AdWords Scripts - The Basics

What are AdWords Scripts?

AdWords Scripts are found in the Bulk Operations tab of your AdWords account. Here, you can create new scripts and check up on your old ones. You’ll need to have some basic knowledge of JavaScript in order to proceed, but there’s plenty of help on Google Developers, and you can do some surprisingly useful and interesting things with just a few lines of code. One of the main advantages of using scripts as part of your optimisation is that they are extremely flexible and customisable; you can select the exact metrics you want and apply them to any level of your account, be that keyword, adgroup, campaign or even MCC.

What can they do?

So what can we actually do with our scripts? Our purposes for using scripts tend to fall into two categories: reporting, and account optimisation. If you’re a little unsure of where to begin, it’s best to start with a reporting script, as if you make any mistakes, there won’t be any unexpected impact on your account! One of the most popular scripts at Periscopix is used to track budgets. Every day, it pulls your spend so far this month and delivers it to a Google Sheet, where we can compare it against our budget for the month and make any changes we feel are necessary. This is done quite simply by selecting the ‘Cost’ metric from the Campaign Performance report. Once you’ve got the hang of this, you can branch out by selecting a broader range of metrics (Shopping product performance by individual search query, anyone?)

All of these can help inform the decisions you make when using manual optimisation, however, you can set scripts to make automatic changes to your accounts. A basic example would be to run a script each morning to find any keyword that had spent over a certain amount without converting in the last 30 days, and reduce the bids by 20%. You can then get more adventurous by using scripts to make dynamic changes to your ad copy, or make adjustments based on quality score. Google even offers a script that will alter your location bid adjustments based on the weather. With a little practice, there’s no end to the types of optimisation you can use scripts for.

To view this blog written by Kathryn Buckley on Periscopix's website, please click here.