It also means that 63% of PPC marketers left incredible opportunities on the table.
Let’s be honest. Like any other business, Google’s prerogative is making more money. As the leading online ad platform, advertisers have no choice but to play by their rules and invest more money in ad spends to achieve their desired results.
The issue isn’t specifically the ad spends but rather the lack of transparency that prevents us from knowing what worked and how Google did it. That’s why depending solely on Google is not enough.
Unlike most native platforms that prioritize their own growth and profits, you need someone in your corner who cares about making your campaigns successful and profitable.
The Operational Cost of Not Using Third-Party PPC Software
1. Wasted ad spend
Using a PPC tool makes it easier to save money by identifying and eliminating irrelevant keywords, low-performing ads, and poorly targeted campaigns.
2. Lost opportunities
A reliable PPC tool can assist you in identifying new opportunities to reach your target audience and generate more quality leads and sales.
3. Increased time and effort
Managing PPC campaigns manually can be both time-consuming and challenging. However, using a PPC tool can assist in automating many tasks, freeing up your time to concentrate on other important aspects of your business.
4. Poor data insights
Using a PPC tool makes tracking and analyzing your campaign data easier, enabling you to make informed decisions about your campaigns.
In addition, there are several intangible costs associated with not having third-party PPC support. For instance, failing to seize optimization opportunities in time can significantly impact your overall performance. One timely optimization can be the difference between wasted budgets and a highly effective campaign.
A prime example of the impact of such optimizations comes from Optmyzr’s client, Zeller Media. They managed to slash their CPCs by a substantial 18% for a prominent online job recruiter with just one strategic adjustment.
With Optmyzr’s Quality Score Tracker tool, Zeller Media could easily monitor Quality Score metrics at various levels, from the account down to the keyword. This empowered them to pinpoint the precise elements of the Quality Score that were driving results.
Ultimately, whether you get Optmyzr or some other tool, there’s no denying the need for one.
But we understand that picking the right tool can be overwhelming and may feel like a big financial commitment if you’re unsure what you’re getting yourself into. That’s why we’ve put together some handy points to make the decision less daunting.
What PPC Tools Do You Need & How Much Do They Cost?
When it comes to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) tools, brands have three main options:
Single-function tools
Full management tools or
Building their own tools
Building in-house PPC tools can be costly but offers a customized solution if resources are available.
The essential types of PPC tools include:
Reporting tools for visualizing campaign data and insights.
Budget management tools to ensure spending stays on track.
Creative tools for ad creation and preview support with shared assets.
Keyword, audience, and placement bidding tools for adjusting bids and reporting on performance.
Optmyzr offers all these features at a lower cost than purchasing them individually. Instead of an average monthly cost of $1,900 for separate tools, Optmyzr provides all-in-one functionality starting at $249 per month up to $799 monthly, making it simple to manage everything in one platform.
We have another great article that compares various single-function software with Optmyzr, which includes reporting, budget management, and everything else you need for successful PPC management. Make sure to check it out to know the cost of individual tools vs. Optmyzr’s all-in-one benefit.
How Optmyzr Supports Advertisers, Not Just Their Ads
At Optmyzr, we care about the success of our advertisers just as much as they care about the success of their ads. We want to help you break free from the limitations of native platforms and create strategies that go beyond the status quo.
Without further ado, let’s dive into how Optmyzr puts advertisers first.
1. Reveal the insights in your performance data.
Our insight tools give you recommendations, patterns, and growth opportunities that may elude manual efforts. You can access audit tools and cause charts for a comprehensive account health assessment. You also get robust capabilities for search, shopping, budgets, bid management, and more.
2. Be in charge of your campaigns.
Optmyzr integrates directly with the Google Ads API, allowing you to make changes to search ads, shopping campaigns, Performance Max, display placements, manual and automated bid strategies, and more.
3. Apply your own layer of automation.
Optmyzr’s automation operates atop ad engines, giving you greater control over outcomes and allowing you to concentrate on genuine growth. Receive alerts to monitor performance and spending even in your absence. And our Rule Engine facilitates automation using straightforward “if/then” logic for more complex strategies.
4. Visualize your impact with data.
You can easily choose from various templates or construct custom reports using numerous widgets. Then, automate report delivery to inform your clients and bosses about your monthly contributions to business growth.
5. Optimize with confidence and peace of mind.
Connecting an ad account with Optmyzr is swift and completely secure, taking less than five minutes. Only you and your team can modify your campaigns. And we give you support for all major ad platforms – Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.
Optmyzr makes it easy to manage every aspect of PPC. It is designed for everyone on your team, from account managers to analysts to strategists.
As we approach the big shopping season, now is the perfect time to test and try out our tools and features to find what works best for you. This will help you maximize your investment, achieve your marketing goals, and avoid expensive missteps when it is go time.
Make Your Investment Today, Get 25% Off the Next Year
When you subscribe to the annual plans for Pro and above, you’ll get 3 months free. That’s a 25% discount compared to the respective monthly plan. The benefits of selecting or upgrading to Optmyzr’s Pro and Pro Plus include additional capabilities like the PPC Vertical Benchmarks tool, a white-labeled shareable dashboard, and higher spend and account limits.
Reach out to our support team to know more about our annual plans for Pro and Pro Plus.
Automation in paid search is here to stay. It saves time for the PPC manager, freeing them up for more strategic tasks.
That said, it often feels like automation wasn’t designed for B2B advertisers.
Take Performance Max, Google’s newest campaign type, for example.
See anything there that looks remotely related to B2B?
Google is pushing Performance Max as the next best thing in campaign automation, yet has alienated B2B advertisers with the imagery used to describe it.
So, are B2B advertisers doomed to manual campaign management? Of course not.
In this article, you’ll learn 5 keys to successful B2B paid search automation.
Key #1: Build Your Funnel.
Let’s take a step back for a moment and talk about audiences. Audiences are one of the most important signals used in targeting PPC ads.
That’s right – it’s not just about keywords anymore. And in B2B, keywords often fail us because they’re ambiguous. (For a great read on how Google interprets ambiguous search queries, check out this article by Bill Slawski) We need audiences as an additional signal to the search engines on who we want to reach.
Here’s where the Google Display Network (GDN), YouTube, and Discovery campaigns come in.
B2B advertisers often shy away from upper-funnel tactics like GDN and YouTube because these channels are not great at driving leads. But when you’re trying to build your funnel, leads shouldn’t be a KPI. You’re focused on building audiences who’ve interacted with a particular type of content.
For example, let’s say your company has a video that talks about common problems in your industry, and how your product or service solves those problems. You could set up a YouTube campaign featuring the video, and create an audience of people who viewed at least 50% of the video.
Now you have an audience that has expressed interest in your product or service.
Similarly, you can promote your content in GDN and Discovery campaigns, and build audiences of people who came to your site and interacted with the content.
Discovery campaigns can be particularly effective not only in building audiences but driving leads. Here’s an example of how Discovery campaigns performed compared with Search campaigns for a B2B client.
Discovery drove leads at a significantly lower cost than search, simply because its CPC was so much lower. These campaigns can be highly effective not only for top-of-funnel but mid-funnel as well.
Key #2: Import Third-Party Data.
It’s important to carefully track results for all your paid search campaigns, regardless of the funnel stage. However, it’s rare for B2B buyers to come to a website and make a purchase online. Instead, B2B advertisers are usually tracking leads, by means of a form-fill or other action on a website.
The challenge is, not every form-fill results in an actual lead.
Some percentage of form-fills are bogus, with users giving fake information.
Another percentage are low-quality leads, either from consumers, students, or other users who aren’t serious about buying.
B2B advertisers need a feedback loop to tell the search engines whether the leads they’re getting from paid search are quality leads or not.
CRM systems are usually the source of truth for B2B advertisers. Importing data from the source of truth allows PPC managers to view data on actual business metrics, rather than just form fills that may or may not turn into leads.
And if you get enough CRM conversions, you can use them for Smart Bidding.
This screenshot is from SA360, but you can also use CRM conversions for Google Ads bid strategies, as long as you have them marked as Primary conversions.
Key #3: Use Portfolio Bid Strategies.
Often, B2B campaigns have low conversion volume. When you’re selling six-figure business software, seven-figure medical equipment, and the like, it’s not unusual to only see a handful of conversions each month.
This can pose a challenge for Smart Bidding as it requires at least 20 conversions per month to be effective.
Not to worry.
Using a portfolio bid strategy is a good way to combine similar campaigns into a single bid strategy with enough conversion data to use third-party data for Smart Bidding.
Be careful to make sure the campaigns have similar performance and objectives, though. Don’t combine brand and non-brand campaigns, or campaigns with very different CPAs or goals.
Key #4: Try tROAS With Micro conversions.
As a B2B advertiser, you may have felt left out of several Smart Bidding options, including tROAS. It’s difficult to set a value for a lead, as some leads will turn into multi-million-dollar customers, some will turn into six-figure customers, and some will never become customers at all. And assigning a final value to a lead can take 18 months to two years.
It is possible for B2B advertisers to successfully use tROAs, though.
Let’s say you have four actions you’re measuring: video views, asset downloads, form fills, and MQLs from a third-party import.
Many B2B advertisers get hung up on assigning value to each conversion. Remember, you just need to assign a relative value, not an actual value.
In this example, an MQL is worth 1,000 times what a video is worth.
By assigning a relative value, you’re telling the search engine which conversions matter most to you. The tROAS strategy will look to maximize the value of conversions, not just the number of conversions – thereby improving the quality of the leads it’s driving.
Key #5: Send the Right Signals.
In order to get the best possible results from paid search, it’s important to send the right signals.
Keywords are one signal. It’s important to choose the right keywords for B2B search campaigns in order to weed out consumer queries.
When thinking about keywords, don’t forget about negative keywords. I’m always surprised by the number of PPC campaigns in new client accounts that don’t have any negatives.
Negative keywords are crucial for B2B campaigns. Go through your keyword research, find all the consumer queries, and add them as negatives.
We talked about audiences earlier. Always, always add audiences for observation.
You should make sure they’re relevant, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to add all the relevant audiences you can find. Monitor performance, and adjust as needed. Audience performance review should be part of your regular optimization cadence.
Don’t forget to add negative audiences, too. If there are audiences you don’t want to reach or audiences that have performed poorly, add them as negatives.
Final takeaways
Remember, you’re telling the automation who you want to reach, and who you don’t want to reach. The more accurate signals you can send, the better your performance will be.
Over the past 5 to 6 years we have all experienced the impact of change within the PPC community. While many of the changes have made tasks faster, advances in automation and machine learning have forced paid search professionals to navigate platform changes without control.
With even more feature confusion marketers can feel overwhelmed by their inability to keep up with Google’s propensity for change.
PPC Marketers are losing control. There is still a hyper-awareness of performance metrics while knowing the industry won’t go back in time. So, what does it all mean?
The two main categories of automation
Task automation
Task automation is pretty simple. Two small examples of automated tasks that have changed over the past few years in PPC include
the ability to find redundant keywords in an account, and
the ability to quickly report data
Both of these tasks used to involve downloading raw data into a spreadsheet and creating pivot tables. Today, both these tasks can be done in minutes using the ‘Recommendations’ Tab or the ‘Report Center’ in the Google Ads interface.
Automation is a positive evolution in the paid search industry for seasoned professionals, but it can be difficult for beginners.
The main drawback of task automation is that people who are new to the field often do not understand why the task is important; they just know to press the button. Finding duplicate keywords for example is a way to avoid competition with ads in the same account.
When there are multiple versions of keywords, ad relevance gets diluted which can impact quality score, reduce click-thru rates and increase CPCs.
When it comes to reporting tasks, prior to automation, segmented reports were cumbersome to create. Reporting can show trended data in the interface but once broken down into segments, the decision-making becomes stronger.
Segmenting data can help determine which campaign type or setting is delivering the most value for the account. Understanding how to segment data and why to segment is a skill that requires experience.
Taking the time to understand why data should be analyzed in different ways will foster better client communication.
Bidding automation
Automated bidding is a different category of automation. Historically, as Google Ads evolved we had only lost control of variants. Automated bidding has been a significant shift. This change means that campaigns need to be consolidated so Google has enough data to learn.
The automation of bidding also favors larger campaign budgets as small daily budgets limit impression share and the ability to get all the data possible.
Lastly, this type of bidding works best when match types are broad because the system can maximize the reach of the keyword and consider the context of the search. This is another area of automation where understanding the history and basics of PPC can shed insight as to why the campaign is behaving in a specific way.
1. Understanding how automation operates is key.
Understanding the types of automation is a key component of effective PPC account management. Showing the trend over time as well as the strategy that has been deployed adds context to client reporting.
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You can’t have it all. It’s a sad, but true fact. You can’t scale an account while becoming more efficient. And the tactics and strategies for each goal are fundamentally different.
It’s like trying to make a peanut butter sandwich while getting your nails done: it just doesn’t work. Alignment and understanding here are critical because clients often ask why CPAs are increasing while pursuing a growth strategy.
As marketers navigating automation it is best to plot learning periods, campaign launch days, budget changes, bidding strategies, and campaign reorganization alongside performance data. This is a great way to explain to clients why the data shifted while explaining the impact of different campaigns and strategies.
2. Audience targeting has evolved over the years.
Another shift in PPC has been the evolution of audience targeting. PPC was designed around keywords. Still, in 2022 we create keyword lists and attempt to match keywords to intent.
However, Google has inch-by-inch added supplemental features to allow for more audience targeting. Advertisers can now target ads based on specific groups or demographics of people that share similar characteristics or interests and layer this data into campaigns with keywords.
The audiences provide more context to our paid search campaigns.
Why do audiences matter?
As much as we think we know, keywords aren’t perfect. The intent is difficult to pinpoint and paid search in the search network is based on matching intent.
“Keywords are not focused on the human, instead, they are focused on the word itself and what we think we know. In contrast, audience targeting is all about people. Instead of looking at keywords, audiences factor humans that have certain characteristics, demographics, and behaviors.”
As marketers, we are trying to influence behavior so the human component of audiences is relevant. Merging the keyword with audiences absolutely improves paid search campaigns.
3. The keyword has evolved too.
The paid search community has a hard time admitting that the keyword is not perfect. Bottom-of-the-funnel activities are easy to understand and show high returns.
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Those of us who started in the early days lived through a radical budgeting shift. In traditional media such as TV and radio demand capture is harder to measure. Keyword paid search was not only easy to measure but could be directly tied back to sales and actions.
As time went on, advertisers struggled to grow demand. Their problem was that they had invested heavily in demand capture activities and underinvested in demand generation tactics. Large advertisers who had abandoned traditional media began to see the light and reinvested in traditional advertising.
It is no surprise that most advertisers did not put their money back into TV, radio, and newspapers. Instead, advertisers moved to Facebook, programmatic display, and CTV.
These newer platforms excel at demand generation more than the keyword. During this time keywords became saturated. Keyword bidding could feel like hitting a brick wall when it came to increasing lead volume.
Platforms such as Google have this data and realized at some point to grow their revenue they would need advertisers to grow beyond keyword bidding as well. The platforms offered top-of-funnel solutions.
But let’s face it - the community at large was reluctant.
This was the start of automation and platform changes. Today the age of automation is upon us.
At first, advertisers were not even sure how to react. Those who had the highest confidence in their abilities started telling stories of a past life where they had been on the other side of the fence, wearing the shoes of the man who crafted the campaigns himself.
They spoke of spending six hours a day meticulously concatenating millions of keywords, optimizing ad copy, and tinkering with settings, in an attempt to find that golden 1% boost in conversion rate.
Modern advertisers leaned into automation and saw success. They began to lean into a fuller funnel approach.
“Today the best advertisers lean into automation while taking the time to understand platform changes. The understanding comes from reading support documentation, understanding the history of how the tasks worked when being done manually, and having a healthy dose of skepticism when applying changes.”
4. Google support’s quality has degraded.
Another evolution in PPC has been platform support. In recent years, Google customer support has been less responsive than it was in the past.
“Click-to-chat has become the new norm. Calls involve long wait times. Google reps are focused on sales and tool adaption and less focused on teaching and supporting client goals.”
They come across as having their priorities backward, while conversations can be circular arguments with the rep referencing incorrect support documentation or proposing campaign changes that don’t align with the goal.
There have been times it seemed like customer support was handled by a computer instead of a human.
5. The PPC community has become more collaborative.
The PPC industry has become much more open as a result of this lack of support, which has led to an increase in collaboration among members of the community. In the past, as professionals, we were territorial over tactics and resisted openly sharing successes and failures.
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Today, we work together to figure out what works and what does not perform as expected.
6. There’s more access to learning resources now.
Another change in the PPC industry is access to information. When I got started in paid search marketing, I had to read blogs to learn. I remember setting up Google Alerts in my inbox so I could read any article about paid search, PPC, or SEO.
Today there are free webinars, books, podcasts, virtual conferences, TikToks, and YouTube channels. There are ways to consume content on your own terms. I’ve been able to attain some of my professional success because of the flexibility afforded by my ability to listen to podcasts or YouTube videos.
“The sharing of information has helped our community thrive in that: it has spread ideas and enabled collaboration. Most of us have stopped trying to outwit the machine and accepted that we can not beat or control it.”
Understanding how machine automation operates is more impactful than deep dives into spreadsheets which was a requirement during the ‘3 million keyword’ days of paid search.
We need to work alongside the machines.
To sum up the changes in PPC - we’re in a battle against the bots. And while it’s up to the industry to fight them together, the onus is on each of us individually to adapt and make the most out of this automated landscape.
It’s important to remember why you got into PPC in the first place - for the opportunities for creativity, for developing your own style, for pushing yourself. If you only view automation as an evil force trying to steal your job, then automation will win.
And maybe that’s how some out there want it - but I don’t think many would be satisfied with a passive existence. Whether or not automation wins, we all need to start looking at new ways to become the best marketers and PPC strategists.
I encourage you to work with your clients to find ways to keep ad campaigns interesting and fresh regardless of what changes come our way.
This is a guest post by Sarah Stemen, Senior Paid Search manager for Marcus Thomas.
About the author: Sarah Stemen is a Senior Paid Search manager for Marcus Thomas based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is a regular participant in PPCChat and a board member of the Paid Search Association. Sarah has been working in paid search since 2007 and has spent time on both the client side and the agency side. When not doing paid search, Sarah is busy with 3 kids.
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Adding Google’s Click ID (GCLID) to Google Analytics is a powerful way to better understand the behavior of people who come to your site after clicking on one of your ads. But to see GCLID data in Google Analytics requires a few steps. We’ll walk you through these in this article.
1. Create a new custom dimension in Google Analytics
Here are the steps to help get the first part of GCLID tracking set up in Google Analytics:
Go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics profile by clicking the settings wheel at the bottom left.
Click Custom Definitions and the Custom Dimensions in the middle column.
Click the button to create a new Custom Dimension.
Name the new custom dimension ‘gclid’.
For scope, select “User”.
Save your changes.
Look at the table with all your custom dimensions and write down the index number for the one you just created. We’ll need this shortly for another step.
2. Use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to capture the GCLID from the URL
The GCLID is passed in the URL by Google when a user clicks on your ad. Google Analytics doesn’t natively know what to do with this so we need to tell it that the GCLID’s value should be stored in the custom dimension we just created.
There are many ways to do this, but one of the most easily repeatable ways is by using Google Tag Manager. Here we’ll tell it to grab the GCLID from the URL.
In the Variables section, add a new User-Defined variable.
For Variable Type, select ‘URL’.
For Component Type, select ‘Query’.
For Query Key, type in ‘gclid’.
Leave all other settings as they are and save the variable.
3. Use Google Tag Manager to send the GCLID to Google Analytics
Now that GTM knows how to grab the GCLID from the URL, we need to send that value to Google Analytics. GTM can do this for us as well.
This is where everything comes together so the steps refer back to the things you did in the previous two instruction lists. We’ve included ample screenshots to make it as easy as possible to follow along.
If you already use GTM to put Google Analytics on your website, go to your existing tag. Otherwise, create a new tag for Universal Analytics.
In the tag configuration, open the dropdown for Google Analytics Settings and create a New Variable.
Add a Custom Dimension under ‘More Settings’.
For the index field, enter the number you wrote down from step 7 in the first instruction list on this page (create a new custom dimension in Google Analytics).
For Dimension Value, click on the brick icon to open your available list of variables.
Select the variable you created in the previous set of steps (use Google Tag Manager to capture the GCLID from the URL).
Save the tag, test your GTM changes and publish them.
4. Use Google Analytics to see GCLID data
Note that the GCLID custom dimensions data will not be retroactively added into your old Google Analytics reports so you’ll have to wait a few hours for new data that does include the GCLID to appear.
As an example of a report you can now run, go to a report like ‘Behavior > Site Content > All Pages’ and in the Secondary Dimensions dropdown select ‘gclid’.
Your report will now include both the URL and the gclid.
You can download this data and using lookups in spreadsheets, start to build a more holistic view into the behavior resulting from clicks on your Google Ads.
