant for one reason or another.
There is no point in keeping disapproved ads in your Google Ads account, but it requires an extra step to remove them after you’ve acknowledged their disapproval. Many account managers don’t bother to go back and remove these ads. If you’ve had your campaign for a long time, running a script that deletes ads that were disapproved will significantly improve your user experience.
Although it may have been nerve-wracking the first time you received the disapproved ad notice from Google, you quickly learn that ads are often disapproved for a litany of reasons. One of the most common is that Google disapproves ads that use too many capitalized letters. You can get a script that automatically resubmits these ads with fewer capitalized letters.
Have Better Control Over Your Budget
One of the most important parts of a search engine marketer’s job is managing the budget for PPC campaigns. While it may seem like budgets require hands-on maintenance, they’re actually an excellent use of automated scripts. The thing is, budgeting decisions are cut-and-dry once you’ve actually set your daily and monthly spends.
You can get a script that will pause all of your campaigns when your account hits the maximum spend for the month. The script also automatically restarts the campaigns on the first day of the following month.
Just like you don’t want to overspend, you don’t want to underspend on your campaigns either. In an ideal world, your campaigns would stay under budget and you would hit all your KPIs. In reality, if you’re not spending close to your budget, your ad is being seen as often as you would like it to be.
If your account is frequently not reaching its monthly budget, you can install a script that helps you meet your budget. These scripts operate by increasing your daily spend towards the end of the month.
Automate Your Bid Management
Going to an even more micro level, besides having more control over your overall budget, you can also automate aspects of the bid management process. The bid management scripts are a little more complicated than the other types of scripts we’ve talked about so far. You’ll need to learn to read Javascript code in order to enter the parameters for your bids.
There are scripts that will allow you to bid in order to increase the number of times your ad is viewed by prospective clients. There are even bid scripts that will let you change your bids based on the weather or time of day.
There Are Many More Scripts Available
In this article, we’ve touched on just a few of the Google AdWords scripts you can use to automate your PPC campaign management.
Looking for other ways to develop your marketing strategy? Make sure that you’re taking advantage of the surging popularity of “near me” search by optimizing your content for local searches.