Purpose

Automatically check your AdWords account for landing pages that are broken, either because they don't load, contain 404 server errors or contain text that indicates a problem of another sort. This script generates a spreadsheet with a list of all the potentially broken landing page URLs used by ads or keywords in your account and allows you to optionally delete or pause any of these items.

Example Use Cases

• Retailers can pause ads when a product goes out of stock
• Pause ads for products that have a low review score based on user comments
• Delete ads that lead to broken landing pages

Settings and Customizations

scope

This setting tells the script if you want to check only keyword destination URLs, only ad destination URLs or all destination URLs. Valid options are:

• all
• kw
• ad

campaignNameSelectorStatement

This setting lets you tell the script to only evaluate a portion of your account. It uses the AdWords Script syntax for the .withCondition clause. If you don't know what that means, don't worry, these examples should make it clear:

• To select everything in the account, you can use the line "CampaignName CONTAINS ''" and that's what the script is already set to use if you don't change it.
• To select all the destination URLs for campaigns that include the word 'search', you could use the line "CampaignName CONTAINS_IGNORE_CASE 'search'"

textToMonitor

This tells the script what text to search for on your landing page. For example, you could tell it to look for the phrase "out of stock". If you want to search for multiple phrases, put a comma between them but do NOT add a space after the comma, for example "out of stock,low inventory" tells the script to look for the phrase "out of stock" or "low inventory". When at least 1 of these phrases is matched, the script wil report this and delete or pause the item as per your request. The search is case insensitive so use lower case for this setting.

suggestMode

Set this setting to 1 so that the script will just report about problems. If set to 1, the script will NOT try to delete or pause anything in the account. We recommend you set this to 1 the first few times to make sure the script is finding only the items you want before you start to delete or pause these items automatically.

disable

This setting tells the script to disable any item it finds that has a destination URL that is broken or that contains one of the phrases you are looking for on the page. When set to 1, it disables what it finds.

enable

This setting does the opposite of the setting 'disable'. It enables any items that have a destination URL where the phrases you are searching for are found. This can be useful to automatically re-enable ads when a product comes back into stock. Set this to 1 to enable items. Note that you should never set both 'disable' and 'enable' to 1.

spreadsheetUrl

This setting tells the script the URL of the Google Spreadsheet where it should store its findings. You can either enter the URL or put in the text "NEW" to have the script automatically create a new spreadsheet every time it runs.

accountName

This setting is where you tell the script what you call the account. It's just used for notifications and for naming the spreadsheet so that you can more easily find what you're looking for. So go ahead and name it something that makes sense to you but avoid special characters like slashes, dollar signs and anything else you wouldn't normally use for file names.

Under The Hood

This script goes through every item that has a destination URL in the specified portion of your account and checks if the page loads correctly without a 404 error. If the page does not load correctly, it pauses the item or just notifies you depending on your settings. It also loads the content of the landing page and checks whether it contains the specified phrases of text. If the text is found, it enables or disables the item or notifies you based on your settings.

This script will only pause or unpause items, it cannot delete anything.

The script is able to follow redirects in your destination URLs but if you want to test whether your redirects are compatible, take a look at our FAQs for instructions.

Download Script

 

Mcc Version of Landing Page Watch Dog:

The MCC (My client center accounts) version of this AdWords script checks broken landing pages runs for all or specific child accounts. It has the same functionality as mentioned above.

Additional Settings and Customization:

In addition to the above settings, you can customise it to choose the child accounts you want to run it for under your MCC account.

accountsToCheck:

This setting tells the script the number of accounts you want to run this script for. When set to default i.e. blank, the script checks the broken landing pages for all the child accounts under the AdWords MCC account. To run for specific child accounts, you can add the AdWords account id of those child accounts separated by a comma.

Download Mcc Script

Tip: AdWords places a limit of 30 minutes on MCC scripts as well. If you have too many child accounts in the MCC then create multiple versions of this script in the MCC account and pick a different set of child accounts for each.