When you add GCLID as a custom dimension in Google Analytics, Optmyzr will help you explore, build, and optimize audiences, as well as help with offline conversion import (OCI).
PPC marketers are always optimizing — some monitoring here, an adjustment there, and then you start to see (better) results. When you have that much to do, it’s impossible to do it manually and scale your output.
So there’s no reason to fear automation — like scripts. They not only speed up the process, but also allow you to be much more efficient in running your business. That’s right — scripts can drive business impact.
Best of all, anyone can use scripts, even if you haven’t written even a single line of code in your life!
So this week on episode 18 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to our panelists who live and breathe scripts:
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you grow your business by automating your PPC accounts with scripts.
1. Update price extensions
Nils: Price extensions are very popular extensions that you can use in your Google Ads accounts to display actual prices. But prices tend to change quite often. If you have different products, and the product manager or account manager is changing the prices of the products because of inventory or competition, you need to update the price extensions with the actual prices.
Up until a year ago, it was impossible to update them through scripts. Fortunately, now we can access the price extensions via the scripts API to keep them in sync with your inventory.
To check the price extensions, you need to do the following: Google Ads scripts → References → AdsApp → Ad Extensions → Prices.
2. When to turn to scripts
Steve: ‘This is taking too much manual work’ is the point where we begin to think about building scripts to shorten the whole process. Most of the time, it’s brought up due to some amount of laziness on our part. For example, I’m currently working on Search Query reports and rely on scripts to deliver automated reports to me.
One of the best things about scripts is that you get to see this functionality and dozens of ways one can apply that across campaigns. The fun of scripts is finding something and imagining creative ways to apply them.
3. The business value of scripts
Nils: Scripts deliver great benefits all over the place. I’ve created a list of the Top 7 benefits of using scripts. Personally I try to automate as much as possible by using scripts. It has helped my remote PPC agency succeed and apply consistent processes to operations. With scripts, you can come up with new ideas to test your account, which wouldn’t have been possible manually. For example, we know that N-gram analysis is very tedious and time-taking. But with scripts, something that complex becomes quicker and can be done more frequently.
The biggest benefit of scripts for my agency has been quality assurance. As the scripts are monitoring everything, any mistake done by my team comes under notice quickly. This way I can be alerted when anything goes haywire and sleep easy.
Steve: We recently shifted to a new revenue model — cost per deliverable, where we charge our customers a fixed amount for our services. Scripts allow me to do that a lot more efficiently.
It’s not a discussion of hours anymore. Our clients are more focused on whether the product runs efficiently rather than how. This allows me to take my expertise and focus on deliverables rather than time.
4. Copy-pasting and modifying scripts
Steve: I think in blocks, which is basically the JavaScript way of thinking. Figuring out which functions do what, and letting them flow through until you get all the pieces for the script. In a lot of cases, you will get pre-built scripts to work on.
For example, Google’s Account Anomaly script is very easy to adjust to things that you are looking for in your anomalies. This can be a good base to get started with scripts.
5. Using scripts to monitor Google’s AI
Nils: We know that Google AI uses machine learning to predict performances on clicks. And machine learnings involves a ‘learning phase’. We are basically providing Google money and data to feed it to the machine learning algorithms. This is where I love to use scripts to track how AI is handling my accounts. If it goes haywire, and does a bad job for my clients my scripts would alert me immediately.
For example, for close variants, I have created a script to monitor the performance of the real keyword against the close variant. If there’s a significant difference in the performance, like in CPA or ROAS, I get alerted of that. You need to layer scripts and Google’s AI to make the most of it.
Conclusion
It’s important to look at Google Ads holistically. Everything — bids, budgets, ad text — influences this interconnected system. It’s not enough to set a script and forget it; you have to monitor it periodically as well.
As you gain experience, you can try modifying them to suit your specific needs. Experiment with existing rules to see how they affect the performance of your PPC accounts, and remember to preview your script before applying it.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So experiment away!
We all have repetitive PPC management tasks we wish we could automate and get off our daily to-do lists. Fortunately, there are several options for PPC advertisers to achieve this, like Google Ads’ Automated Rules, and Optmyzr’s Rule Engine.
In working with hundreds of customers in my two years at Optmyzr, I noticed many advertisers don’t explore our Rule Engine’s most powerful capabilities because they assume it’s just another interface to control Google’s Automated Rules.
Turns out there’s much more to it than that.
The Rule Engine actually enables our power users to do some of their most advanced optimizations that they wouldn’t have time for without this level of automation.
I talked to Fred, one of our founders who shared that the Rule Engine was initially built as a script for a customer whose bid management strategy took a full day of his time every week!
The script was useful but limited to that advertiser’s strategy. So our company built the Rule Engine to allow every advertiser to automate their most powerful strategies.
While we’re fans of Google Ads Automated Rules for their simple setup, that simplicity is limiting when you want to take your account to the next level with a more powerful strategy. That’s the gap we’re solving with our Rule Engine.
Let me share 6 useful things you can do with the Optmyzr Rule Engine that you cannot with Google Ads Automated Rules.
1. Combine multiple rules into layered strategies
Though in Google Ads you can add as many automated rules as you want, it’s not possible to combine them into a single optimization. In Optmyzr, this is possible with Rule Engine strategies.
In Optmyzr, a rule is a set of conditions and actions (if and then statements). Strategies let you combine multiple rules — in essence, letting you add the ‘else’ portion in an ‘if’, ‘then’, else’ rule.
For example, in just one strategy, you can consolidate all your search query management by adding one rule to add positive keywords and another rule to add negatives.
You can also have multiple actions applied to an entity. For example, you can add a label to the keywords your rule paused because they were found to be too expensive.
2. Use data from multiple/custom date ranges
Automated rules in Google Ads let you use a single date range for metrics. This makes it impossible to do relative comparisons, like to find ad groups that have a sudden spike in CPA for the past week compared to the last 30 days.
With our Rule Engine, you can bring in performance data from as many date ranges as you’d like, making relative comparisons very easy.
While using multiple date ranges is useful, it’s even better when you can customize those date ranges. Rather than just using default ones like the last 7/30/n days, you can build custom date ranges that are based on lookback windows.
For example, you can build a custom date range for 14 days ago to 8 days ago (week before last), and another for 7 days ago to 1 day ago (last week). This enables you to find search terms that have gained a lot of impressions in the past week compared to the week before, or ad groups that have seen a decline in CTR for a few weeks in a row.
3. Do relative comparisons of metrics across a hierarchical structure
With our Rule Engine, you’re able to compare, in just one condition, the performance of the same metric at different levels. This comes in handy when you want to do a relative comparison using expressions/formulas.
For example, compare the CPA of one keyword versus the CPA of the campaign in which the keyword is located. Now you could do things like find keywords that are 50% more expensive than average for the campaign.
In Google Ads automated rules, you can compare a metric against a static value but not against other elements. So you can only do things like find keywords whose CPA is higher than $20. That’s not helpful when you know that CPAs vary greatly between brand and non-brand campaigns, and even between campaigns that sell different services in different locations.
By using a relative comparison, you don’t need to set a static target for all your comparisons, and it becomes very easy to simply look for outliers.
Note: You can also use expressions as actions to calculate new bids and targets.
4. Use external data
What happens when you want to use data not available in Google Ads, but that is also important for your business and optimizations?
5. Set rules on autopilot or review them on demand
While automations help you save tons of time, you may not always want to give up full control; this is why we also let you use your Rule Engine strategies manually. We give you everything necessary to create your own optimization tools and then run them on demand.
Following this idea, even when your strategies are running automatically, we still let you decide if you want to review the changes before you apply them. This is a huge advantage when you want to test your optimization before giving all the control to the automation.
6. Exclude recent changes
You can avoid applying continuous changes to the same entity for a defined period of time to give them enough time to perform before it’s considered by the strategy again. This helps when you don’t want to stack bids or change the target CPA of an ad group that was already adjusted the day before.
This is particularly helpful in situations where you’re slowly changing things like bids until they meet your goal.
For example, if you automate bidding to set an ideal CPC based on the last 7 days’ conversion rate and your target CPA (new CPC = target CPA * conversion rate), you can run that rule as often as you want without worrying that your bids will get out of control.
However, the following is a riskier automation: new CPC = old CPC + $0.10 when last 7 days’ CPA is below CPA target.
It’s risky because if you run this rule 5 times per day, it will increase the bid 5 times even though the last 7 days’ CPA includes only a small portion of data since the last bid change.
With Optmyzr, you can remove this risk by excluding items that were already changed recently. Now every time the rule runs, it will only make suggestions for entities that were not already recently changed by the same rule.
The Rule Engine is my favorite, because you can tailor account rules to match what the individual client needs to be seeing for performance.
Larry C, Owner/Operator, 707 Marketing
Conclusion
If we have to sum up all of the above, it’s about two things: flexibility and more control. Which tool to use will depend on how much of your workflow you want to automate, and how much customization is required.
The Rule Engine definitely is a powerful tool that gives you much room to play with and is designed for both novice and advanced users.
Interested in learning more about it? Let support@optmyzr.com know, and we’ll be happy to help you!
Paid search marketing has become even more challenging than usual, as PPC pros grapple with unforeseen challenges far beyond our normal existence. We’re all being tasked to re-think how we approach paid search and adapt to this time of crisis. Even without the COVID-19 crisis, our longstanding, baked-in challenges compound the pressures on even the best of PPC pros.
Among the entrenched challenges is the clear need to view PPC beyond the land of Google.
We love Google. It’s still the undisputed king of search. Yet now more than ever, Bing continues to steadily work its way up the market share ladder. Many estimates say the Bing properties now account for about a third of all search activity.
Remember, Bing includes Yahoo!, MSN, and more.
Fear not. We’re not introducing more challenges into your PPC life; we’re focused on easing your burden.
Whether you’ve already added Microsoft Ads to your PPC mix or are just realizing the opportunities in the evolving search landscape, the Optmyzr team continues to make it easy to work across platforms.
This week, our team releases the Rule Engine for Bing Ads. The new module is part of the core Optmyzr PPC Management Suite, makes it easier to craft deeper customization, and adds power to your Microsoft Ads campaigns.
Best of all, you can work in tandem, managing Google Ads and Microsoft Ads much more efficiently and effectively.
Closely adapted from our longstanding Rule Engine for Google Ads, the intuitive Rule Engine makes it easy to create custom PPC optimizations and execute bulk changes to Microsoft Advertising campaigns across the Bing universe.
Think of the Rule Engine as a way to create multiple rules in sequence, tapping into essential conditions within campaigns along with the corresponding actions.
What does that look like in real life? Based on conditions and parameters deep in campaign structures, the Rule Engine makes it easy to automate discovery and actions against critical aspects of PPC including:
Quickly uncovering expensive keywords
Identifying expensive product groups
Bidding to target CPA or target ROAS
Identifying anomalies with close variants
The Rule Engine Wizard makes it easy to find a strategy that fits your needs
The Rule Engine includes many pre-built strategies for critical needs that we’ve identified over the years — and that our users have also discovered. These pre-built strategies help you get started faster.
As PPC pros’ needs and skill evolve, the Rule Engine becomes even more powerful.
Start by selecting an objective and one of the Instant Strategies, or build your own
We’ve designed the tool to ease the time and steps required to build your own strategies. A new, intuitive setup wizard allows simple point-and-click rule creation, making it possible to launch new strategies in just minutes.
Several customers took part in the beta testing of the Rule Engine for Bing. One, in particular, was able to deploy the Rule Engine for innovative bid management and alerts.
Leverage Optmyzr’s machine intelligence or take full control of your strategy settings
That customer is Spain-based sporting goods retailer Sprinter. As part of a very competitive industry, the experienced team at Sprinter has to align keyword strategies with inventories, promotions, seasonality, economic dynamics, and other factors that impact revenue.
Sprinter’s senior paid social executive Manuel Vilella noted after beta testing, “We like to bid manually in our brand campaigns, as we prefer not using automated strategies to achieve the minimum CPC. As we have some dozens of brand keywords, we need a solution to adjust the bid according to the viewability. Rule Engine allows us to forget about implementing these changes, as it does this automatically.”
The Rule Engine lets you build unique strategies using if-then statements
We’re proud to bring this new capability to market at a critical time when once again, search marketing is being upended and re-invented before our eyes. Being an effective, strategic marketer during adverse times requires us all to take a much more holistic view of the market and have effective tools at our disposal to work efficiently and strategically across channels.
Best of all, whether the Rule Engine for Google Ads is a familiar tool or one you’ve never tried, we’ve focused on ease of use. So the Rule Engine for Bing can be incorporated into workflows quickly and effectively.
If you’re a current Optmyzr user, let us know how we can help you get the most out of the Rule Engine across Bing and Google. If you’re thinking about trying Optmyzr, contact us for a demo. You’ll see how Rule Engine fits into the full suite and can reduce tasks that previously would have taken hours (or even days) to minutes.
Our team is standing by. Let us know how we can help!
PPC Hero Summit is just around the corner, and I hope you take time to attend a webinar session I’m doing Feb. 12 with my good friend and fellow PPC veteran Jeff Baum of Hanapin Marketing.
Jeff and I will help PPC pros decipher one of the most confusing (and sometimes feared) aspects of PPC in 2020: Automation and artificial intelligence. Our session is entitled “Beyond the Engines’ AI: Make Machine Learning Work for YOUR Brand.” We will help PPC pros learn how they can outperform the competition as automation by Google and Bing threatens to make things easier – and more difficult at the same time.
Pros and Cons of PPC Automation
Google and Bing know what they are doing. Billions upon billions of searches have provided unprecedented opportunity to understand the actual intent and needs of audiences in ways old school marketers could never dream.
Over the last few years, in particular, the big engines have deployed powerful AI and machine learning to automate many core functions of PPC. On the upside, they’ve made it possible for pretty much anyone to set up and run good PPC. There are a lot of positives associated with automations now at search marketers’ collective fingertips – not the least of which is time savings.
The automation of many aspects of core PPC is eliminating busy tasks that used to take up the lion’s share of time for even the most efficient marketers.
However, with all of the greatness of automation, we see some big “cons” on the other side of the ledger, including a growing concern among search marketers that they may be automated into obsolescence. Let’s consider a few specific areas of concern, which we’ll cover in our PPC Hero Summit online session:
Smart marketers are not 100% sold on the search engines’ machine learning features and settings. After all, the buck stops at the desk of the actual PPC pro when it comes to spending our own (or our clients’) budgets. Surrendering all control and decision making to Google and Bing automations isn’t wise.
If everyone uses the same automations in the same manner, PPC may well become overly commoditized. It could be akin to all teams in a sports league using the exact same playbook and strategy.
Company A and Company B may be in the same industry selling similar products, but things that work well for one company or its customers may fail miserably for the other.
Jeff and I will cover essentials of what’s working and what’s not when it comes to the big engines’ machine learning. More importantly, we’ll discuss many liberating and empowering reasons to use a third-party tool to help you leapfrog competitors, including:
Ability to elevate to marketing strategist versus practitioner;
Visibility into immediate dynamics of campaigns to make faster, effective course corrections;
Great control over dynamics unique to your business or industry.
Perhaps most valuable, we’ll help search marketers understand how to make a strong business case to their own bosses for a third-party resource.
I encourage you to invest 30 minutes of time to participate in our February 12 session. Jeff and I know your time is valuable, so we’re planning a rapid-fire event that can make a tremendous difference in your future as a marketer – without a huge investment of your time.
Register today and we look forward to this informative session.
AI and machine learning-driven automations are responsible for big changes to how search marketers run their accounts. Make no mistake, smart marketers are those who leverage this new technology and operate at the forefront of where Google, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook are taking us.
Keeping control over PPC in an ever-more automated world is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for PPC pros this year. Let me share how we’re going to help you make 2020 your best year yet.
Automation Layering
Automation within the search engines poses a couple of inherent risks for PPC pros:
Automation-fueled obsolescence for the PPC pro
Commoditized marketing for the brand
Think about it: If Google automates seemingly everything, will the PPC pro have anything to actually do? And if everyone is using the same automated setup/bid/execute models, is everyone operating on a playing field that is just far too level????
You’re not wrong to have those fears but the team at Optmyzr takes a different view of platform automations – one of opportunity versus threat.
We see a new era for PPC pros to become indispensable through a concept we call Automation Layering.
Frederick Vallaeys, Cofounding CEO, Optmyzr
Simply stated, the search engines are continually automating specific tasks and functions associated with PPC. Automation layering is about the human PPC pro using those automations to morph from being task oriented to becoming a strategic marketing leader.
Optmyzr CEO, Fred Vallaeys, explains automation layering at SMX East. Apologies for the scratchy audio.
Google and the others are aggressively automating the repetitive and tedious side of PPC. Innovative PPC pros crave reducing manual tasks, which allows them to redefine their role and rightfully claim the mantle of marketing strategist.
For the past year and through 2020 and beyond, we are focused on empowering PPC pros to make sense of the platform-level automations and turn those automations into PPC gold.
Let me add a real-life example to illustrate what we’re talking about. We used the Rule Engine to find expensive keywords. Surprise, surprise, we almost instantly found some keywords using automated bidding from Google, spending nearly $2,000 in the last 30 days with 0 conversions.
The ‘Reduce Bids‘ optimization, based on an Optmyzr Rule Engine strategy, can proactively identify and pause keywords where automated bidding by Google is wasting money.
To a big company like Google, this is peanuts and just a necessary part of teaching the machines how to do bidding. But to an advertiser, that is real money coming off their bottom-line that could have been better spent.
Bid automation is great because it saves advertisers a tremendous amount of time, but we have to use our own automations, like Optmyzr, to stay on top of the automations from the engines.
Data-Driven Ads
Saying a PPC campaign is data-driven is a bit like proclaiming that the sun rises in the east. It’s no surprise. PPC pros live in data all day, every day.
Reality is, data will continue to expand its already omnipresence in PPC pros’ lives. We see more structured data leading to more ads based on that structured data. From merchant feeds to inventory spreadsheets, product-level details get deeper and even MORE real-time than ever.
In 2020, we’ll focus much more intensely on the very powerful shopping ads in Google, Amazon, and Bing, in particular. Our expanding developer team will focus on many emerging advancements of shopping ads in 2020.
Search marketers operate in multiple search platforms with varying functions, control, and reporting capabilities. While automation at the platform level helps streamline many of the in-channel tasks, working across disparate platforms can be challenging. As such, we are focusing on improving usability for marketers:
Deciding where to even start. Let’s face it – from seasoned pros to those just starting their search marketing journey, we’ve gotten to a point there are so many options it can be paralyzing to get started. Our developers are refining how Optmyzr suggests what actions to take and highlight the most important things happening in your accounts.
Knowing what actions can or should be taken based on the mind-boggling amount of data at a marketer’s disposal. From the moment a user logs in to Optmyzr, smart suggestions will help you create and follow your own workflow. We’ll also guide users directly to the actions that will provide the most immediate results, essentially highlighting “this is the most broken thing that must be addressed NOW.”
Interacting with Optmyzr. Look for important user interface enhancements in the months ahead. We know that PPC pros spend a significant part of their day in the system, working their channels. Intuitive, customized – and customizable – workflows will help align the work being done to capture greater value in channel.
Staying on top of client needs and anticipating or adjusting to subtle changes deep within automated systems will be more critical than ever in 2020. Optmyzr Co-Founder Manas Garg summed this notion up eloquently in a recent discussion about automation and smart bidding. He noted
“While advertisers shift more and more to smart bidding, many will fall into a complacency trap with a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ mindset. Optmyzr must help them see the signals so they avoid falling months behind a trend or opportunity.”
Manas Garg, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Software that helps advertisers stay in control of the myriad automations from the engines is the key to success. We see 2020 as an opportune time to further empower PPC pros with essential tools and prebuilt recipes that maximize the native automations within the big engines.
2020 can be a year of empowerment and unprecedented opportunity for smart PPC pros. Make it your best year yet. Optmyzr is with you.
In a previous blog post, we walked you through how you could manage bids by weather using Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and its spreadsheet capability. Today we will be doing a similar walkthrough but focused on how to integrate and use Google Analytics to optimize your Google Ads account using the Rule Engine. For this example, we’ll be pulling a report from Google Analytics with data from how many new users came from AMP pages, and then use that information to raise the bids for them by 5%.
Set up the Spreadsheet
The first thing we’ll need to do is populate a spreadsheet with Google Analytics data to work with. To do this, you can generate a new Google Analytics report directly into a spreadsheet by using the Add-On Feature for Google Analytics. You can do this by opening up a new spreadsheet and heading over to “Add-Ons”. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed as an add on, you can set it up with “Get add-ons”, selecting “Google Analytics” and signing into your Analytics Account.
In the report spreadsheets, you can add almost any combination of metrics, dimensions, and segments to create a Google Analytics report into a spreadsheet. For this example, we’ll be using the following:
Metrics: “Users”, “New Users”
Dimensions: “Campaign name”, “Ad Group name”, “Campaign ID”, “Ad Group ID” “Source”, “Data Source”
Segment: “All Users”
This will help us gather how many new users our campaigns have acquired through the use of mobile, web and AMP pages.
Run the Report
After you create the report, head back over to the Add-Ons section and press “Run Reports”. The results will appear in a separate tab, and will look somewhat like this:
To be able to use this spreadsheet in the Rule Engine, you’ll need to delete the information above the results breakdown and change the “Campaigns” to “CampaignName”, “Google Ads: Ad Group” to “AdGroupName” and “Google Ads: Ad Group ID” to “AdGroupId”. It should look something like this.
Finally, and once these settings are done, open up the sharing preferences and share the spreadsheet with the following email:
You can read further on how external spreadsheet data works with the Rule Engine here.
Connect it to the Rule Engine
Once the spreadsheet is set up and ready, head over to the Rule Engine and create a new custom recipe. Define the level on which changes will be made, and set a name for your new recipe.
On the settings page, scroll down to the “Connect External Data” field and paste the spreadsheet link in the empty space. Make sure you use the results tab name where it says “Specify Sheet Name”.
Create the Recipe
Once you’ve connected the external spreadsheet, click proceed and you’ll be taken to define the first condition.
You can read more about how custom Rule Engine recipes work here.
In this case, we’ll set the first condition that’ll tell the system to consider the ad groups with more than 5 “new users”. The second condition will filter out the new users that have been acquired through AMP pages, and the third condition defines that only the ones with a CTR higher than 5% will be considered. Here you can also filter out by campaign and ad group, by selecting “Campaign Name” or “Ad Group Name” contains.
Then we’ll tell the system that when these rules are matched, it should increase the bid by a 5%
Once we’re done, press on the preview button and you’ll be taken to a page with a list of the results. These results will show which campaigns and ad groups matched the rules in the recipe, the current bid and the 5% increase of bid. If you want to apply these changes, simply press on Apply Now.
Keep it running
Every Rule Engine recipe can be scheduled to run automatically by pressing on the Automate button on the recipe’s preview. Pressing on this button will prompt a confirmation box with the final details for you to review. You can schedule it to run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Congratulations, you’ve just created a custom Analytics-based recipe! If you have any questions or would like help setting it up, feel free to contact us at support@optmyzr.com and our awesome team will give you a hand!
You know that old saying “when it rains… apply bid changes”. Well, that’s not really how it goes, but it’s most definitely one thing you can do with our Rule Engine!
Now we’ll show you how Optmyzr can help you automatically bid by weather. A similar case was also covered in the “Advanced Rule Engine Examples” video by our co-founder Frederick Vallaeys.
Step 1: Create the Recipe.
For this example, we’ll create a recipe to modify bids at the ad group level using values such as “Current Temperature” or “Current Weather Condition”.
Keep in mind that this is just one of many use cases for the Rule Engine weather bid management. Among the possibilities you’ll find you can:
Increase/decrease bids at the keyword or product group level using weather data (e.g., increase bids for all keywords containing “air conditioners” during warm days).
Change the status of your campaigns (e.g., pause your “bathing suits” campaigns if it’s snowing)
You’ll need to generate your own API key here https://openweathermap.org/appid#get and follow the rest of the steps listed on the sheet “Instructions and Keys”.
Note: For the last step on the spreadsheet, you can download your list of campaigns from the “Connect External Data” section in the Rule Engine by clicking on “Get Sample Data For Your Account” and pasting it exactly as it is on the “Paste CSV from RE here” sheet.
Step 3: Add the corresponding City or ZIP Code to each of the campaigns.
Now let’s add the corresponding City or ZIP Code to the campaigns. The spreadsheet has a couple of sheets to get weather data. Depending on which one you want to use, you’ll have to manually add the City or ZIP code to your list of campaigns.
For cities, please follow this format {city},{country code} (you can get a list of country codes here).
Note: If the country code is not specified, the OpenWeatherMap API might return data for the wrong city.
Step 4: Link the spreadsheet.
To link the spreadsheet to your recipe, you’ll need to paste the spreadsheet’s URL in the “Connect External Data” section. Make sure you specify the sheet from where the Rule Engine pulls weather data, and the correct column types (Current Temperature: Number|Current Weather Condition: Text).
Let’s get down to business! Having completed these previous steps, you can now use any of the weather data from the spreadsheet to build your own custom optimization. Remember the spreadsheet has campaign data, so that’s the scope you should use when adding the conditions:
Let’s suppose that we have a couple of campaigns for “Sunglasses” in Madrid and “Shorts” in Toulouse. If temperatures start to rise, we might want to increase the bids for the ad groups in those campaigns accordingly.
The first rule does precisely this. If the temperature rises above 27ºC, and the weather condition is “clear sky” it applies two actions:
We increase the bids for the ad groups in the campaign by 10%
We label the ad groups (for the example we’ll use: Bid by High Temperature) – This step is critical, as it helps to revert the changes with Rule-2.
But what happens if the temperatures drop? The second rule reverses the changes applied by the first rule. To do this, we check all ad groups with the label “Bid by High Temperature” and apply two actions:
Set the bids back to their previous value. We achieve this by using an expression where we divide the Current Bid by 1+(0.1) where 0.1 = 10% increase.
We remove the labels “Bid by High Temperature”.
Note: In the same spreadsheet you can change the temperature units used (Instructions and Keys sheet – Step 4) and see a list of all weather conditions the Open Weather Map API can return (Descriptions sheet)
Step 6: Test, preview & automate.
All set! You can now preview the suggestions and if everything looks ok, you can go ahead and automate it to run on a daily basis.
Try it out! If you have any questions, or if you’d like us to have a look at your recipe before you start running it just email us at support@optmyzr.com – we’ll be glad to help you.
Just like you do, some campaigns deserve a good day off! So with the Rule Engine, we found a way to send them on their holidays (automatically)!
One of the many great features of our Rule Engine is that you can import external data into your recipes to use almost any value on a spreadsheet cell as a condition and to trigger very concrete actions. In this example, I’ll show you how to pause a campaign based on a list of dates from a spreadsheet.
The method I’ll share could be useful to pause your campaigns on days when your call center or store is closed or to activate specific campaigns during seasonal events, like Prime Day or Black Friday.
Step 1: Create a new recipe in Rule Engine
Create a new Custom Recipe and select “All but removed” in the Campaign status dropdown from the Filters section. This step is essential, as it ensures that the recipe runs on both Enabled and Paused campaigns.
Step 2: Set up the spreadsheet
Make a copy of this spreadsheet. In the “Campaigns” sheet, you need to add all the data for the campaigns you want the recipe to modify based on the list of dates (“Dates” sheet).
To make this easier, you can download your list of campaigns from the “Connect External Data” section in the Rule Engine by clicking on “Get Sample Data For Your Account”.
Now, copy and paste the mandatory data for CampaignId and CampaignName in the corresponding cells.
Update: May 24, 2021
Rule Engine automations use the GMT timezone. Please keep this in mind at the moment of setting up your spreadsheet to avoid any conflicts between the time on your sheets and the time the automation runs (File > Spreadsheet Settings > General > Time zone)
We also recommend making sure the “Recalculation” settings on your spreadsheet are set to either “On change and every minute” or “On change and every hour”. This affects how often the TODAY formula is updated (File > Spreadsheet Settings > Calculation > Recalculation)
Step 3: Set up the list of dates when the automation needs to do something with your campaign
On the “Dates” sheet we have the list of dates used for the comparisons we make within the spreadsheet (so it can see if today’s date is on the list of special dates when something needs to happen). There, you’ll have to add the dates you want to use (make sure to follow the same format). Note that by default, this spreadsheet includes the list of US public holidays (2019-2020).
Step 4: Create your date-driven automation!
Now here’s where the fun starts! – let’s build the rules.
The first rule takes care of the campaigns when the cells in the Holiday column are “Yes”. When that’s the case, we apply two actions:
1. We label the campaign (for the example we’ll use: Paused by Holiday Recipe)
2. And then we pause the campaign
The second rule does the opposite. It’ll take care of re-enabling the campaign once the cells in the Holiday column say “No”.
It’s important to only check the campaigns labeled by the previous rule. That’s why we add the condition “Label Name is equal to Paused by Holiday Recipe” – It has to be the same label!
The two actions for this rule are:
1. Remove the label we added with the first Rule (Paused by Holiday Recipe)
2. Re-enable the campaigns
Step 4: Test, preview, automate
Voila! The recipe has been created 🙂
Now preview the suggestions, and if everything looks ok, you can automate it to run daily.
tl;dr:
Try it out! If you have any questions, or if you’d like us to have a look at your recipe before you start running it just email us: support@optmyzr.com – and we’ll be glad to help you.
Are you wasting time working on tasks that could be automated?
That’s the exact question I asked myself several years ago, before making the switch from a manual account management process to an automated one.
Conversion Hut is slightly different to most marketing agencies. We only focus on two areas – PPC Ads and Conversion Rate Optimization.
Our agency has a diverse portfolio of clients and before moving to a more automated business model, our clients were more than happy with the consistent performance improvements that they were receiving.
However, where we were running into difficulty was when we were trying to focus more on the overall strategy for the accounts. Including testing new types of campaigns as well as consistent landing page testing and optimization.
All of this just wasn’t possible in the time allotted for every client, each month.
I looked at the client schedules and could see the amount of time being used was primarily the housekeeping tasks rather than tasks which could provide real growth.
My theory was that by reducing the amount of time we spent on general tasks by replacing it with automation, we could then spend more time focusing on the big shiny things.
So in true Conversion Hut style, we thought “Let’s test it”.
Let’s test switching to a predominantly automated PPC management agency which would allow us to spend more time on aspects that were really going to move the needle and less time on things that could be done with little human interaction.
If we could save time and still maintain our high quality standards, this would be a win for us.
What happened next?
To be quite honest, it transformed our company.
Tasks that would usually take a few hours each day, were instead done in minutes.
And instead of spending less time on things like strategy and conversion rate optimization, we were now spending the majority of our time doing them.
The current situation
At the moment there seems to be people on two sides of the fence when it comes to automation.
People that prefer to do everything manually, because they don’t want to lose any control. And then there’s the people that harness the power of automation and understand that you’re still in full control.
Our tool of choice for our PPC automation is Optmyzr.
We’re fully aware that there are plenty of tools available on the market that offer a similar service. But for us, Optmyzr does everything we could possibly want it to and more.
In this blog post i’m going to cover some of the different tasks that we automate and how our company benefits as a result.
The topics that we will cover are as follows :
Keyword Bidding
New Keywords
Ad Testing
Bid Modifications
Shopping Campaigns
1. Keyword Bidding
Bidding effectively is the holy grail of PPC management.
It can really make or break a campaigns performance.
However, it’s extremely time consuming as well as requiring to be done regularly. In some cases, even daily.
Because of this, it can take up the majority of time that account managers have.
Which is more than likely why a lot of the agencies out there have opted for using one of Google’s automated bidding strategies for their clients.
For most of our clients, we can’t see the same performance improvement that we can by doing keyword bidding manually, which is why we haven’t gone down that path.
The automated bidding tool that we use can adjust bids for thousands of keywords in seconds. And unlike Google’s technology, we’re actually defining the rules that the bids are set to.
So for our ecommerce clients we can define an ROAS that we want to try and meet from each keyword.
We can also set those rules on a product basis if we like. So if one group of keywords needs a target ROAS that’s higher or lower, we can customise our bids accordingly.
Alternatively, for lead generation and SAAS companies we can adjust bids based on a target CPA that we’re trying to hit.
An example ‘recipe’.
We can also specify the amount of conversions a keyword must have before we make a change as well as making sure the keyword bid hasn’t been adjusted in a certain time period (i.e. 7 days).
There’s one more really important capability that was a game changer for us.
The lookback window.
We can set multiple lookback date ranges for each rule that we create, so that we can find out when keywords met a predefined rule.
For instance, we may adjust the date range from 7 day, 14 day, 30 day, 60 day and so on, until it matches our rule.
Once it does, that’s the data it uses to adjust the bid.
For one person to do this manually, would almost certainly be a full time job for some accounts.
As i’m sure you can see already, automated bidding can save hours of manual work.
But that hasn’t scratched the service of what automation can do just yet.
2. New Keywords
Any account manager knows that adding new keywords is a basic part of PPC management.
By continuously adding new relevant keywords to an account, it will help increase traffic and sales.
The downside is that it takes time to do. Quite a bit of time for most accounts.
Here’s the usual manual process for adding new keywords :
Load up the search terms report for the last 30 days.
Look for keywords which have driven clicks.
If a search term looks like a good addition, add it to a list to include.
Once complete, add the new keywords including each match type to the relevant adgroups.
For those keywords which require their own adgroups, create a new adgroup.
Add keywords and different match types.
Create new ads
If there isn’t a relevant landing page, create one.
Publish.
Woah.
Looking back at it now, that’s a lengthy process and i can’t believe we used to spend all that time doing it!
What Happens Now?
Now we can pre-define criteria for new keywords that we want to add to an account.
We may say that we require a minimum number of clicks, impressions, conversions or quality score before we decide to include it in a campaign.
We’ll then see a list of suggestions to include and we can pick and choose what we would like to go with.
We can quickly duplicate the keyword and adjust the matchtype so we have various versions. We then click the add button and they’re added to our adgroups.
What about if we need to create a new adgroup?
That’s no problem either, we can specify that the new keywords need to go into their own single adgroup and it will create them automatically.
This also includes pulling the ads in from the adgroup where their clicks came from.
3. Ad Testing
Nothing can improve the performance of a PPC campaign more than consistent Ad testing.
Although working your way through each campaign regularly to weed out the under-performers and highflyers is fairly time consuming.
Previously we used to this with the use of a script that would tell us when an ad became the “winner” based on a limited amount of settings that we could define.
I think the term to refer to that process was it was ‘fine’. It kind of did what we wanted it to do, with some customisation.
How our Ad Testing looks like now
Within Optmyzr we can quickly jump into the A/B testing for Ads report and see if there are any ad tests that have reached statistical significance.
We can choose the date ranges to look at as well as them ad performance from specific campaigns.
We can even select the test result confidence level that we want for an ad to be a statistically significant winner.
We can also set the amount of impressions an ad must have before even including it in the analysis.
Additionally, we can choose whether we want to set a winner based on Conversions, Conversions by Impressions or CTR.
We can quickly see how ads KPI’s are performing
Because of this, our ad testing has moved up to a whole new level.
We easily save at least 4 hours of PPC management for each client per month from this feature alone.
And because we’re applying the criteria before calling something a winner, it’s far more accurate (in my opinion) than doing this manually.
Where this tool really comes into its own is when it comes to pausing the losing ads.
When we’re ready to pause an ad, we can also create a new ad at the same time.
But that’s not all.
The feature will also tell us the best performing copy from historical data, to use on each of the various Ad elements.
Next steps
Right now we’re testing using a new feature in Optmyzr which allows us to quickly analyse and compare the ad performance data based on the various ad components (Headlines 1,2,3 + Descriptions 1,2 etc).
This works great for big accounts that have lots of adgroups but don’t necessarily receive lots of clicks. Where reaching any conclusions from the data would take a long time to do.
Our account managers can now quickly see how specific copy is performing across all campaigns or individual campaigns. We can even segment by device to see how the performance changes between them.
This works brilliant for us.
When working with medium to large accounts, this process takes a huge amount of time to do. Now we can see this data in seconds.
4. Bid Modifications
Since bid modifications were introduced, they’ve really helped make optimization more granular.
However to do this effectively, we previously needed to work our way through each of our clients campaigns and make the adjustments manually where we thought we could improve performance.
Since moving to Optmyzr, we’ve definitely streamlined this process and picked out some of their best features to make this happen.
We use their suite of tools that are made to assist with Bid Modifiers, in particular for Geo, Device and Audiences.
The method we use is called Intelligent Suggest, which from the name you’ll probably be able to gather that it gives you the recommended modifications based on your goals.
It uses machine learning to provide the suggestions, which includes an array of different factors.
We can then see a predicted performance improvement if the changes that are suggested are applied to the campaigns.
Each of the different modifications that can be made, can be broken down further to be more granular.
So rather than just adjust Device bids at the campaign level, we can adjust them at the adgroup level instead.
We can see each of the proposed changes to made and make our own changes should we wish.
To compile and apply this data would take hours for a human to do, but using automation, it’s done and applied within seconds. The only time involved is clarifying the changes that are being made.
5. Shopping Campaigns
Google Shopping Campaigns are huge at the moment and there’s no sign of them slowing down. With new features being released frequently, it’s a great time to be using them.
However, when it comes to Google Shopping Campaign Optimization, there’s a huge amount of factors that are involved to not only setup a campaign effectively, but then turning those campaigns into revenue generating machines.
By default, Shopping Campaigns load of all of the products from the product feed into a single product group.
But this isn’t the best way of implementing a shopping campaign, as you’re effectively bidding the same on all products.
So for instance, you could have a product with a retail price fo $500 and that would have the same bid as a product with a retail price of $10.
Implementing campaigns like this is unlikely going to get the results that we want.
When it comes to the shopping campaigns we create, we always apply the One Product Adgroup method.
What’s involved here is creating an individual adgroup for each of our products that are in our product feed.
That way we have much more control over not only our bids, but our bid modifications too (as well as many others).
Prior to using Optmyzr, we used to do it all manually with the help of excel.
To say it was time consuming would be an understatement.
Using Optmyzr, we can quickly build campaigns based on our product feeds in seconds.
We can choose if we want to build the product groups based on a number of different attributes including :
Brand
Product ID
Condition
What Optmyzr helps us do is take the time out of creating campaigns and give us more time to manage them strategically.
There’s also some additional tools that they offer to help with managing the campaigns.
The biggest mistakes made with automation
We asked Fred Vallaeys, Cofounding CEO of Optmyzer what he thought the biggest mistakes people make when moving to automated PPC management :
Automations still need to be monitored. I.e. Do NOT set-it-and-forget-it. For example, a Google Ads script authorization could expire which means it stops running. Now that automated script that you thought would prevent you from spending more than the client’s budget isn’t actually running and you miss the budget.
Automations require reliable inputs. For example, if you have automated bidding but your web server goes down and clicks are leading to a 404 page where no conversions are possible, it will start to reduce bids, perhaps so low that you no longer qualify for page 1. Then when the server is fixed, ads linger on page 2 and your conversions aren’t restored.
Automations need complete instructions. For example, if you tell a bid system to maximize conversions but you set no bounds on maximum CPA, it can buy some very expensive conversions. If you don’t distinguish between different types of conversions, some of which are more valuable, it may buy too many of the low value conversions.
The robots do as we say not the other way round
As i’m sure you’ll agree with what we have covered in this article, automation isn’t just about giving full control to the robots and letting them go and do as they please.
We still have the final say over what happens in our accounts. Any changes that are made, we can decide whether to make them or not.
As well as that, the room for error in the changes that we do is so much lower than if it were to be doing them manually. Humans being humans, can have off-days and make errors in the optimization that they are doing.
Agencies seem to be fairly divided when it comes to used automated tools or not.
We think it’s a no-brainer for allowing our campaign managers to spend less time on the housekeeping and more time on the big-wins for our clients.
I think main question here is what would you rather, a campaign manager that’s snowed under doing day to day tasks with no time to spend on growing clients accounts?
Or a campaign manager that has a surplus of time, that they can use to focus on making more money for them?
PPC automation is being adopted by successful agencies across the world in some shape or form. So this isn’t really a question about if you’re going to use it. It’s about when you’re going to start using it.
I really hope you’ve enjoyed this guide to the benefits of PPC automation and been able to see the amount of time that it can save as well as the improvement in performance.
I’d love to hear your experience with PPC Automation. Please feel free to reach out with your comments or questions.
The Optmyzr team is fresh off an invigorating and inspiring webinar with our friends from Hanapin Marketing. I had the opportunity to present virtually alongside Jacob Fairclough, the associate director of Analytics at Hanapin and regular blogger at PPC Hero.
Jake and I spend a lot of our work life neck deep in scripting, which makes it easy to assume everyone PPC pro out there is as keen on scripting as we are.
We had a great audience of PPC pros for the webinar, and started off with an online insta-poll asking attendees to identify their biggest challenge in working with scripts. More than 90 percent of attendees indicated scripting is still a big unknown:
If you would respond more in line with the other 10%, you might already be a script-ninja. Great! Ninjas can stop reading this post and pop over to our script libraryto peruse the latest from our script-crafting experts. A regular browse through our latest scripts can keep your automation ahead of the game.
However, if you are like a lot of PPC pros, the notion of scripting as part of your PPC automation regimen might make you shield your eyes and run for the door. So keep reading!
PPC Automation Takes Many Forms
It’s important to understand the varying degrees of automation in PPC – and where scripts fit into the picture.
The basics:
Google Ads and Bing Ads provide basic, but essential automations that can reduce tasks for core PPC activities. Things like automated bid management. If automation is new to you, this is a good place to start.
The big engines also provide essential automation via rules. This can include automation for keyword campaigns, scheduling, termination. Google and Bing make it easy to get started automating in about five minutes. Results can be pretty striking – and perhaps start a healthy automation addiction.
The essentials:
PPC management suites, such as Optmyzr, allow PPC pros to manage virtually all aspects of their work more efficiently. Within such full suite tools are varying levels of automation and controls that can greatly elevate the effectiveness of PPC campaigns through automated bid management, implementation of rules and many other forms of automation (fear not…we’ll write extensively about deep-in-the-weeds PPC automation throughout 2019).
The advanced:
A lot of our clients regularly derive extreme value from the advanced, custom scripts our team creates on a regular basis. From budget management to URL checkers to reporting, our scripts eliminate hours of task-oriented activities, freeing up the PPC pro to focus more on the human aspects of their job – strategy, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
Still, there are many really smart PPC pros who perhaps only dabble lightly in our scripts to help boost their capabilities, but may still have some level of trepidation.
Finally, many clients see scripts as cryptic cave paintings – and never explore our vast array of really powerful tools that take their game to a whole new level.
If scripts seem cryptic – don’t fret. You’re not alone, and the PPC script “cave paintings” are really much easier to figure out than you might think.
PPC Scripts Deconstructed
Let’s look at Google Ads scripts – but keep in mind Bing Ads is really cut from the same cloth. Scripts that work in one platform can generally be easily adapted for the other.
Google Ad scripts are really just a flavor of JavaScript code that can be pasted into a Google Ads account. Think of formulas within spreadsheets or even a basic IFTTT sequence. If you can write something down as a process or set of commands, you actually understand coding more than you may think.
Start by examining your PPC workflow. Can something be automated? Repetitive tasks? We work in data and process flows – two key ingredients for automation and scripting. Think of the most common things surrounding managing keywords, product groups, Ads, Shopping Ads, bid adjustments. So much of what we do can be boiled down to a process. Processes SCREAM “automate me!”
The next question to ask yourself is – SHOULD this be automated? The chart below helps us prioritize opportunities to automate via scripts and what we may want to keep as is or perhaps automate at a later date.
The key question: What keeps you the busiest? Plot your responses on a basic X-Y grid diagram where the X-axis scales according to time consumption and the Y-axis focuses on task frequency. For me, I find ad testing – explored manually – happens a lot and takes a ton of time. Bid management happens a lot, but is relatively quick to do. Reporting takes a lot of time, but happens predictably and not as frequently. Budget updates can be done quickly and don’t happen as frequently.
Now we have a great visual representation to prioritize what can/should be automated.
Whatever priorities you come up with, chances are we have easily-adapted scripts ready made for you in our script library. If you can master “control-C” and “control-V,” you are already on your way. The steps are pretty simple:
Copy the free script you want from our script library
Paste the script into your Google Ads manager (same for Bing scripts)
Revise the few specific lines of code that need to be customized (easier than it may sound at first)
Test/preview
Launch
Okay…step 3 in the sequence above still may seem daunting, but it’s not. In reality, most PPC pros can master this step fairly quickly. You really only need to adjust some configuration in the code. Simple things such as replacing email address for notification – or adjust specific parameters that you want the script to monitor, such as triggering based on a specific percentage of budget or other specific performance data.
Reality is there may be hundreds of lines of code in a script that you copy and paste, but you need only adjust a few lines for the commands and actions you want. After you try it a few times, it becomes really easy to do.
Scripts have their place (and not)
Scripts clearly can be great tools to use, but like everything, they have limitations. For example, they can only run 30 minutes at a time and they have limits on parameters such as numbers of keywords. Advanced script ninjas will often go a level deeper into crafting robust APIs for more advanced programming that goes beyond the limitations of scripts. But for now, it’s most essential to get comfortable with scripts if this is new turf for you.
The results can be astounding. Breaking complex tasks down to smaller components allows machines to focus on the tasks and the humans to focus on more esoteric, strategic aspects of PPC. Creativity in words or imagery for Shopping Ads – or perhaps planning out seasonal/timely campaigns that require the human mind to break new ground. Machines are getting smarter, but they simply can’t compete with the human mind on many levels still.
Automate like it’s 2019!
PPC Automation has made huge strides in recent years and we expect that trend gain speed in 2019. Scripts are one piece of what should be a more holistic approach to automation.
Hopefully we’ve broken down some of the natural barriers many great PPC pros find when they think about scripting. Start small. If you are an agency, test on your internal campaigns and get comfortable. You’ll see that scripts are pretty foolproof, easy to debug when they aren’t working right, and open new doors to become the PPC rockstar you’re destined to be.
Conclusion
Coming up in January, we’re going to run a run little contest with our friends at Hanapin. We’ll ask PPC pros what they want to automate via scripts. Based on your feedback, we’ll build the most sought after script and post it free here and on PPCHero.com.
Jake and I will revisit scripts even more in depth at PPC Hero Summit on Wednesday, March 6th. The event will offer a great opportunity to add scripting as part of a holistic approach to PPC automation.
In the meantime, start exploring scripts! They can help transform your effectiveness as a true PPC rockstar.
We hosted a webinar to show how the Rule Engine can be used to automate bid management based on external data like sales tracked in a CRM, weather conditions, and conversion types.
You can watch the replay of that webinar here:
Map AdWords entities to external data
A key requirement for using external data is that we must be able to map it to an AdWords entity like a campaign, ad group, keyword, or product group. We do this by looking at the ID and name fields of every row in the spreadsheet.
For example, to be able to use campaign-level weather data, the spreadsheet must contain either the campaign name or the campaign ID on the row that has the weather data like temperature and cloud levels.
Resources to get started
To help you get started with the examples shown in the webinar, here are a few resources that help with the creation of the external data:
Running search ads is an easy sell for agencies, because clients like the measurability and control this medium offers.
Then comes the discussion of the agency fees and hours required to execute a successful campaign, often yielding a chasm between the service a client expects and what the agency can offer, yet remaining profitable. As contract negotiations whittle down already aggressive project bids, the pressure falls on the day-to-day PPC managers to complete mountains of work in little time.
The danger for agencies—besides write-downs and overages—is becoming so focused on checking off a task list that they fail to make the strategic moves necessary for the results they promised. To prevent this unenviable situation, agencies need to pause and take a hard look at where their time is going to maximize efficiency and boost profitability of PPC campaigns. Automation of AdWords and PPC campaigns overall is key.
4 PPC agency time killers
Reality is, dozens of time killers plague search marketing agencies, but we want to focus in on a few specific areas of exceptional opportunity to automate the most frequent time-consuming PPC tasks. At the very least, analysis of the following automation opportunities can put agencies on the path to better profitability.
1. Reporting
PPC account managers field constant client questions about results and requisite explanations of how campaigns affect business. Many agencies tell us reporting can consume three, four or even five full days of exhaustive, detailed, manual work each month. Reporting is perhaps one of the most essential parts of campaign management, but it shouldn’t eat up otherwise profitable time. Thankfully, machine learning and automated processes now make it possible for campaign managers to automatically and reliably pull data, analyze for key findings and structure custom-looking reports in minutes versus days. We have multiple clients notching 90 percent reductions in reporting time via automated reporting capabilities. Read about experiences for EU-based Geniadsand US-based Granular. Both agencies saw dramatic reductions in time spent on reporting, allowing them to redirect critical thinking to campaign optimization. Google also recently stepped up its automation game with a simple API connecting AdWords data with Google Slides. Simple AdWords scripts can be used to create presentations or automate appending additional data into existing ones. There may be upfront time required to do additional scripting or implement ready-made scripts like our Enhanced Scripts™, but once implemented, automated PPC reporting can drive agency efficiency, effectiveness AND profitability.
2. Bid management
Effective bid management can make or break campaigns. Google actually builds in automated bid management right in the Adwords interface to automate strategies like “bid to top of page.” These sorts of Automated Rules are basic, but can save tremendous amounts of time compared to doing the same work manually in spreadsheets. Many PPC pros, however, cling to their own bid management processes to maintain as much control as they can. But they miss the fact that relinquishing control of such manual processes can free them up to do more strategic, high-value campaign management. Prebuilt rules can take the tedious work out of managing bids to position, target CPA, target ROAS and other key metrics. With a little time and thought in HOW and WHAT to automate, PPC pros can reliably take big chunks of time out of bid management.
3. Keyword management
Automation and artificial intelligence can even help with tasks that require a bit of human input, like keyword management. Computers can find optimal new keywords based purely on the data, whereas PPC pros may be inclined to rely on intuition when they should follow data. Automating keyword management shifts a PPC pro’s job to confirming the suggestions and tweaking the model being used as opposed to groveling over every keyword to make a difference. Considering many accounts have tens of thousands of new queries to contemplate adding as keywords, shifting to automation can be a huge time saver. The challenge is about releasing control of keyword management to open up productive time. Ask yourself if the task is something you really NEED to be doing. If automation can do the same or even better, why would you even think about continuing with the status quo. And even if the automation is slightly worse than a human, consider the tradeoff between your employees’ valuable time and the change in performance from a more automated keyword management process.
4. Ad Testing
Google offers ready-made tools for PPC pros to test theories and decipher infinitesimal differences between ads. These tools are only a starting point for automation. The trouble is, expanding permutations of all the variables between keywords, ad creative, regions, bids and the myriad other variables can make even the best PPC pro’s head spin. Managing the ads becomes an intricate ballet, prioritizing what we think is important and digging into the subtleties of the data and understanding what “statistically valid” really means. As PPC pros advance along an automation path, they can harness the power of visualization and data insight tools to move their energy, talent and creativity away from test building and into informed, strategic optimization. Looking beyond Google’s built-in automation tools, more powerful options such as Optmyzr Ad Optimization, can systematize repetitive tasks that often fall short due to human interpretation or error. PPC pros who embrace ad testing automation are able to look at the bigger picture, make adjustments and gain significant efficiency.
Time spent on repetitive tasks ripe or overdue for automation can exact a painful toll on agency profitability and competitiveness. Of course, write-downs and write-offs will always be a fact of agency life, but many profitability killers are preventable with automation, advanced scripting, AI and machine learning.
Because of such rapid transformation, automation will be a key area of focus on this blog throughout 2018 – along with our contributed articles in Search Engine Landand Search Engine Journal. I encourage you to read my most recent Search Engine Journal articleeasy ways to get started with PPC automation.
“Automate or be rendered obsolete” might well become the PPC pro’s rally cry in the near future. Agencies and PPC pros alike need to explore automation to stay ahead of the curve. The industry will only get more competitive with tighter margins.
Optmyzr’s Rule Based Optimizations recently added the ability to integrate with any 3rd party data through Google spreadsheets. By connecting call conversion data, CRM data, internal business data, or data about pretty much anything else, advertisers can now build some really cool optimizations of their own. Even the classic Bid By Weather use case that has been so heavily promoted through AdWords Scripts can now be implemented by advertisers using Optmyzr without writing any code.
To help advertisers create their spreadsheets for some of the more common use cases, like bidding by conversion name or type, we wrote a simple AdWords Script that can pull any Google Ads data into a spreadsheet and keep it updated as often as hourly. This spreadsheet can then be linked to a Rule-Based Optimization in Optmyzr so it’s always ready to run an optimization with the right data.
Automatically Put Raw Google Ads Data In a Spreadsheet
Even if you’re not planning to use this script to automate your account management, it is still useful if you need a way to get a lot of raw Google Ads data into a spreadsheet. It can also be a great supplement to current Optmyzr reports which are more focused on showing the highlights of an account and presenting insights that a stakeholder rather than a PPC practitioner might find useful.
The script can fetch multiple ads reports and add them as different spreadsheets or different tabs in the same spreadsheet.
How to Use the Script
For each report you want to add in a spreadsheet you’ll need to have one section of the code that specifies the query, spreadsheet URL, tab name, and report version. Our sample version already includes a few sample queries but let our support team know if you need help crafting another query.
These are the settings you need to modify to put the right AdWords data into the spreadsheet you want.
You can modify the following variables with your settings:
• query: this is the AWQL query that tells AdWords what data to include. We’ve added a few sample queries in the code or you can write your own just like your write SQL.
• spreadsheetUrl: the Url of the Google spreadsheet that this script will update.
• tabName: the name of the sheet (tab) in the spreadsheet that should be updated.
• reportVersion: the version of the AdWords API reports you’re using. The data available in the Ads API changes periodically so this ensures our script talks to the right version of AdWords.
To run this code, simply add it as a new script in AdWords and schedule it. Most likely you’ll just need to schedule this to run once a day, early in the day.
Resources
1. The AdWords reporting APIlists available reports and fields. Use this to find what report to use for the data you need. Also use it to find which data you can combine in one report. Note that some types of data are not compatible, like ‘ConversionCategoryName’, and ‘Clicks’.
2. The AWQL guideexplains how to construct a query. Note that even though AWQL supports ordering and limiting of results, this functionality is not available when using AWQL inside AdWords scripts. This means that your report will include all results in no particular order and when you run the same report again, the order of results may change.
Sample Queries
The following sample queries are compatible with reportVersion v201710
A breakdown of conversion types for all converting keywords in AdWords in the last 30 days:
Note that while anyone can use this script for free, Optmyzr subscribers may find it easier to use the Rule Engine to schedule adding their Google Ads data to a Google spreadsheet
Some PPC tools simply slap a different UI on existing capabilities from the engines but at Optmyzr, we try hard to build functionality that doesn’t simply repackage what’s already available for free. Our focus is on making it really easy to do some things that would take a lot of time to do in the AdWords interface or the AdWords Editor.
Our Rule Engine is an example of a specialty tool that makes it easy to do things that would otherwise be too time-consuming. Let me give you an example of one really cool custom optimization you can set up with our Rule Engine.
Pause keywords that are expensive relative to the campaign they are in
Everyone wants to fix expensive keywords. But what does it mean for a keyword to be ‘expensive’? A brand keyword should probably be a lot cheaper than a non-brand keyword but does that mean that all brand keywords are cheap, and non-brand keywords are expensive? Of course not! We should determine ‘expensiveness’ based on what type of keyword it is. And one of the easiest ways to know the type of keyword is by looking at the campaign it’s in.
So one way to find ‘expensive’ keywords is to look for ones whose average costs are much higher than for other keywords in the same campaign.
Now try doing that quickly in AdWords…
You could try an Automated Rule, but as you can see in the screenshot, the metrics we have access to in AdWords Automated Rules are those from the entity we’re acting on. So if we’re trying to pause expensive keywords, we can only use keyword data to make that determination and we don’t have access to campaign data for that keyword.
Then consider that you might want to change your definition of ‘expensive’ over time. The first few times you run this analysis you might look for big outliers, say keywords that are at least twice the expected cost. But as you run the rule more frequently, you may want to include keywords that are just 30% more expensive. This means you need to be able to write an equation to do the analysis. Automated Rules have no formula builders, you can only do simple comparisons.
Since an Automated Rule won’t work, what about just using the AdWords interface? You could certainly do it and the process would look roughly as follows:
Download the keyword report
Download the campaign report
Combine the 2 in a spreadsheet by using VLOOKUP to bring the campaign data next to the keyword data
Write a formula to find outlier keywords
Write a formula to set a new bid or status for the outliers
Upload the new bids back into AdWords through Editor or Bulk Uploads
It’s doable but unless you can automate this, you probably won’t do it as often as you’d like.
I personally once did an optimization that took 27 separate reports: a combination of different lookback windows, different levels of the account, and some extra reports to get conversions broken down by type.
We built the Rule Engine because we never want you to have to go through the pain I went through to do this monster of an optimization. Here’s what building a rule looks like:
What the screenshot shows is the finished rule. We’ve already prebuilt this as a recipe so anyone can copy it into their account in seconds. But if you want to modify it or write a rule from scratch, that’s easy too. Here’s what our screen for editing a condition looks like:
Simply click on one side of the equation and pick a metric or write a custom formula. You can choose whether the metric is for the keyword, its parent ad group or campaign, or the account. You can also choose if the metrics should be for just one segment, like a particular device type.
More optimizations that are much easier in Optmyzr
Here are a few more optimizations that are really easy in Optmyzr compared to doing them in AdWords:
Lower the cost for keywords with high CPAs BUT only if they are in a campaign that’s missing the CPA target
Identify all keywords that exceed the CPA target for the last 7 days but that were meeting the CPA target for the past 30 days.
Update CPC bids based on an ROAS target by taking into account the shortest possible date range in which a product group has at least 2 conversions.
There’s so much more you can do with the Rule Engine so hopefully I’ve given you a taste of its power and you’ll start to experiment with it for your own optimizations. I’d love to hear how you have used the Rule Engine to do an amazing optimization in a fraction of the time it would have taken in AdWords.
And if you don’t have access to the Rule Engine (a Pro-plan feature), contact our support team so we can set you up with a free trial.
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) from Google AdWords are now available for all advertisers to create. To help everyone who’s too busy to write thousands of new ads but who still wants to make the transition quickly we’ve just released a new free AdWords Script.
The script uses your landing pages’ meta tags to make suggestions for the new longer ad components. The title tag gets split into 2 lines of ad headlines and the meta description’s first 80 characters become the basis of the ad description line.
The script outputs a Google Sheet that can be imported into the AdWords Editor after you make any final tweaks to your ETAs.
Copy the code into your own AdWords account and give it a try:
Step-by-step for Using AdWords Scripts
If you’ve not worked with AdWords Scripts yet, this is a great way to get your feet wet. The script simply outputs a spreadsheet of data and makes no changes to your account so it’s a very low-risk way to try things out. Here is a quick step-by-step:
Copy the script code from the section above
Copy-and-paste it into the Bulk Operations > Scripts section of your AdWords account
put it into a child account and not in an MCC account
the code should completely replace any other code already in the script
Edit the text between lines 23 and 29 to customize the script
Authorize, Save, and finally Preview the script
Switch to the “Logs” view of the output and make sure the script ran successfully
Open the just-created Google Sheet and make final tweaks to the bulk sheet of expanded text ads
Go to the AdWords Editor and go to the menu for “Account” > “Import” and either import the data from a file or by copy-and-pasting
Do a final review of changes and apply the changes to your account.
Congrats! You just used AdWords Scripts to save yourself a ton of time…
Try Some Other AdWords Scripts
We have lots of other scripts to try and they’re all on our patent pending Enhanced Scripts™ platform so that the code will work equally well on MCC and child accounts, you can maintain multiple settings per account, easily maintain different settings different accounts, and most importantly, all without ever touching a single line of code. If you can copy-and-paste, you can use our Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords.
Finding answers to frequent questions like why an account saw an increase/decrease in clicks or conversions is tedious. A drop in conversions or clicks can be attributed to multiple elements like keywords, placements, or an entire network, which makes answering such questions difficult and time consuming.
Optmyzr has automated this investigation process through its new PPC Investigator tool. If someday, your account experiences a sudden decrease in clicks, just ask PPC Investigator what brought on the change and you will get an answer within seconds.
How does it work?
As the performance of every metric depends on the performance of other underlying metrics, PPC Investigator uses the relationship between different metrics to show potential causality. Then it takes it to the next level and highlights exactly which element (keyword, ad group etc.) in the account caused performance to change. There are two levels at which the performance change can be investigated – Cause Chart and Root Cause Analysis
Cause Chart
The Cause Chart breaks down a metric’s performance into its underlying related metrics and highlights the metric that impacted performance in red. Analysis from the Cause Chart can help find those areas in an account that can benefit from a bid or ad optimization. For example, if conversions dropped and the underlying reason is identified to be an increase in impression share lost due to ad rank, a bid optimization will help. Subject to availability of budget, an account manager can choose to bid higher for better impression share, higher CTR and more conversions.
But wait! That’s not all! PPC Investigator also helps in examining and identifying the positive and negative top movers in an account. It shows the elements in an account (keywords, ad groups. campaigns) that were significant contributors to the change in the account over a period of time. This analysis is available under the Root Cause Analysis tab. Root Cause Analysis
PPC Investigator’s Root Cause Analysis evaluates the exact Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords etc. responsible for change in an account. The tool finds the top contributors by taking into consideration individual keywords/ad groups/network/device and even their combinations like keyword+device or network+ad group. You can view the top three positive and negative movers for a particular account which are further broken down to check sub-contributors. Here is a quick overview of the account insights the Root Cause Analysis can give:
Identify the pain points which impacted account performance to streamline workflows. You’ll know exactly which keyword or ad group caused the change and needs to be investigated.
Check the impact of paused campaigns/ad groups/keywords and make a decision on whether you would like to enable them or keep them paused. These are keywords or campaigns that shows a 90-100% drop.
Find optimization opportunities by viewing the networks or devices that might be pulling down the performance of an ad group or campaign.
Read more about the PPC Investigator here. You can try it out in your Optmyzr account under the Data Insights tools.
It also means that 63% of PPC marketers left incredible opportunities on the table.
Let’s be honest. Like any other business, Google’s prerogative is making more money. As the leading online ad platform, advertisers have no choice but to play by their rules and invest more money in ad spends to achieve their desired results.
The issue isn’t specifically the ad spends but rather the lack of transparency that prevents us from knowing what worked and how Google did it. That’s why depending solely on Google is not enough.
Unlike most native platforms that prioritize their own growth and profits, you need someone in your corner who cares about making your campaigns successful and profitable.
The Operational Cost of Not Using Third-Party PPC Software
1. Wasted ad spend
Using a PPC tool makes it easier to save money by identifying and eliminating irrelevant keywords, low-performing ads, and poorly targeted campaigns.
2. Lost opportunities
A reliable PPC tool can assist you in identifying new opportunities to reach your target audience and generate more quality leads and sales.
3. Increased time and effort
Managing PPC campaigns manually can be both time-consuming and challenging. However, using a PPC tool can assist in automating many tasks, freeing up your time to concentrate on other important aspects of your business.
4. Poor data insights
Using a PPC tool makes tracking and analyzing your campaign data easier, enabling you to make informed decisions about your campaigns.
In addition, there are several intangible costs associated with not having third-party PPC support. For instance, failing to seize optimization opportunities in time can significantly impact your overall performance. One timely optimization can be the difference between wasted budgets and a highly effective campaign.
A prime example of the impact of such optimizations comes from Optmyzr’s client, Zeller Media. They managed to slash their CPCs by a substantial 18% for a prominent online job recruiter with just one strategic adjustment.
With Optmyzr’s Quality Score Tracker tool, Zeller Media could easily monitor Quality Score metrics at various levels, from the account down to the keyword. This empowered them to pinpoint the precise elements of the Quality Score that were driving results.
Ultimately, whether you get Optmyzr or some other tool, there’s no denying the need for one.
But we understand that picking the right tool can be overwhelming and may feel like a big financial commitment if you’re unsure what you’re getting yourself into. That’s why we’ve put together some handy points to make the decision less daunting.
What PPC Tools Do You Need & How Much Do They Cost?
When it comes to PPC (Pay-Per-Click) tools, brands have three main options:
Single-function tools
Full management tools or
Building their own tools
Building in-house PPC tools can be costly but offers a customized solution if resources are available.
The essential types of PPC tools include:
Reporting tools for visualizing campaign data and insights.
Budget management tools to ensure spending stays on track.
Creative tools for ad creation and preview support with shared assets.
Keyword, audience, and placement bidding tools for adjusting bids and reporting on performance.
Optmyzr offers all these features at a lower cost than purchasing them individually. Instead of an average monthly cost of $1,900 for separate tools, Optmyzr provides all-in-one functionality starting at $249 per month up to $799 monthly, making it simple to manage everything in one platform.
We have another great article that compares various single-function software with Optmyzr, which includes reporting, budget management, and everything else you need for successful PPC management. Make sure to check it out to know the cost of individual tools vs. Optmyzr’s all-in-one benefit.
How Optmyzr Supports Advertisers, Not Just Their Ads
At Optmyzr, we care about the success of our advertisers just as much as they care about the success of their ads. We want to help you break free from the limitations of native platforms and create strategies that go beyond the status quo.
Without further ado, let’s dive into how Optmyzr puts advertisers first.
1. Reveal the insights in your performance data.
Our insight tools give you recommendations, patterns, and growth opportunities that may elude manual efforts. You can access audit tools and cause charts for a comprehensive account health assessment. You also get robust capabilities for search, shopping, budgets, bid management, and more.
2. Be in charge of your campaigns.
Optmyzr integrates directly with the Google Ads API, allowing you to make changes to search ads, shopping campaigns, Performance Max, display placements, manual and automated bid strategies, and more.
3. Apply your own layer of automation.
Optmyzr’s automation operates atop ad engines, giving you greater control over outcomes and allowing you to concentrate on genuine growth. Receive alerts to monitor performance and spending even in your absence. And our Rule Engine facilitates automation using straightforward “if/then” logic for more complex strategies.
4. Visualize your impact with data.
You can easily choose from various templates or construct custom reports using numerous widgets. Then, automate report delivery to inform your clients and bosses about your monthly contributions to business growth.
5. Optimize with confidence and peace of mind.
Connecting an ad account with Optmyzr is swift and completely secure, taking less than five minutes. Only you and your team can modify your campaigns. And we give you support for all major ad platforms – Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon.
Optmyzr makes it easy to manage every aspect of PPC. It is designed for everyone on your team, from account managers to analysts to strategists.
As we approach the big shopping season, now is the perfect time to test and try out our tools and features to find what works best for you. This will help you maximize your investment, achieve your marketing goals, and avoid expensive missteps when it is go time.
Make Your Investment Today, Get 25% Off the Next Year
When you subscribe to the annual plans for Pro and above, you’ll get 3 months free. That’s a 25% discount compared to the respective monthly plan. The benefits of selecting or upgrading to Optmyzr’s Pro and Pro Plus include additional capabilities like the PPC Vertical Benchmarks tool, a white-labeled shareable dashboard, and higher spend and account limits.
Reach out to our support team to know more about our annual plans for Pro and Pro Plus.
Automation in paid search is here to stay. It saves time for the PPC manager, freeing them up for more strategic tasks.
That said, it often feels like automation wasn’t designed for B2B advertisers.
Take Performance Max, Google’s newest campaign type, for example.
See anything there that looks remotely related to B2B?
Google is pushing Performance Max as the next best thing in campaign automation, yet has alienated B2B advertisers with the imagery used to describe it.
So, are B2B advertisers doomed to manual campaign management? Of course not.
In this article, you’ll learn 5 keys to successful B2B paid search automation.
Key #1: Build Your Funnel.
Let’s take a step back for a moment and talk about audiences. Audiences are one of the most important signals used in targeting PPC ads.
That’s right – it’s not just about keywords anymore. And in B2B, keywords often fail us because they’re ambiguous. (For a great read on how Google interprets ambiguous search queries, check out this article by Bill Slawski) We need audiences as an additional signal to the search engines on who we want to reach.
Here’s where the Google Display Network (GDN), YouTube, and Discovery campaigns come in.
B2B advertisers often shy away from upper-funnel tactics like GDN and YouTube because these channels are not great at driving leads. But when you’re trying to build your funnel, leads shouldn’t be a KPI. You’re focused on building audiences who’ve interacted with a particular type of content.
For example, let’s say your company has a video that talks about common problems in your industry, and how your product or service solves those problems. You could set up a YouTube campaign featuring the video, and create an audience of people who viewed at least 50% of the video.
Now you have an audience that has expressed interest in your product or service.
Similarly, you can promote your content in GDN and Discovery campaigns, and build audiences of people who came to your site and interacted with the content.
Discovery campaigns can be particularly effective not only in building audiences but driving leads. Here’s an example of how Discovery campaigns performed compared with Search campaigns for a B2B client.
Discovery drove leads at a significantly lower cost than search, simply because its CPC was so much lower. These campaigns can be highly effective not only for top-of-funnel but mid-funnel as well.
Key #2: Import Third-Party Data.
It’s important to carefully track results for all your paid search campaigns, regardless of the funnel stage. However, it’s rare for B2B buyers to come to a website and make a purchase online. Instead, B2B advertisers are usually tracking leads, by means of a form-fill or other action on a website.
The challenge is, not every form-fill results in an actual lead.
Some percentage of form-fills are bogus, with users giving fake information.
Another percentage are low-quality leads, either from consumers, students, or other users who aren’t serious about buying.
B2B advertisers need a feedback loop to tell the search engines whether the leads they’re getting from paid search are quality leads or not.
CRM systems are usually the source of truth for B2B advertisers. Importing data from the source of truth allows PPC managers to view data on actual business metrics, rather than just form fills that may or may not turn into leads.
And if you get enough CRM conversions, you can use them for Smart Bidding.
This screenshot is from SA360, but you can also use CRM conversions for Google Ads bid strategies, as long as you have them marked as Primary conversions.
Key #3: Use Portfolio Bid Strategies.
Often, B2B campaigns have low conversion volume. When you’re selling six-figure business software, seven-figure medical equipment, and the like, it’s not unusual to only see a handful of conversions each month.
This can pose a challenge for Smart Bidding as it requires at least 20 conversions per month to be effective.
Not to worry.
Using a portfolio bid strategy is a good way to combine similar campaigns into a single bid strategy with enough conversion data to use third-party data for Smart Bidding.
Be careful to make sure the campaigns have similar performance and objectives, though. Don’t combine brand and non-brand campaigns, or campaigns with very different CPAs or goals.
Key #4: Try tROAS With Micro conversions.
As a B2B advertiser, you may have felt left out of several Smart Bidding options, including tROAS. It’s difficult to set a value for a lead, as some leads will turn into multi-million-dollar customers, some will turn into six-figure customers, and some will never become customers at all. And assigning a final value to a lead can take 18 months to two years.
It is possible for B2B advertisers to successfully use tROAs, though.
Let’s say you have four actions you’re measuring: video views, asset downloads, form fills, and MQLs from a third-party import.
Many B2B advertisers get hung up on assigning value to each conversion. Remember, you just need to assign a relative value, not an actual value.
In this example, an MQL is worth 1,000 times what a video is worth.
By assigning a relative value, you’re telling the search engine which conversions matter most to you. The tROAS strategy will look to maximize the value of conversions, not just the number of conversions – thereby improving the quality of the leads it’s driving.
Key #5: Send the Right Signals.
In order to get the best possible results from paid search, it’s important to send the right signals.
Keywords are one signal. It’s important to choose the right keywords for B2B search campaigns in order to weed out consumer queries.
When thinking about keywords, don’t forget about negative keywords. I’m always surprised by the number of PPC campaigns in new client accounts that don’t have any negatives.
Negative keywords are crucial for B2B campaigns. Go through your keyword research, find all the consumer queries, and add them as negatives.
We talked about audiences earlier. Always, always add audiences for observation.
You should make sure they’re relevant, of course, but it doesn’t hurt to add all the relevant audiences you can find. Monitor performance, and adjust as needed. Audience performance review should be part of your regular optimization cadence.
Don’t forget to add negative audiences, too. If there are audiences you don’t want to reach or audiences that have performed poorly, add them as negatives.
Final takeaways
Remember, you’re telling the automation who you want to reach, and who you don’t want to reach. The more accurate signals you can send, the better your performance will be.
Over the past 5 to 6 years we have all experienced the impact of change within the PPC community. While many of the changes have made tasks faster, advances in automation and machine learning have forced paid search professionals to navigate platform changes without control.
With even more feature confusion marketers can feel overwhelmed by their inability to keep up with Google’s propensity for change.
PPC Marketers are losing control. There is still a hyper-awareness of performance metrics while knowing the industry won’t go back in time. So, what does it all mean?
The two main categories of automation
Task automation
Task automation is pretty simple. Two small examples of automated tasks that have changed over the past few years in PPC include
the ability to find redundant keywords in an account, and
the ability to quickly report data
Both of these tasks used to involve downloading raw data into a spreadsheet and creating pivot tables. Today, both these tasks can be done in minutes using the ‘Recommendations’ Tab or the ‘Report Center’ in the Google Ads interface.
Automation is a positive evolution in the paid search industry for seasoned professionals, but it can be difficult for beginners.
The main drawback of task automation is that people who are new to the field often do not understand why the task is important; they just know to press the button. Finding duplicate keywords for example is a way to avoid competition with ads in the same account.
When there are multiple versions of keywords, ad relevance gets diluted which can impact quality score, reduce click-thru rates and increase CPCs.
When it comes to reporting tasks, prior to automation, segmented reports were cumbersome to create. Reporting can show trended data in the interface but once broken down into segments, the decision-making becomes stronger.
Segmenting data can help determine which campaign type or setting is delivering the most value for the account. Understanding how to segment data and why to segment is a skill that requires experience.
Taking the time to understand why data should be analyzed in different ways will foster better client communication.
Bidding automation
Automated bidding is a different category of automation. Historically, as Google Ads evolved we had only lost control of variants. Automated bidding has been a significant shift. This change means that campaigns need to be consolidated so Google has enough data to learn.
The automation of bidding also favors larger campaign budgets as small daily budgets limit impression share and the ability to get all the data possible.
Lastly, this type of bidding works best when match types are broad because the system can maximize the reach of the keyword and consider the context of the search. This is another area of automation where understanding the history and basics of PPC can shed insight as to why the campaign is behaving in a specific way.
1. Understanding how automation operates is key.
Understanding the types of automation is a key component of effective PPC account management. Showing the trend over time as well as the strategy that has been deployed adds context to client reporting.
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You can’t have it all. It’s a sad, but true fact. You can’t scale an account while becoming more efficient. And the tactics and strategies for each goal are fundamentally different.
It’s like trying to make a peanut butter sandwich while getting your nails done: it just doesn’t work. Alignment and understanding here are critical because clients often ask why CPAs are increasing while pursuing a growth strategy.
As marketers navigating automation it is best to plot learning periods, campaign launch days, budget changes, bidding strategies, and campaign reorganization alongside performance data. This is a great way to explain to clients why the data shifted while explaining the impact of different campaigns and strategies.
2. Audience targeting has evolved over the years.
Another shift in PPC has been the evolution of audience targeting. PPC was designed around keywords. Still, in 2022 we create keyword lists and attempt to match keywords to intent.
However, Google has inch-by-inch added supplemental features to allow for more audience targeting. Advertisers can now target ads based on specific groups or demographics of people that share similar characteristics or interests and layer this data into campaigns with keywords.
The audiences provide more context to our paid search campaigns.
Why do audiences matter?
As much as we think we know, keywords aren’t perfect. The intent is difficult to pinpoint and paid search in the search network is based on matching intent.
“Keywords are not focused on the human, instead, they are focused on the word itself and what we think we know. In contrast, audience targeting is all about people. Instead of looking at keywords, audiences factor humans that have certain characteristics, demographics, and behaviors.”
As marketers, we are trying to influence behavior so the human component of audiences is relevant. Merging the keyword with audiences absolutely improves paid search campaigns.
3. The keyword has evolved too.
The paid search community has a hard time admitting that the keyword is not perfect. Bottom-of-the-funnel activities are easy to understand and show high returns.
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Those of us who started in the early days lived through a radical budgeting shift. In traditional media such as TV and radio demand capture is harder to measure. Keyword paid search was not only easy to measure but could be directly tied back to sales and actions.
As time went on, advertisers struggled to grow demand. Their problem was that they had invested heavily in demand capture activities and underinvested in demand generation tactics. Large advertisers who had abandoned traditional media began to see the light and reinvested in traditional advertising.
It is no surprise that most advertisers did not put their money back into TV, radio, and newspapers. Instead, advertisers moved to Facebook, programmatic display, and CTV.
These newer platforms excel at demand generation more than the keyword. During this time keywords became saturated. Keyword bidding could feel like hitting a brick wall when it came to increasing lead volume.
Platforms such as Google have this data and realized at some point to grow their revenue they would need advertisers to grow beyond keyword bidding as well. The platforms offered top-of-funnel solutions.
But let’s face it - the community at large was reluctant.
This was the start of automation and platform changes. Today the age of automation is upon us.
At first, advertisers were not even sure how to react. Those who had the highest confidence in their abilities started telling stories of a past life where they had been on the other side of the fence, wearing the shoes of the man who crafted the campaigns himself.
They spoke of spending six hours a day meticulously concatenating millions of keywords, optimizing ad copy, and tinkering with settings, in an attempt to find that golden 1% boost in conversion rate.
Modern advertisers leaned into automation and saw success. They began to lean into a fuller funnel approach.
“Today the best advertisers lean into automation while taking the time to understand platform changes. The understanding comes from reading support documentation, understanding the history of how the tasks worked when being done manually, and having a healthy dose of skepticism when applying changes.”
4. Google support’s quality has degraded.
Another evolution in PPC has been platform support. In recent years, Google customer support has been less responsive than it was in the past.
“Click-to-chat has become the new norm. Calls involve long wait times. Google reps are focused on sales and tool adaption and less focused on teaching and supporting client goals.”
They come across as having their priorities backward, while conversations can be circular arguments with the rep referencing incorrect support documentation or proposing campaign changes that don’t align with the goal.
There have been times it seemed like customer support was handled by a computer instead of a human.
5. The PPC community has become more collaborative.
The PPC industry has become much more open as a result of this lack of support, which has led to an increase in collaboration among members of the community. In the past, as professionals, we were territorial over tactics and resisted openly sharing successes and failures.
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Today, we work together to figure out what works and what does not perform as expected.
6. There’s more access to learning resources now.
Another change in the PPC industry is access to information. When I got started in paid search marketing, I had to read blogs to learn. I remember setting up Google Alerts in my inbox so I could read any article about paid search, PPC, or SEO.
Today there are free webinars, books, podcasts, virtual conferences, TikToks, and YouTube channels. There are ways to consume content on your own terms. I’ve been able to attain some of my professional success because of the flexibility afforded by my ability to listen to podcasts or YouTube videos.
“The sharing of information has helped our community thrive in that: it has spread ideas and enabled collaboration. Most of us have stopped trying to outwit the machine and accepted that we can not beat or control it.”
Understanding how machine automation operates is more impactful than deep dives into spreadsheets which was a requirement during the ‘3 million keyword’ days of paid search.
We need to work alongside the machines.
To sum up the changes in PPC - we’re in a battle against the bots. And while it’s up to the industry to fight them together, the onus is on each of us individually to adapt and make the most out of this automated landscape.
It’s important to remember why you got into PPC in the first place - for the opportunities for creativity, for developing your own style, for pushing yourself. If you only view automation as an evil force trying to steal your job, then automation will win.
And maybe that’s how some out there want it - but I don’t think many would be satisfied with a passive existence. Whether or not automation wins, we all need to start looking at new ways to become the best marketers and PPC strategists.
I encourage you to work with your clients to find ways to keep ad campaigns interesting and fresh regardless of what changes come our way.
This is a guest post by Sarah Stemen, Senior Paid Search manager for Marcus Thomas.
About the author: Sarah Stemen is a Senior Paid Search manager for Marcus Thomas based in Cleveland, Ohio. She is a regular participant in PPCChat and a board member of the Paid Search Association. Sarah has been working in paid search since 2007 and has spent time on both the client side and the agency side. When not doing paid search, Sarah is busy with 3 kids.
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Adding Google’s Click ID (GCLID) to Google Analytics is a powerful way to better understand the behavior of people who come to your site after clicking on one of your ads. But to see GCLID data in Google Analytics requires a few steps. We’ll walk you through these in this article.
1. Create a new custom dimension in Google Analytics
Here are the steps to help get the first part of GCLID tracking set up in Google Analytics:
Go to the Admin section of your Google Analytics profile by clicking the settings wheel at the bottom left.
Click Custom Definitions and the Custom Dimensions in the middle column.
Click the button to create a new Custom Dimension.
Name the new custom dimension ‘gclid’.
For scope, select “User”.
Save your changes.
Look at the table with all your custom dimensions and write down the index number for the one you just created. We’ll need this shortly for another step.
2. Use Google Tag Manager (GTM) to capture the GCLID from the URL
The GCLID is passed in the URL by Google when a user clicks on your ad. Google Analytics doesn’t natively know what to do with this so we need to tell it that the GCLID’s value should be stored in the custom dimension we just created.
There are many ways to do this, but one of the most easily repeatable ways is by using Google Tag Manager. Here we’ll tell it to grab the GCLID from the URL.
In the Variables section, add a new User-Defined variable.
For Variable Type, select ‘URL’.
For Component Type, select ‘Query’.
For Query Key, type in ‘gclid’.
Leave all other settings as they are and save the variable.
3. Use Google Tag Manager to send the GCLID to Google Analytics
Now that GTM knows how to grab the GCLID from the URL, we need to send that value to Google Analytics. GTM can do this for us as well.
This is where everything comes together so the steps refer back to the things you did in the previous two instruction lists. We’ve included ample screenshots to make it as easy as possible to follow along.
If you already use GTM to put Google Analytics on your website, go to your existing tag. Otherwise, create a new tag for Universal Analytics.
In the tag configuration, open the dropdown for Google Analytics Settings and create a New Variable.
Add a Custom Dimension under ‘More Settings’.
For the index field, enter the number you wrote down from step 7 in the first instruction list on this page (create a new custom dimension in Google Analytics).
For Dimension Value, click on the brick icon to open your available list of variables.
Select the variable you created in the previous set of steps (use Google Tag Manager to capture the GCLID from the URL).
Save the tag, test your GTM changes and publish them.
4. Use Google Analytics to see GCLID data
Note that the GCLID custom dimensions data will not be retroactively added into your old Google Analytics reports so you’ll have to wait a few hours for new data that does include the GCLID to appear.
As an example of a report you can now run, go to a report like ‘Behavior > Site Content > All Pages’ and in the Secondary Dimensions dropdown select ‘gclid’.
Your report will now include both the URL and the gclid.
You can download this data and using lookups in spreadsheets, start to build a more holistic view into the behavior resulting from clicks on your Google Ads.
When you add GCLID as a custom dimension in Google Analytics, Optmyzr will help you explore, build, and optimize audiences, as well as help with offline conversion import (OCI).
PPC marketers are always optimizing — some monitoring here, an adjustment there, and then you start to see (better) results. When you have that much to do, it’s impossible to do it manually and scale your output.
So there’s no reason to fear automation — like scripts. They not only speed up the process, but also allow you to be much more efficient in running your business. That’s right — scripts can drive business impact.
Best of all, anyone can use scripts, even if you haven’t written even a single line of code in your life!
So this week on episode 18 of PPC Town Hall, we spoke to our panelists who live and breathe scripts:
As always, you can view this week’s episode as well as previous editions of PPC Town Hall right here.
Here are 5 insights to help you grow your business by automating your PPC accounts with scripts.
1. Update price extensions
Nils: Price extensions are very popular extensions that you can use in your Google Ads accounts to display actual prices. But prices tend to change quite often. If you have different products, and the product manager or account manager is changing the prices of the products because of inventory or competition, you need to update the price extensions with the actual prices.
Up until a year ago, it was impossible to update them through scripts. Fortunately, now we can access the price extensions via the scripts API to keep them in sync with your inventory.
To check the price extensions, you need to do the following: Google Ads scripts → References → AdsApp → Ad Extensions → Prices.
2. When to turn to scripts
Steve: ‘This is taking too much manual work’ is the point where we begin to think about building scripts to shorten the whole process. Most of the time, it’s brought up due to some amount of laziness on our part. For example, I’m currently working on Search Query reports and rely on scripts to deliver automated reports to me.
One of the best things about scripts is that you get to see this functionality and dozens of ways one can apply that across campaigns. The fun of scripts is finding something and imagining creative ways to apply them.
3. The business value of scripts
Nils: Scripts deliver great benefits all over the place. I’ve created a list of the Top 7 benefits of using scripts. Personally I try to automate as much as possible by using scripts. It has helped my remote PPC agency succeed and apply consistent processes to operations. With scripts, you can come up with new ideas to test your account, which wouldn’t have been possible manually. For example, we know that N-gram analysis is very tedious and time-taking. But with scripts, something that complex becomes quicker and can be done more frequently.
The biggest benefit of scripts for my agency has been quality assurance. As the scripts are monitoring everything, any mistake done by my team comes under notice quickly. This way I can be alerted when anything goes haywire and sleep easy.
Steve: We recently shifted to a new revenue model — cost per deliverable, where we charge our customers a fixed amount for our services. Scripts allow me to do that a lot more efficiently.
It’s not a discussion of hours anymore. Our clients are more focused on whether the product runs efficiently rather than how. This allows me to take my expertise and focus on deliverables rather than time.
4. Copy-pasting and modifying scripts
Steve: I think in blocks, which is basically the JavaScript way of thinking. Figuring out which functions do what, and letting them flow through until you get all the pieces for the script. In a lot of cases, you will get pre-built scripts to work on.
For example, Google’s Account Anomaly script is very easy to adjust to things that you are looking for in your anomalies. This can be a good base to get started with scripts.
5. Using scripts to monitor Google’s AI
Nils: We know that Google AI uses machine learning to predict performances on clicks. And machine learnings involves a ‘learning phase’. We are basically providing Google money and data to feed it to the machine learning algorithms. This is where I love to use scripts to track how AI is handling my accounts. If it goes haywire, and does a bad job for my clients my scripts would alert me immediately.
For example, for close variants, I have created a script to monitor the performance of the real keyword against the close variant. If there’s a significant difference in the performance, like in CPA or ROAS, I get alerted of that. You need to layer scripts and Google’s AI to make the most of it.
Conclusion
It’s important to look at Google Ads holistically. Everything — bids, budgets, ad text — influences this interconnected system. It’s not enough to set a script and forget it; you have to monitor it periodically as well.
As you gain experience, you can try modifying them to suit your specific needs. Experiment with existing rules to see how they affect the performance of your PPC accounts, and remember to preview your script before applying it.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So experiment away!
We all have repetitive PPC management tasks we wish we could automate and get off our daily to-do lists. Fortunately, there are several options for PPC advertisers to achieve this, like Google Ads’ Automated Rules, and Optmyzr’s Rule Engine.
In working with hundreds of customers in my two years at Optmyzr, I noticed many advertisers don’t explore our Rule Engine’s most powerful capabilities because they assume it’s just another interface to control Google’s Automated Rules.
Turns out there’s much more to it than that.
The Rule Engine actually enables our power users to do some of their most advanced optimizations that they wouldn’t have time for without this level of automation.
I talked to Fred, one of our founders who shared that the Rule Engine was initially built as a script for a customer whose bid management strategy took a full day of his time every week!
The script was useful but limited to that advertiser’s strategy. So our company built the Rule Engine to allow every advertiser to automate their most powerful strategies.
While we’re fans of Google Ads Automated Rules for their simple setup, that simplicity is limiting when you want to take your account to the next level with a more powerful strategy. That’s the gap we’re solving with our Rule Engine.
Let me share 6 useful things you can do with the Optmyzr Rule Engine that you cannot with Google Ads Automated Rules.
1. Combine multiple rules into layered strategies
Though in Google Ads you can add as many automated rules as you want, it’s not possible to combine them into a single optimization. In Optmyzr, this is possible with Rule Engine strategies.
In Optmyzr, a rule is a set of conditions and actions (if and then statements). Strategies let you combine multiple rules — in essence, letting you add the ‘else’ portion in an ‘if’, ‘then’, else’ rule.
For example, in just one strategy, you can consolidate all your search query management by adding one rule to add positive keywords and another rule to add negatives.
You can also have multiple actions applied to an entity. For example, you can add a label to the keywords your rule paused because they were found to be too expensive.
2. Use data from multiple/custom date ranges
Automated rules in Google Ads let you use a single date range for metrics. This makes it impossible to do relative comparisons, like to find ad groups that have a sudden spike in CPA for the past week compared to the last 30 days.
With our Rule Engine, you can bring in performance data from as many date ranges as you’d like, making relative comparisons very easy.
While using multiple date ranges is useful, it’s even better when you can customize those date ranges. Rather than just using default ones like the last 7/30/n days, you can build custom date ranges that are based on lookback windows.
For example, you can build a custom date range for 14 days ago to 8 days ago (week before last), and another for 7 days ago to 1 day ago (last week). This enables you to find search terms that have gained a lot of impressions in the past week compared to the week before, or ad groups that have seen a decline in CTR for a few weeks in a row.
3. Do relative comparisons of metrics across a hierarchical structure
With our Rule Engine, you’re able to compare, in just one condition, the performance of the same metric at different levels. This comes in handy when you want to do a relative comparison using expressions/formulas.
For example, compare the CPA of one keyword versus the CPA of the campaign in which the keyword is located. Now you could do things like find keywords that are 50% more expensive than average for the campaign.
In Google Ads automated rules, you can compare a metric against a static value but not against other elements. So you can only do things like find keywords whose CPA is higher than $20. That’s not helpful when you know that CPAs vary greatly between brand and non-brand campaigns, and even between campaigns that sell different services in different locations.
By using a relative comparison, you don’t need to set a static target for all your comparisons, and it becomes very easy to simply look for outliers.
Note: You can also use expressions as actions to calculate new bids and targets.
4. Use external data
What happens when you want to use data not available in Google Ads, but that is also important for your business and optimizations?
5. Set rules on autopilot or review them on demand
While automations help you save tons of time, you may not always want to give up full control; this is why we also let you use your Rule Engine strategies manually. We give you everything necessary to create your own optimization tools and then run them on demand.
Following this idea, even when your strategies are running automatically, we still let you decide if you want to review the changes before you apply them. This is a huge advantage when you want to test your optimization before giving all the control to the automation.
6. Exclude recent changes
You can avoid applying continuous changes to the same entity for a defined period of time to give them enough time to perform before it’s considered by the strategy again. This helps when you don’t want to stack bids or change the target CPA of an ad group that was already adjusted the day before.
This is particularly helpful in situations where you’re slowly changing things like bids until they meet your goal.
For example, if you automate bidding to set an ideal CPC based on the last 7 days’ conversion rate and your target CPA (new CPC = target CPA * conversion rate), you can run that rule as often as you want without worrying that your bids will get out of control.
However, the following is a riskier automation: new CPC = old CPC + $0.10 when last 7 days’ CPA is below CPA target.
It’s risky because if you run this rule 5 times per day, it will increase the bid 5 times even though the last 7 days’ CPA includes only a small portion of data since the last bid change.
With Optmyzr, you can remove this risk by excluding items that were already changed recently. Now every time the rule runs, it will only make suggestions for entities that were not already recently changed by the same rule.
The Rule Engine is my favorite, because you can tailor account rules to match what the individual client needs to be seeing for performance.
Larry C, Owner/Operator, 707 Marketing
Conclusion
If we have to sum up all of the above, it’s about two things: flexibility and more control. Which tool to use will depend on how much of your workflow you want to automate, and how much customization is required.
The Rule Engine definitely is a powerful tool that gives you much room to play with and is designed for both novice and advanced users.
Interested in learning more about it? Let support@optmyzr.com know, and we’ll be happy to help you!
Paid search marketing has become even more challenging than usual, as PPC pros grapple with unforeseen challenges far beyond our normal existence. We’re all being tasked to re-think how we approach paid search and adapt to this time of crisis. Even without the COVID-19 crisis, our longstanding, baked-in challenges compound the pressures on even the best of PPC pros.
Among the entrenched challenges is the clear need to view PPC beyond the land of Google.
We love Google. It’s still the undisputed king of search. Yet now more than ever, Bing continues to steadily work its way up the market share ladder. Many estimates say the Bing properties now account for about a third of all search activity.
Remember, Bing includes Yahoo!, MSN, and more.
Fear not. We’re not introducing more challenges into your PPC life; we’re focused on easing your burden.
Whether you’ve already added Microsoft Ads to your PPC mix or are just realizing the opportunities in the evolving search landscape, the Optmyzr team continues to make it easy to work across platforms.
This week, our team releases the Rule Engine for Bing Ads. The new module is part of the core Optmyzr PPC Management Suite, makes it easier to craft deeper customization, and adds power to your Microsoft Ads campaigns.
Best of all, you can work in tandem, managing Google Ads and Microsoft Ads much more efficiently and effectively.
Closely adapted from our longstanding Rule Engine for Google Ads, the intuitive Rule Engine makes it easy to create custom PPC optimizations and execute bulk changes to Microsoft Advertising campaigns across the Bing universe.
Think of the Rule Engine as a way to create multiple rules in sequence, tapping into essential conditions within campaigns along with the corresponding actions.
What does that look like in real life? Based on conditions and parameters deep in campaign structures, the Rule Engine makes it easy to automate discovery and actions against critical aspects of PPC including:
Quickly uncovering expensive keywords
Identifying expensive product groups
Bidding to target CPA or target ROAS
Identifying anomalies with close variants
The Rule Engine Wizard makes it easy to find a strategy that fits your needs
The Rule Engine includes many pre-built strategies for critical needs that we’ve identified over the years — and that our users have also discovered. These pre-built strategies help you get started faster.
As PPC pros’ needs and skill evolve, the Rule Engine becomes even more powerful.
Start by selecting an objective and one of the Instant Strategies, or build your own
We’ve designed the tool to ease the time and steps required to build your own strategies. A new, intuitive setup wizard allows simple point-and-click rule creation, making it possible to launch new strategies in just minutes.
Several customers took part in the beta testing of the Rule Engine for Bing. One, in particular, was able to deploy the Rule Engine for innovative bid management and alerts.
Leverage Optmyzr’s machine intelligence or take full control of your strategy settings
That customer is Spain-based sporting goods retailer Sprinter. As part of a very competitive industry, the experienced team at Sprinter has to align keyword strategies with inventories, promotions, seasonality, economic dynamics, and other factors that impact revenue.
Sprinter’s senior paid social executive Manuel Vilella noted after beta testing, “We like to bid manually in our brand campaigns, as we prefer not using automated strategies to achieve the minimum CPC. As we have some dozens of brand keywords, we need a solution to adjust the bid according to the viewability. Rule Engine allows us to forget about implementing these changes, as it does this automatically.”
The Rule Engine lets you build unique strategies using if-then statements
We’re proud to bring this new capability to market at a critical time when once again, search marketing is being upended and re-invented before our eyes. Being an effective, strategic marketer during adverse times requires us all to take a much more holistic view of the market and have effective tools at our disposal to work efficiently and strategically across channels.
Best of all, whether the Rule Engine for Google Ads is a familiar tool or one you’ve never tried, we’ve focused on ease of use. So the Rule Engine for Bing can be incorporated into workflows quickly and effectively.
If you’re a current Optmyzr user, let us know how we can help you get the most out of the Rule Engine across Bing and Google. If you’re thinking about trying Optmyzr, contact us for a demo. You’ll see how Rule Engine fits into the full suite and can reduce tasks that previously would have taken hours (or even days) to minutes.
Our team is standing by. Let us know how we can help!
PPC Hero Summit is just around the corner, and I hope you take time to attend a webinar session I’m doing Feb. 12 with my good friend and fellow PPC veteran Jeff Baum of Hanapin Marketing.
Jeff and I will help PPC pros decipher one of the most confusing (and sometimes feared) aspects of PPC in 2020: Automation and artificial intelligence. Our session is entitled “Beyond the Engines’ AI: Make Machine Learning Work for YOUR Brand.” We will help PPC pros learn how they can outperform the competition as automation by Google and Bing threatens to make things easier – and more difficult at the same time.
Pros and Cons of PPC Automation
Google and Bing know what they are doing. Billions upon billions of searches have provided unprecedented opportunity to understand the actual intent and needs of audiences in ways old school marketers could never dream.
Over the last few years, in particular, the big engines have deployed powerful AI and machine learning to automate many core functions of PPC. On the upside, they’ve made it possible for pretty much anyone to set up and run good PPC. There are a lot of positives associated with automations now at search marketers’ collective fingertips – not the least of which is time savings.
The automation of many aspects of core PPC is eliminating busy tasks that used to take up the lion’s share of time for even the most efficient marketers.
However, with all of the greatness of automation, we see some big “cons” on the other side of the ledger, including a growing concern among search marketers that they may be automated into obsolescence. Let’s consider a few specific areas of concern, which we’ll cover in our PPC Hero Summit online session:
Smart marketers are not 100% sold on the search engines’ machine learning features and settings. After all, the buck stops at the desk of the actual PPC pro when it comes to spending our own (or our clients’) budgets. Surrendering all control and decision making to Google and Bing automations isn’t wise.
If everyone uses the same automations in the same manner, PPC may well become overly commoditized. It could be akin to all teams in a sports league using the exact same playbook and strategy.
Company A and Company B may be in the same industry selling similar products, but things that work well for one company or its customers may fail miserably for the other.
Jeff and I will cover essentials of what’s working and what’s not when it comes to the big engines’ machine learning. More importantly, we’ll discuss many liberating and empowering reasons to use a third-party tool to help you leapfrog competitors, including:
Ability to elevate to marketing strategist versus practitioner;
Visibility into immediate dynamics of campaigns to make faster, effective course corrections;
Great control over dynamics unique to your business or industry.
Perhaps most valuable, we’ll help search marketers understand how to make a strong business case to their own bosses for a third-party resource.
I encourage you to invest 30 minutes of time to participate in our February 12 session. Jeff and I know your time is valuable, so we’re planning a rapid-fire event that can make a tremendous difference in your future as a marketer – without a huge investment of your time.
Register today and we look forward to this informative session.
AI and machine learning-driven automations are responsible for big changes to how search marketers run their accounts. Make no mistake, smart marketers are those who leverage this new technology and operate at the forefront of where Google, Bing, Amazon, and Facebook are taking us.
Keeping control over PPC in an ever-more automated world is both the biggest challenge and the biggest opportunity for PPC pros this year. Let me share how we’re going to help you make 2020 your best year yet.
Automation Layering
Automation within the search engines poses a couple of inherent risks for PPC pros:
Automation-fueled obsolescence for the PPC pro
Commoditized marketing for the brand
Think about it: If Google automates seemingly everything, will the PPC pro have anything to actually do? And if everyone is using the same automated setup/bid/execute models, is everyone operating on a playing field that is just far too level????
You’re not wrong to have those fears but the team at Optmyzr takes a different view of platform automations – one of opportunity versus threat.
We see a new era for PPC pros to become indispensable through a concept we call Automation Layering.
Frederick Vallaeys, Cofounding CEO, Optmyzr
Simply stated, the search engines are continually automating specific tasks and functions associated with PPC. Automation layering is about the human PPC pro using those automations to morph from being task oriented to becoming a strategic marketing leader.
Optmyzr CEO, Fred Vallaeys, explains automation layering at SMX East. Apologies for the scratchy audio.
Google and the others are aggressively automating the repetitive and tedious side of PPC. Innovative PPC pros crave reducing manual tasks, which allows them to redefine their role and rightfully claim the mantle of marketing strategist.
For the past year and through 2020 and beyond, we are focused on empowering PPC pros to make sense of the platform-level automations and turn those automations into PPC gold.
Let me add a real-life example to illustrate what we’re talking about. We used the Rule Engine to find expensive keywords. Surprise, surprise, we almost instantly found some keywords using automated bidding from Google, spending nearly $2,000 in the last 30 days with 0 conversions.
The ‘Reduce Bids‘ optimization, based on an Optmyzr Rule Engine strategy, can proactively identify and pause keywords where automated bidding by Google is wasting money.
To a big company like Google, this is peanuts and just a necessary part of teaching the machines how to do bidding. But to an advertiser, that is real money coming off their bottom-line that could have been better spent.
Bid automation is great because it saves advertisers a tremendous amount of time, but we have to use our own automations, like Optmyzr, to stay on top of the automations from the engines.
Data-Driven Ads
Saying a PPC campaign is data-driven is a bit like proclaiming that the sun rises in the east. It’s no surprise. PPC pros live in data all day, every day.
Reality is, data will continue to expand its already omnipresence in PPC pros’ lives. We see more structured data leading to more ads based on that structured data. From merchant feeds to inventory spreadsheets, product-level details get deeper and even MORE real-time than ever.
In 2020, we’ll focus much more intensely on the very powerful shopping ads in Google, Amazon, and Bing, in particular. Our expanding developer team will focus on many emerging advancements of shopping ads in 2020.
Search marketers operate in multiple search platforms with varying functions, control, and reporting capabilities. While automation at the platform level helps streamline many of the in-channel tasks, working across disparate platforms can be challenging. As such, we are focusing on improving usability for marketers:
Deciding where to even start. Let’s face it – from seasoned pros to those just starting their search marketing journey, we’ve gotten to a point there are so many options it can be paralyzing to get started. Our developers are refining how Optmyzr suggests what actions to take and highlight the most important things happening in your accounts.
Knowing what actions can or should be taken based on the mind-boggling amount of data at a marketer’s disposal. From the moment a user logs in to Optmyzr, smart suggestions will help you create and follow your own workflow. We’ll also guide users directly to the actions that will provide the most immediate results, essentially highlighting “this is the most broken thing that must be addressed NOW.”
Interacting with Optmyzr. Look for important user interface enhancements in the months ahead. We know that PPC pros spend a significant part of their day in the system, working their channels. Intuitive, customized – and customizable – workflows will help align the work being done to capture greater value in channel.
Staying on top of client needs and anticipating or adjusting to subtle changes deep within automated systems will be more critical than ever in 2020. Optmyzr Co-Founder Manas Garg summed this notion up eloquently in a recent discussion about automation and smart bidding. He noted
“While advertisers shift more and more to smart bidding, many will fall into a complacency trap with a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ mindset. Optmyzr must help them see the signals so they avoid falling months behind a trend or opportunity.”
Manas Garg, Co-Founder, Optmyzr
Software that helps advertisers stay in control of the myriad automations from the engines is the key to success. We see 2020 as an opportune time to further empower PPC pros with essential tools and prebuilt recipes that maximize the native automations within the big engines.
2020 can be a year of empowerment and unprecedented opportunity for smart PPC pros. Make it your best year yet. Optmyzr is with you.
In a previous blog post, we walked you through how you could manage bids by weather using Optmyzr’s Rule Engine and its spreadsheet capability. Today we will be doing a similar walkthrough but focused on how to integrate and use Google Analytics to optimize your Google Ads account using the Rule Engine. For this example, we’ll be pulling a report from Google Analytics with data from how many new users came from AMP pages, and then use that information to raise the bids for them by 5%.
Set up the Spreadsheet
The first thing we’ll need to do is populate a spreadsheet with Google Analytics data to work with. To do this, you can generate a new Google Analytics report directly into a spreadsheet by using the Add-On Feature for Google Analytics. You can do this by opening up a new spreadsheet and heading over to “Add-Ons”. If you don’t have Google Analytics installed as an add on, you can set it up with “Get add-ons”, selecting “Google Analytics” and signing into your Analytics Account.
In the report spreadsheets, you can add almost any combination of metrics, dimensions, and segments to create a Google Analytics report into a spreadsheet. For this example, we’ll be using the following:
Metrics: “Users”, “New Users”
Dimensions: “Campaign name”, “Ad Group name”, “Campaign ID”, “Ad Group ID” “Source”, “Data Source”
Segment: “All Users”
This will help us gather how many new users our campaigns have acquired through the use of mobile, web and AMP pages.
Run the Report
After you create the report, head back over to the Add-Ons section and press “Run Reports”. The results will appear in a separate tab, and will look somewhat like this:
To be able to use this spreadsheet in the Rule Engine, you’ll need to delete the information above the results breakdown and change the “Campaigns” to “CampaignName”, “Google Ads: Ad Group” to “AdGroupName” and “Google Ads: Ad Group ID” to “AdGroupId”. It should look something like this.
Finally, and once these settings are done, open up the sharing preferences and share the spreadsheet with the following email:
You can read further on how external spreadsheet data works with the Rule Engine here.
Connect it to the Rule Engine
Once the spreadsheet is set up and ready, head over to the Rule Engine and create a new custom recipe. Define the level on which changes will be made, and set a name for your new recipe.
On the settings page, scroll down to the “Connect External Data” field and paste the spreadsheet link in the empty space. Make sure you use the results tab name where it says “Specify Sheet Name”.
Create the Recipe
Once you’ve connected the external spreadsheet, click proceed and you’ll be taken to define the first condition.
You can read more about how custom Rule Engine recipes work here.
In this case, we’ll set the first condition that’ll tell the system to consider the ad groups with more than 5 “new users”. The second condition will filter out the new users that have been acquired through AMP pages, and the third condition defines that only the ones with a CTR higher than 5% will be considered. Here you can also filter out by campaign and ad group, by selecting “Campaign Name” or “Ad Group Name” contains.
Then we’ll tell the system that when these rules are matched, it should increase the bid by a 5%
Once we’re done, press on the preview button and you’ll be taken to a page with a list of the results. These results will show which campaigns and ad groups matched the rules in the recipe, the current bid and the 5% increase of bid. If you want to apply these changes, simply press on Apply Now.
Keep it running
Every Rule Engine recipe can be scheduled to run automatically by pressing on the Automate button on the recipe’s preview. Pressing on this button will prompt a confirmation box with the final details for you to review. You can schedule it to run on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Congratulations, you’ve just created a custom Analytics-based recipe! If you have any questions or would like help setting it up, feel free to contact us at support@optmyzr.com and our awesome team will give you a hand!
You know that old saying “when it rains… apply bid changes”. Well, that’s not really how it goes, but it’s most definitely one thing you can do with our Rule Engine!
Now we’ll show you how Optmyzr can help you automatically bid by weather. A similar case was also covered in the “Advanced Rule Engine Examples” video by our co-founder Frederick Vallaeys.
Step 1: Create the Recipe.
For this example, we’ll create a recipe to modify bids at the ad group level using values such as “Current Temperature” or “Current Weather Condition”.
Keep in mind that this is just one of many use cases for the Rule Engine weather bid management. Among the possibilities you’ll find you can:
Increase/decrease bids at the keyword or product group level using weather data (e.g., increase bids for all keywords containing “air conditioners” during warm days).
Change the status of your campaigns (e.g., pause your “bathing suits” campaigns if it’s snowing)
You’ll need to generate your own API key here https://openweathermap.org/appid#get and follow the rest of the steps listed on the sheet “Instructions and Keys”.
Note: For the last step on the spreadsheet, you can download your list of campaigns from the “Connect External Data” section in the Rule Engine by clicking on “Get Sample Data For Your Account” and pasting it exactly as it is on the “Paste CSV from RE here” sheet.
Step 3: Add the corresponding City or ZIP Code to each of the campaigns.
Now let’s add the corresponding City or ZIP Code to the campaigns. The spreadsheet has a couple of sheets to get weather data. Depending on which one you want to use, you’ll have to manually add the City or ZIP code to your list of campaigns.
For cities, please follow this format {city},{country code} (you can get a list of country codes here).
Note: If the country code is not specified, the OpenWeatherMap API might return data for the wrong city.
Step 4: Link the spreadsheet.
To link the spreadsheet to your recipe, you’ll need to paste the spreadsheet’s URL in the “Connect External Data” section. Make sure you specify the sheet from where the Rule Engine pulls weather data, and the correct column types (Current Temperature: Number|Current Weather Condition: Text).
Let’s get down to business! Having completed these previous steps, you can now use any of the weather data from the spreadsheet to build your own custom optimization. Remember the spreadsheet has campaign data, so that’s the scope you should use when adding the conditions:
Let’s suppose that we have a couple of campaigns for “Sunglasses” in Madrid and “Shorts” in Toulouse. If temperatures start to rise, we might want to increase the bids for the ad groups in those campaigns accordingly.
The first rule does precisely this. If the temperature rises above 27ºC, and the weather condition is “clear sky” it applies two actions:
We increase the bids for the ad groups in the campaign by 10%
We label the ad groups (for the example we’ll use: Bid by High Temperature) – This step is critical, as it helps to revert the changes with Rule-2.
But what happens if the temperatures drop? The second rule reverses the changes applied by the first rule. To do this, we check all ad groups with the label “Bid by High Temperature” and apply two actions:
Set the bids back to their previous value. We achieve this by using an expression where we divide the Current Bid by 1+(0.1) where 0.1 = 10% increase.
We remove the labels “Bid by High Temperature”.
Note: In the same spreadsheet you can change the temperature units used (Instructions and Keys sheet – Step 4) and see a list of all weather conditions the Open Weather Map API can return (Descriptions sheet)
Step 6: Test, preview & automate.
All set! You can now preview the suggestions and if everything looks ok, you can go ahead and automate it to run on a daily basis.
Try it out! If you have any questions, or if you’d like us to have a look at your recipe before you start running it just email us at support@optmyzr.com – we’ll be glad to help you.
Just like you do, some campaigns deserve a good day off! So with the Rule Engine, we found a way to send them on their holidays (automatically)!
One of the many great features of our Rule Engine is that you can import external data into your recipes to use almost any value on a spreadsheet cell as a condition and to trigger very concrete actions. In this example, I’ll show you how to pause a campaign based on a list of dates from a spreadsheet.
The method I’ll share could be useful to pause your campaigns on days when your call center or store is closed or to activate specific campaigns during seasonal events, like Prime Day or Black Friday.
Step 1: Create a new recipe in Rule Engine
Create a new Custom Recipe and select “All but removed” in the Campaign status dropdown from the Filters section. This step is essential, as it ensures that the recipe runs on both Enabled and Paused campaigns.
Step 2: Set up the spreadsheet
Make a copy of this spreadsheet. In the “Campaigns” sheet, you need to add all the data for the campaigns you want the recipe to modify based on the list of dates (“Dates” sheet).
To make this easier, you can download your list of campaigns from the “Connect External Data” section in the Rule Engine by clicking on “Get Sample Data For Your Account”.
Now, copy and paste the mandatory data for CampaignId and CampaignName in the corresponding cells.
Update: May 24, 2021
Rule Engine automations use the GMT timezone. Please keep this in mind at the moment of setting up your spreadsheet to avoid any conflicts between the time on your sheets and the time the automation runs (File > Spreadsheet Settings > General > Time zone)
We also recommend making sure the “Recalculation” settings on your spreadsheet are set to either “On change and every minute” or “On change and every hour”. This affects how often the TODAY formula is updated (File > Spreadsheet Settings > Calculation > Recalculation)
Step 3: Set up the list of dates when the automation needs to do something with your campaign
On the “Dates” sheet we have the list of dates used for the comparisons we make within the spreadsheet (so it can see if today’s date is on the list of special dates when something needs to happen). There, you’ll have to add the dates you want to use (make sure to follow the same format). Note that by default, this spreadsheet includes the list of US public holidays (2019-2020).
Step 4: Create your date-driven automation!
Now here’s where the fun starts! – let’s build the rules.
The first rule takes care of the campaigns when the cells in the Holiday column are “Yes”. When that’s the case, we apply two actions:
1. We label the campaign (for the example we’ll use: Paused by Holiday Recipe)
2. And then we pause the campaign
The second rule does the opposite. It’ll take care of re-enabling the campaign once the cells in the Holiday column say “No”.
It’s important to only check the campaigns labeled by the previous rule. That’s why we add the condition “Label Name is equal to Paused by Holiday Recipe” – It has to be the same label!
The two actions for this rule are:
1. Remove the label we added with the first Rule (Paused by Holiday Recipe)
2. Re-enable the campaigns
Step 4: Test, preview, automate
Voila! The recipe has been created 🙂
Now preview the suggestions, and if everything looks ok, you can automate it to run daily.
tl;dr:
Try it out! If you have any questions, or if you’d like us to have a look at your recipe before you start running it just email us: support@optmyzr.com – and we’ll be glad to help you.
Are you wasting time working on tasks that could be automated?
That’s the exact question I asked myself several years ago, before making the switch from a manual account management process to an automated one.
Conversion Hut is slightly different to most marketing agencies. We only focus on two areas – PPC Ads and Conversion Rate Optimization.
Our agency has a diverse portfolio of clients and before moving to a more automated business model, our clients were more than happy with the consistent performance improvements that they were receiving.
However, where we were running into difficulty was when we were trying to focus more on the overall strategy for the accounts. Including testing new types of campaigns as well as consistent landing page testing and optimization.
All of this just wasn’t possible in the time allotted for every client, each month.
I looked at the client schedules and could see the amount of time being used was primarily the housekeeping tasks rather than tasks which could provide real growth.
My theory was that by reducing the amount of time we spent on general tasks by replacing it with automation, we could then spend more time focusing on the big shiny things.
So in true Conversion Hut style, we thought “Let’s test it”.
Let’s test switching to a predominantly automated PPC management agency which would allow us to spend more time on aspects that were really going to move the needle and less time on things that could be done with little human interaction.
If we could save time and still maintain our high quality standards, this would be a win for us.
What happened next?
To be quite honest, it transformed our company.
Tasks that would usually take a few hours each day, were instead done in minutes.
And instead of spending less time on things like strategy and conversion rate optimization, we were now spending the majority of our time doing them.
The current situation
At the moment there seems to be people on two sides of the fence when it comes to automation.
People that prefer to do everything manually, because they don’t want to lose any control. And then there’s the people that harness the power of automation and understand that you’re still in full control.
Our tool of choice for our PPC automation is Optmyzr.
We’re fully aware that there are plenty of tools available on the market that offer a similar service. But for us, Optmyzr does everything we could possibly want it to and more.
In this blog post i’m going to cover some of the different tasks that we automate and how our company benefits as a result.
The topics that we will cover are as follows :
Keyword Bidding
New Keywords
Ad Testing
Bid Modifications
Shopping Campaigns
1. Keyword Bidding
Bidding effectively is the holy grail of PPC management.
It can really make or break a campaigns performance.
However, it’s extremely time consuming as well as requiring to be done regularly. In some cases, even daily.
Because of this, it can take up the majority of time that account managers have.
Which is more than likely why a lot of the agencies out there have opted for using one of Google’s automated bidding strategies for their clients.
For most of our clients, we can’t see the same performance improvement that we can by doing keyword bidding manually, which is why we haven’t gone down that path.
The automated bidding tool that we use can adjust bids for thousands of keywords in seconds. And unlike Google’s technology, we’re actually defining the rules that the bids are set to.
So for our ecommerce clients we can define an ROAS that we want to try and meet from each keyword.
We can also set those rules on a product basis if we like. So if one group of keywords needs a target ROAS that’s higher or lower, we can customise our bids accordingly.
Alternatively, for lead generation and SAAS companies we can adjust bids based on a target CPA that we’re trying to hit.
An example ‘recipe’.
We can also specify the amount of conversions a keyword must have before we make a change as well as making sure the keyword bid hasn’t been adjusted in a certain time period (i.e. 7 days).
There’s one more really important capability that was a game changer for us.
The lookback window.
We can set multiple lookback date ranges for each rule that we create, so that we can find out when keywords met a predefined rule.
For instance, we may adjust the date range from 7 day, 14 day, 30 day, 60 day and so on, until it matches our rule.
Once it does, that’s the data it uses to adjust the bid.
For one person to do this manually, would almost certainly be a full time job for some accounts.
As i’m sure you can see already, automated bidding can save hours of manual work.
But that hasn’t scratched the service of what automation can do just yet.
2. New Keywords
Any account manager knows that adding new keywords is a basic part of PPC management.
By continuously adding new relevant keywords to an account, it will help increase traffic and sales.
The downside is that it takes time to do. Quite a bit of time for most accounts.
Here’s the usual manual process for adding new keywords :
Load up the search terms report for the last 30 days.
Look for keywords which have driven clicks.
If a search term looks like a good addition, add it to a list to include.
Once complete, add the new keywords including each match type to the relevant adgroups.
For those keywords which require their own adgroups, create a new adgroup.
Add keywords and different match types.
Create new ads
If there isn’t a relevant landing page, create one.
Publish.
Woah.
Looking back at it now, that’s a lengthy process and i can’t believe we used to spend all that time doing it!
What Happens Now?
Now we can pre-define criteria for new keywords that we want to add to an account.
We may say that we require a minimum number of clicks, impressions, conversions or quality score before we decide to include it in a campaign.
We’ll then see a list of suggestions to include and we can pick and choose what we would like to go with.
We can quickly duplicate the keyword and adjust the matchtype so we have various versions. We then click the add button and they’re added to our adgroups.
What about if we need to create a new adgroup?
That’s no problem either, we can specify that the new keywords need to go into their own single adgroup and it will create them automatically.
This also includes pulling the ads in from the adgroup where their clicks came from.
3. Ad Testing
Nothing can improve the performance of a PPC campaign more than consistent Ad testing.
Although working your way through each campaign regularly to weed out the under-performers and highflyers is fairly time consuming.
Previously we used to this with the use of a script that would tell us when an ad became the “winner” based on a limited amount of settings that we could define.
I think the term to refer to that process was it was ‘fine’. It kind of did what we wanted it to do, with some customisation.
How our Ad Testing looks like now
Within Optmyzr we can quickly jump into the A/B testing for Ads report and see if there are any ad tests that have reached statistical significance.
We can choose the date ranges to look at as well as them ad performance from specific campaigns.
We can even select the test result confidence level that we want for an ad to be a statistically significant winner.
We can also set the amount of impressions an ad must have before even including it in the analysis.
Additionally, we can choose whether we want to set a winner based on Conversions, Conversions by Impressions or CTR.
We can quickly see how ads KPI’s are performing
Because of this, our ad testing has moved up to a whole new level.
We easily save at least 4 hours of PPC management for each client per month from this feature alone.
And because we’re applying the criteria before calling something a winner, it’s far more accurate (in my opinion) than doing this manually.
Where this tool really comes into its own is when it comes to pausing the losing ads.
When we’re ready to pause an ad, we can also create a new ad at the same time.
But that’s not all.
The feature will also tell us the best performing copy from historical data, to use on each of the various Ad elements.
Next steps
Right now we’re testing using a new feature in Optmyzr which allows us to quickly analyse and compare the ad performance data based on the various ad components (Headlines 1,2,3 + Descriptions 1,2 etc).
This works great for big accounts that have lots of adgroups but don’t necessarily receive lots of clicks. Where reaching any conclusions from the data would take a long time to do.
Our account managers can now quickly see how specific copy is performing across all campaigns or individual campaigns. We can even segment by device to see how the performance changes between them.
This works brilliant for us.
When working with medium to large accounts, this process takes a huge amount of time to do. Now we can see this data in seconds.
4. Bid Modifications
Since bid modifications were introduced, they’ve really helped make optimization more granular.
However to do this effectively, we previously needed to work our way through each of our clients campaigns and make the adjustments manually where we thought we could improve performance.
Since moving to Optmyzr, we’ve definitely streamlined this process and picked out some of their best features to make this happen.
We use their suite of tools that are made to assist with Bid Modifiers, in particular for Geo, Device and Audiences.
The method we use is called Intelligent Suggest, which from the name you’ll probably be able to gather that it gives you the recommended modifications based on your goals.
It uses machine learning to provide the suggestions, which includes an array of different factors.
We can then see a predicted performance improvement if the changes that are suggested are applied to the campaigns.
Each of the different modifications that can be made, can be broken down further to be more granular.
So rather than just adjust Device bids at the campaign level, we can adjust them at the adgroup level instead.
We can see each of the proposed changes to made and make our own changes should we wish.
To compile and apply this data would take hours for a human to do, but using automation, it’s done and applied within seconds. The only time involved is clarifying the changes that are being made.
5. Shopping Campaigns
Google Shopping Campaigns are huge at the moment and there’s no sign of them slowing down. With new features being released frequently, it’s a great time to be using them.
However, when it comes to Google Shopping Campaign Optimization, there’s a huge amount of factors that are involved to not only setup a campaign effectively, but then turning those campaigns into revenue generating machines.
By default, Shopping Campaigns load of all of the products from the product feed into a single product group.
But this isn’t the best way of implementing a shopping campaign, as you’re effectively bidding the same on all products.
So for instance, you could have a product with a retail price fo $500 and that would have the same bid as a product with a retail price of $10.
Implementing campaigns like this is unlikely going to get the results that we want.
When it comes to the shopping campaigns we create, we always apply the One Product Adgroup method.
What’s involved here is creating an individual adgroup for each of our products that are in our product feed.
That way we have much more control over not only our bids, but our bid modifications too (as well as many others).
Prior to using Optmyzr, we used to do it all manually with the help of excel.
To say it was time consuming would be an understatement.
Using Optmyzr, we can quickly build campaigns based on our product feeds in seconds.
We can choose if we want to build the product groups based on a number of different attributes including :
Brand
Product ID
Condition
What Optmyzr helps us do is take the time out of creating campaigns and give us more time to manage them strategically.
There’s also some additional tools that they offer to help with managing the campaigns.
The biggest mistakes made with automation
We asked Fred Vallaeys, Cofounding CEO of Optmyzer what he thought the biggest mistakes people make when moving to automated PPC management :
Automations still need to be monitored. I.e. Do NOT set-it-and-forget-it. For example, a Google Ads script authorization could expire which means it stops running. Now that automated script that you thought would prevent you from spending more than the client’s budget isn’t actually running and you miss the budget.
Automations require reliable inputs. For example, if you have automated bidding but your web server goes down and clicks are leading to a 404 page where no conversions are possible, it will start to reduce bids, perhaps so low that you no longer qualify for page 1. Then when the server is fixed, ads linger on page 2 and your conversions aren’t restored.
Automations need complete instructions. For example, if you tell a bid system to maximize conversions but you set no bounds on maximum CPA, it can buy some very expensive conversions. If you don’t distinguish between different types of conversions, some of which are more valuable, it may buy too many of the low value conversions.
The robots do as we say not the other way round
As i’m sure you’ll agree with what we have covered in this article, automation isn’t just about giving full control to the robots and letting them go and do as they please.
We still have the final say over what happens in our accounts. Any changes that are made, we can decide whether to make them or not.
As well as that, the room for error in the changes that we do is so much lower than if it were to be doing them manually. Humans being humans, can have off-days and make errors in the optimization that they are doing.
Agencies seem to be fairly divided when it comes to used automated tools or not.
We think it’s a no-brainer for allowing our campaign managers to spend less time on the housekeeping and more time on the big-wins for our clients.
I think main question here is what would you rather, a campaign manager that’s snowed under doing day to day tasks with no time to spend on growing clients accounts?
Or a campaign manager that has a surplus of time, that they can use to focus on making more money for them?
PPC automation is being adopted by successful agencies across the world in some shape or form. So this isn’t really a question about if you’re going to use it. It’s about when you’re going to start using it.
I really hope you’ve enjoyed this guide to the benefits of PPC automation and been able to see the amount of time that it can save as well as the improvement in performance.
I’d love to hear your experience with PPC Automation. Please feel free to reach out with your comments or questions.
The Optmyzr team is fresh off an invigorating and inspiring webinar with our friends from Hanapin Marketing. I had the opportunity to present virtually alongside Jacob Fairclough, the associate director of Analytics at Hanapin and regular blogger at PPC Hero.
Jake and I spend a lot of our work life neck deep in scripting, which makes it easy to assume everyone PPC pro out there is as keen on scripting as we are.
We had a great audience of PPC pros for the webinar, and started off with an online insta-poll asking attendees to identify their biggest challenge in working with scripts. More than 90 percent of attendees indicated scripting is still a big unknown:
If you would respond more in line with the other 10%, you might already be a script-ninja. Great! Ninjas can stop reading this post and pop over to our script libraryto peruse the latest from our script-crafting experts. A regular browse through our latest scripts can keep your automation ahead of the game.
However, if you are like a lot of PPC pros, the notion of scripting as part of your PPC automation regimen might make you shield your eyes and run for the door. So keep reading!
PPC Automation Takes Many Forms
It’s important to understand the varying degrees of automation in PPC – and where scripts fit into the picture.
The basics:
Google Ads and Bing Ads provide basic, but essential automations that can reduce tasks for core PPC activities. Things like automated bid management. If automation is new to you, this is a good place to start.
The big engines also provide essential automation via rules. This can include automation for keyword campaigns, scheduling, termination. Google and Bing make it easy to get started automating in about five minutes. Results can be pretty striking – and perhaps start a healthy automation addiction.
The essentials:
PPC management suites, such as Optmyzr, allow PPC pros to manage virtually all aspects of their work more efficiently. Within such full suite tools are varying levels of automation and controls that can greatly elevate the effectiveness of PPC campaigns through automated bid management, implementation of rules and many other forms of automation (fear not…we’ll write extensively about deep-in-the-weeds PPC automation throughout 2019).
The advanced:
A lot of our clients regularly derive extreme value from the advanced, custom scripts our team creates on a regular basis. From budget management to URL checkers to reporting, our scripts eliminate hours of task-oriented activities, freeing up the PPC pro to focus more on the human aspects of their job – strategy, creativity and out-of-the-box thinking.
Still, there are many really smart PPC pros who perhaps only dabble lightly in our scripts to help boost their capabilities, but may still have some level of trepidation.
Finally, many clients see scripts as cryptic cave paintings – and never explore our vast array of really powerful tools that take their game to a whole new level.
If scripts seem cryptic – don’t fret. You’re not alone, and the PPC script “cave paintings” are really much easier to figure out than you might think.
PPC Scripts Deconstructed
Let’s look at Google Ads scripts – but keep in mind Bing Ads is really cut from the same cloth. Scripts that work in one platform can generally be easily adapted for the other.
Google Ad scripts are really just a flavor of JavaScript code that can be pasted into a Google Ads account. Think of formulas within spreadsheets or even a basic IFTTT sequence. If you can write something down as a process or set of commands, you actually understand coding more than you may think.
Start by examining your PPC workflow. Can something be automated? Repetitive tasks? We work in data and process flows – two key ingredients for automation and scripting. Think of the most common things surrounding managing keywords, product groups, Ads, Shopping Ads, bid adjustments. So much of what we do can be boiled down to a process. Processes SCREAM “automate me!”
The next question to ask yourself is – SHOULD this be automated? The chart below helps us prioritize opportunities to automate via scripts and what we may want to keep as is or perhaps automate at a later date.
The key question: What keeps you the busiest? Plot your responses on a basic X-Y grid diagram where the X-axis scales according to time consumption and the Y-axis focuses on task frequency. For me, I find ad testing – explored manually – happens a lot and takes a ton of time. Bid management happens a lot, but is relatively quick to do. Reporting takes a lot of time, but happens predictably and not as frequently. Budget updates can be done quickly and don’t happen as frequently.
Now we have a great visual representation to prioritize what can/should be automated.
Whatever priorities you come up with, chances are we have easily-adapted scripts ready made for you in our script library. If you can master “control-C” and “control-V,” you are already on your way. The steps are pretty simple:
Copy the free script you want from our script library
Paste the script into your Google Ads manager (same for Bing scripts)
Revise the few specific lines of code that need to be customized (easier than it may sound at first)
Test/preview
Launch
Okay…step 3 in the sequence above still may seem daunting, but it’s not. In reality, most PPC pros can master this step fairly quickly. You really only need to adjust some configuration in the code. Simple things such as replacing email address for notification – or adjust specific parameters that you want the script to monitor, such as triggering based on a specific percentage of budget or other specific performance data.
Reality is there may be hundreds of lines of code in a script that you copy and paste, but you need only adjust a few lines for the commands and actions you want. After you try it a few times, it becomes really easy to do.
Scripts have their place (and not)
Scripts clearly can be great tools to use, but like everything, they have limitations. For example, they can only run 30 minutes at a time and they have limits on parameters such as numbers of keywords. Advanced script ninjas will often go a level deeper into crafting robust APIs for more advanced programming that goes beyond the limitations of scripts. But for now, it’s most essential to get comfortable with scripts if this is new turf for you.
The results can be astounding. Breaking complex tasks down to smaller components allows machines to focus on the tasks and the humans to focus on more esoteric, strategic aspects of PPC. Creativity in words or imagery for Shopping Ads – or perhaps planning out seasonal/timely campaigns that require the human mind to break new ground. Machines are getting smarter, but they simply can’t compete with the human mind on many levels still.
Automate like it’s 2019!
PPC Automation has made huge strides in recent years and we expect that trend gain speed in 2019. Scripts are one piece of what should be a more holistic approach to automation.
Hopefully we’ve broken down some of the natural barriers many great PPC pros find when they think about scripting. Start small. If you are an agency, test on your internal campaigns and get comfortable. You’ll see that scripts are pretty foolproof, easy to debug when they aren’t working right, and open new doors to become the PPC rockstar you’re destined to be.
Conclusion
Coming up in January, we’re going to run a run little contest with our friends at Hanapin. We’ll ask PPC pros what they want to automate via scripts. Based on your feedback, we’ll build the most sought after script and post it free here and on PPCHero.com.
Jake and I will revisit scripts even more in depth at PPC Hero Summit on Wednesday, March 6th. The event will offer a great opportunity to add scripting as part of a holistic approach to PPC automation.
In the meantime, start exploring scripts! They can help transform your effectiveness as a true PPC rockstar.
We hosted a webinar to show how the Rule Engine can be used to automate bid management based on external data like sales tracked in a CRM, weather conditions, and conversion types.
You can watch the replay of that webinar here:
Map AdWords entities to external data
A key requirement for using external data is that we must be able to map it to an AdWords entity like a campaign, ad group, keyword, or product group. We do this by looking at the ID and name fields of every row in the spreadsheet.
For example, to be able to use campaign-level weather data, the spreadsheet must contain either the campaign name or the campaign ID on the row that has the weather data like temperature and cloud levels.
Resources to get started
To help you get started with the examples shown in the webinar, here are a few resources that help with the creation of the external data:
Running search ads is an easy sell for agencies, because clients like the measurability and control this medium offers.
Then comes the discussion of the agency fees and hours required to execute a successful campaign, often yielding a chasm between the service a client expects and what the agency can offer, yet remaining profitable. As contract negotiations whittle down already aggressive project bids, the pressure falls on the day-to-day PPC managers to complete mountains of work in little time.
The danger for agencies—besides write-downs and overages—is becoming so focused on checking off a task list that they fail to make the strategic moves necessary for the results they promised. To prevent this unenviable situation, agencies need to pause and take a hard look at where their time is going to maximize efficiency and boost profitability of PPC campaigns. Automation of AdWords and PPC campaigns overall is key.
4 PPC agency time killers
Reality is, dozens of time killers plague search marketing agencies, but we want to focus in on a few specific areas of exceptional opportunity to automate the most frequent time-consuming PPC tasks. At the very least, analysis of the following automation opportunities can put agencies on the path to better profitability.
1. Reporting
PPC account managers field constant client questions about results and requisite explanations of how campaigns affect business. Many agencies tell us reporting can consume three, four or even five full days of exhaustive, detailed, manual work each month. Reporting is perhaps one of the most essential parts of campaign management, but it shouldn’t eat up otherwise profitable time. Thankfully, machine learning and automated processes now make it possible for campaign managers to automatically and reliably pull data, analyze for key findings and structure custom-looking reports in minutes versus days. We have multiple clients notching 90 percent reductions in reporting time via automated reporting capabilities. Read about experiences for EU-based Geniadsand US-based Granular. Both agencies saw dramatic reductions in time spent on reporting, allowing them to redirect critical thinking to campaign optimization. Google also recently stepped up its automation game with a simple API connecting AdWords data with Google Slides. Simple AdWords scripts can be used to create presentations or automate appending additional data into existing ones. There may be upfront time required to do additional scripting or implement ready-made scripts like our Enhanced Scripts™, but once implemented, automated PPC reporting can drive agency efficiency, effectiveness AND profitability.
2. Bid management
Effective bid management can make or break campaigns. Google actually builds in automated bid management right in the Adwords interface to automate strategies like “bid to top of page.” These sorts of Automated Rules are basic, but can save tremendous amounts of time compared to doing the same work manually in spreadsheets. Many PPC pros, however, cling to their own bid management processes to maintain as much control as they can. But they miss the fact that relinquishing control of such manual processes can free them up to do more strategic, high-value campaign management. Prebuilt rules can take the tedious work out of managing bids to position, target CPA, target ROAS and other key metrics. With a little time and thought in HOW and WHAT to automate, PPC pros can reliably take big chunks of time out of bid management.
3. Keyword management
Automation and artificial intelligence can even help with tasks that require a bit of human input, like keyword management. Computers can find optimal new keywords based purely on the data, whereas PPC pros may be inclined to rely on intuition when they should follow data. Automating keyword management shifts a PPC pro’s job to confirming the suggestions and tweaking the model being used as opposed to groveling over every keyword to make a difference. Considering many accounts have tens of thousands of new queries to contemplate adding as keywords, shifting to automation can be a huge time saver. The challenge is about releasing control of keyword management to open up productive time. Ask yourself if the task is something you really NEED to be doing. If automation can do the same or even better, why would you even think about continuing with the status quo. And even if the automation is slightly worse than a human, consider the tradeoff between your employees’ valuable time and the change in performance from a more automated keyword management process.
4. Ad Testing
Google offers ready-made tools for PPC pros to test theories and decipher infinitesimal differences between ads. These tools are only a starting point for automation. The trouble is, expanding permutations of all the variables between keywords, ad creative, regions, bids and the myriad other variables can make even the best PPC pro’s head spin. Managing the ads becomes an intricate ballet, prioritizing what we think is important and digging into the subtleties of the data and understanding what “statistically valid” really means. As PPC pros advance along an automation path, they can harness the power of visualization and data insight tools to move their energy, talent and creativity away from test building and into informed, strategic optimization. Looking beyond Google’s built-in automation tools, more powerful options such as Optmyzr Ad Optimization, can systematize repetitive tasks that often fall short due to human interpretation or error. PPC pros who embrace ad testing automation are able to look at the bigger picture, make adjustments and gain significant efficiency.
Time spent on repetitive tasks ripe or overdue for automation can exact a painful toll on agency profitability and competitiveness. Of course, write-downs and write-offs will always be a fact of agency life, but many profitability killers are preventable with automation, advanced scripting, AI and machine learning.
Because of such rapid transformation, automation will be a key area of focus on this blog throughout 2018 – along with our contributed articles in Search Engine Landand Search Engine Journal. I encourage you to read my most recent Search Engine Journal articleeasy ways to get started with PPC automation.
“Automate or be rendered obsolete” might well become the PPC pro’s rally cry in the near future. Agencies and PPC pros alike need to explore automation to stay ahead of the curve. The industry will only get more competitive with tighter margins.
Optmyzr’s Rule Based Optimizations recently added the ability to integrate with any 3rd party data through Google spreadsheets. By connecting call conversion data, CRM data, internal business data, or data about pretty much anything else, advertisers can now build some really cool optimizations of their own. Even the classic Bid By Weather use case that has been so heavily promoted through AdWords Scripts can now be implemented by advertisers using Optmyzr without writing any code.
To help advertisers create their spreadsheets for some of the more common use cases, like bidding by conversion name or type, we wrote a simple AdWords Script that can pull any Google Ads data into a spreadsheet and keep it updated as often as hourly. This spreadsheet can then be linked to a Rule-Based Optimization in Optmyzr so it’s always ready to run an optimization with the right data.
Automatically Put Raw Google Ads Data In a Spreadsheet
Even if you’re not planning to use this script to automate your account management, it is still useful if you need a way to get a lot of raw Google Ads data into a spreadsheet. It can also be a great supplement to current Optmyzr reports which are more focused on showing the highlights of an account and presenting insights that a stakeholder rather than a PPC practitioner might find useful.
The script can fetch multiple ads reports and add them as different spreadsheets or different tabs in the same spreadsheet.
How to Use the Script
For each report you want to add in a spreadsheet you’ll need to have one section of the code that specifies the query, spreadsheet URL, tab name, and report version. Our sample version already includes a few sample queries but let our support team know if you need help crafting another query.
These are the settings you need to modify to put the right AdWords data into the spreadsheet you want.
You can modify the following variables with your settings:
• query: this is the AWQL query that tells AdWords what data to include. We’ve added a few sample queries in the code or you can write your own just like your write SQL.
• spreadsheetUrl: the Url of the Google spreadsheet that this script will update.
• tabName: the name of the sheet (tab) in the spreadsheet that should be updated.
• reportVersion: the version of the AdWords API reports you’re using. The data available in the Ads API changes periodically so this ensures our script talks to the right version of AdWords.
To run this code, simply add it as a new script in AdWords and schedule it. Most likely you’ll just need to schedule this to run once a day, early in the day.
Resources
1. The AdWords reporting APIlists available reports and fields. Use this to find what report to use for the data you need. Also use it to find which data you can combine in one report. Note that some types of data are not compatible, like ‘ConversionCategoryName’, and ‘Clicks’.
2. The AWQL guideexplains how to construct a query. Note that even though AWQL supports ordering and limiting of results, this functionality is not available when using AWQL inside AdWords scripts. This means that your report will include all results in no particular order and when you run the same report again, the order of results may change.
Sample Queries
The following sample queries are compatible with reportVersion v201710
A breakdown of conversion types for all converting keywords in AdWords in the last 30 days:
Note that while anyone can use this script for free, Optmyzr subscribers may find it easier to use the Rule Engine to schedule adding their Google Ads data to a Google spreadsheet
Some PPC tools simply slap a different UI on existing capabilities from the engines but at Optmyzr, we try hard to build functionality that doesn’t simply repackage what’s already available for free. Our focus is on making it really easy to do some things that would take a lot of time to do in the AdWords interface or the AdWords Editor.
Our Rule Engine is an example of a specialty tool that makes it easy to do things that would otherwise be too time-consuming. Let me give you an example of one really cool custom optimization you can set up with our Rule Engine.
Pause keywords that are expensive relative to the campaign they are in
Everyone wants to fix expensive keywords. But what does it mean for a keyword to be ‘expensive’? A brand keyword should probably be a lot cheaper than a non-brand keyword but does that mean that all brand keywords are cheap, and non-brand keywords are expensive? Of course not! We should determine ‘expensiveness’ based on what type of keyword it is. And one of the easiest ways to know the type of keyword is by looking at the campaign it’s in.
So one way to find ‘expensive’ keywords is to look for ones whose average costs are much higher than for other keywords in the same campaign.
Now try doing that quickly in AdWords…
You could try an Automated Rule, but as you can see in the screenshot, the metrics we have access to in AdWords Automated Rules are those from the entity we’re acting on. So if we’re trying to pause expensive keywords, we can only use keyword data to make that determination and we don’t have access to campaign data for that keyword.
Then consider that you might want to change your definition of ‘expensive’ over time. The first few times you run this analysis you might look for big outliers, say keywords that are at least twice the expected cost. But as you run the rule more frequently, you may want to include keywords that are just 30% more expensive. This means you need to be able to write an equation to do the analysis. Automated Rules have no formula builders, you can only do simple comparisons.
Since an Automated Rule won’t work, what about just using the AdWords interface? You could certainly do it and the process would look roughly as follows:
Download the keyword report
Download the campaign report
Combine the 2 in a spreadsheet by using VLOOKUP to bring the campaign data next to the keyword data
Write a formula to find outlier keywords
Write a formula to set a new bid or status for the outliers
Upload the new bids back into AdWords through Editor or Bulk Uploads
It’s doable but unless you can automate this, you probably won’t do it as often as you’d like.
I personally once did an optimization that took 27 separate reports: a combination of different lookback windows, different levels of the account, and some extra reports to get conversions broken down by type.
We built the Rule Engine because we never want you to have to go through the pain I went through to do this monster of an optimization. Here’s what building a rule looks like:
What the screenshot shows is the finished rule. We’ve already prebuilt this as a recipe so anyone can copy it into their account in seconds. But if you want to modify it or write a rule from scratch, that’s easy too. Here’s what our screen for editing a condition looks like:
Simply click on one side of the equation and pick a metric or write a custom formula. You can choose whether the metric is for the keyword, its parent ad group or campaign, or the account. You can also choose if the metrics should be for just one segment, like a particular device type.
More optimizations that are much easier in Optmyzr
Here are a few more optimizations that are really easy in Optmyzr compared to doing them in AdWords:
Lower the cost for keywords with high CPAs BUT only if they are in a campaign that’s missing the CPA target
Identify all keywords that exceed the CPA target for the last 7 days but that were meeting the CPA target for the past 30 days.
Update CPC bids based on an ROAS target by taking into account the shortest possible date range in which a product group has at least 2 conversions.
There’s so much more you can do with the Rule Engine so hopefully I’ve given you a taste of its power and you’ll start to experiment with it for your own optimizations. I’d love to hear how you have used the Rule Engine to do an amazing optimization in a fraction of the time it would have taken in AdWords.
And if you don’t have access to the Rule Engine (a Pro-plan feature), contact our support team so we can set you up with a free trial.
Expanded Text Ads (ETAs) from Google AdWords are now available for all advertisers to create. To help everyone who’s too busy to write thousands of new ads but who still wants to make the transition quickly we’ve just released a new free AdWords Script.
The script uses your landing pages’ meta tags to make suggestions for the new longer ad components. The title tag gets split into 2 lines of ad headlines and the meta description’s first 80 characters become the basis of the ad description line.
The script outputs a Google Sheet that can be imported into the AdWords Editor after you make any final tweaks to your ETAs.
Copy the code into your own AdWords account and give it a try:
Step-by-step for Using AdWords Scripts
If you’ve not worked with AdWords Scripts yet, this is a great way to get your feet wet. The script simply outputs a spreadsheet of data and makes no changes to your account so it’s a very low-risk way to try things out. Here is a quick step-by-step:
Copy the script code from the section above
Copy-and-paste it into the Bulk Operations > Scripts section of your AdWords account
put it into a child account and not in an MCC account
the code should completely replace any other code already in the script
Edit the text between lines 23 and 29 to customize the script
Authorize, Save, and finally Preview the script
Switch to the “Logs” view of the output and make sure the script ran successfully
Open the just-created Google Sheet and make final tweaks to the bulk sheet of expanded text ads
Go to the AdWords Editor and go to the menu for “Account” > “Import” and either import the data from a file or by copy-and-pasting
Do a final review of changes and apply the changes to your account.
Congrats! You just used AdWords Scripts to save yourself a ton of time…
Try Some Other AdWords Scripts
We have lots of other scripts to try and they’re all on our patent pending Enhanced Scripts™ platform so that the code will work equally well on MCC and child accounts, you can maintain multiple settings per account, easily maintain different settings different accounts, and most importantly, all without ever touching a single line of code. If you can copy-and-paste, you can use our Enhanced Scripts™ for AdWords.
Finding answers to frequent questions like why an account saw an increase/decrease in clicks or conversions is tedious. A drop in conversions or clicks can be attributed to multiple elements like keywords, placements, or an entire network, which makes answering such questions difficult and time consuming.
Optmyzr has automated this investigation process through its new PPC Investigator tool. If someday, your account experiences a sudden decrease in clicks, just ask PPC Investigator what brought on the change and you will get an answer within seconds.
How does it work?
As the performance of every metric depends on the performance of other underlying metrics, PPC Investigator uses the relationship between different metrics to show potential causality. Then it takes it to the next level and highlights exactly which element (keyword, ad group etc.) in the account caused performance to change. There are two levels at which the performance change can be investigated – Cause Chart and Root Cause Analysis
Cause Chart
The Cause Chart breaks down a metric’s performance into its underlying related metrics and highlights the metric that impacted performance in red. Analysis from the Cause Chart can help find those areas in an account that can benefit from a bid or ad optimization. For example, if conversions dropped and the underlying reason is identified to be an increase in impression share lost due to ad rank, a bid optimization will help. Subject to availability of budget, an account manager can choose to bid higher for better impression share, higher CTR and more conversions.
But wait! That’s not all! PPC Investigator also helps in examining and identifying the positive and negative top movers in an account. It shows the elements in an account (keywords, ad groups. campaigns) that were significant contributors to the change in the account over a period of time. This analysis is available under the Root Cause Analysis tab. Root Cause Analysis
PPC Investigator’s Root Cause Analysis evaluates the exact Campaigns/Ad groups/Product partition/Keywords etc. responsible for change in an account. The tool finds the top contributors by taking into consideration individual keywords/ad groups/network/device and even their combinations like keyword+device or network+ad group. You can view the top three positive and negative movers for a particular account which are further broken down to check sub-contributors. Here is a quick overview of the account insights the Root Cause Analysis can give:
Identify the pain points which impacted account performance to streamline workflows. You’ll know exactly which keyword or ad group caused the change and needs to be investigated.
Check the impact of paused campaigns/ad groups/keywords and make a decision on whether you would like to enable them or keep them paused. These are keywords or campaigns that shows a 90-100% drop.
Find optimization opportunities by viewing the networks or devices that might be pulling down the performance of an ad group or campaign.
Read more about the PPC Investigator here. You can try it out in your Optmyzr account under the Data Insights tools.
