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Managing a Google Ads account can be an uphill task. You need a lot of time, effort, and attention to get familiar with this platform. Otherwise, it can result in substantial wasted effort and capital. Failing to manage your account correctly can limit your reach, and ultimately, waste your budget.
Handling Google Ads can be time-consuming if you can’t hire a dedicated team to manage it. Without digital marketing experts, sellers have to make too many changes frequently. Luckily, Google has made it easier to run Google Ads campaign with a set of automated rules.
In this article, we’ll explore the 12 Google Ads automated rules to help you save time and money on your Google Ads campaigns.
Google Ads automated rules are a powerful way to semi-automate your Google Ads accounts. They are a set of rules with conditions that automatically run and make changes in your Google Ads account.
Simply put, these rules allow you to apply scheduled automated changes to your campaigns. Doing this frees up your time and human resources, which you can dedicate to other critical business operations.
Google Ads automated rules allow you to schedule your ads to show at specific times of the day. You can adjust bids by the time of day, seasonal factors, or other dynamic conditions. You can even control your budget and spend by displaying ads only at times you specify.
The first step is to think about all the tasks you frequently perform in your Google Ads account. List out the steps you take and then structure your rules to have these actions performed automatically.
Google Ads automated rules help you hand over partial management to Google. It allows advertisers to create a set of rules that abide by certain conditions to run and change specific campaign settings automatically.
Google Ads automated rules have a high level of customization. This allows advertisers to schedule adjustments on most account elements.
You can apply automated rules to:
When you’re ready to create a rule, navigate to the top menu and click “Tools” to see the drop-down menu. Then, under the “Bulk Actions” tab, choose “All bulk actions.”
Next, click on “Rules” from the left menu bar.
Now, click on the “+” button.
You will get a list of different automated rules from which you can set different rules for your Google Ads account.
Suppose you want to use the automated rule “Campaign rule” from the list of rules shown above. You’ll have to provide the following info:
These categories include:
Here are the 12 types of automated rules that you’ll find in your Google Ads account.
These rules allow you to alter campaigns depending on factors such as performance, cost, keyword, and more. Using this rule, you can:
The objective of this rule is to review and pause non-converting campaigns. Suppose you have some extra budget to spend on a specific promotion. You can increase your Google Ads campaign budget by a particular amount or percentage on your terms.
Suppose you want to raise your budget by 10% when your campaign is getting over 1000 clicks. This rule will help you increase your conversion if you’re already receiving a good amount on the set budget.
These rules allow you to impact actions on ad groups meeting the rule’s requirements. This includes changing a bid, pausing ad groups, or notifying you of an action. Using this rule, you can:
You can also stop the whole ad group if it is showing poor performance.
It’ll help you to pause your low-performing ad groups. Underperforming ad groups may consume your budget while giving nothing in return. Using this type of automated rule can help you optimize your campaign.
This rule can help you review and pause non-converting keywords. The time frame should be a big enough window to determine whether or not a keyword is converting. Using this rule, you can:
Using this rule, Google Ads isolates keywords contributing very little to your last-click conversions, and then you can pause those keywords. However, if some keywords rarely drive large last-click volume, but play a vital role at the top of the funnel, make sure you consider that when using this rule.
This rule can help you review and pause low-performing campaigns. You can use it to:
You can get notified when your campaign is performing well and meeting the conditions you’ve set. You don’t have to log in to your Google Ads account every day or check the performance manually.
These rules allow you to impact change on your Google Display campaigns. You can get more exposure to keywords that are performing well for your campaign. You can use these rules to:
With this rule, you tell Google to enable your Display keywords when your campaign is receiving more than 1000 impressions. You can reach more users with Display keywords if your campaign is already performing well.
These rules help you choose the right topic for your Google Display campaigns. You can review all your topics and increase bids whenever certain requirements are met. This helps you get more exposure for converting topics that are under the cost-per-conversion (CPC) goal. You can use these rules to:
This rule will help you reach your potential customers. For instance, if your campaign conversion value is less than 100, this rule will automatically pause the topics you’re targeting.
These rules allow you to make changes to ads of specific placements so that you can optimize your low-performing Google Ads display campaigns. You can use these rules to:
This rule automatically enables the placements when your campaign clicks are more than 200. You can drive more users to your campaign by targeting the placements that are relevant to your campaign goal.
These rules help you filter the audiences targeting to determine if automated rules should be applied. You can use these rules to:
Using this rule, you can identify the potential customers that are performing or not performing well for your campaigns.
These rules take into account the age range of your followers, as well as ad clicks. As a result, you can reach potential customers within specific age brackets. Using these rules, you can:
You can take advantage of automation by getting notified about the audience that’s interested in your products.
These rules allow you to make changes based on the gender of your audience. You can refine your audience based on gender to target those that are the best fit for your products. Using these rules, you can:
It allows you to exclude the gender from a particular ad group when the clicks are less than 120, helping you refine your targeting.
Using these rules, you can refine your targeting based on parental status that’s performing well for your campaign. You can:
It’ll alter the bid by 10% when the campaign’s conversion on that parental status is greater than 100. You can optimize your campaign for parental status.
These rules allow you to change campaign assets when displaying the ad to users who fall within certain income ranges. You can refine your targeting within demographic targeting and adjust bid levels based on users you identify as living within a specific geographical area grouped by income. Using these rules, you can:
You can refine your targeting more accurately by enabling the income range when your campaign meets a specific condition. You can collect the data of audiences that are interested in your products or services.
Here are some best practices for Google Ads automated rules to help you get started:
If you’ve never made a particular change before, it’s best not to do so when you’re letting the computer take over. For example, pausing and enabling campaigns after a holiday should be done manually to ensure you understand if there are caveats to the rule.
However, for bid or budget adjustments, this is critical. Go for manual bidding if you’re thinking of setting a rule on for at least a month before. You can test to see if the changes you’re making are what you’d like to see and if they have the desired outcome.
Google Ads automated rules can take some manual work off your plate. However, they can’t and shouldn’t replace having a person reviewing the account. Regularly check in on the rules you have set. See if they’re working the way they should.
Observe whether they have the desired impact you had in mind when you set them originally. Even if it’s monthly or quarterly, regularly monitor your automated rules to ensure they are functioning as desired.
Whenever set up an automated rule, always think if there’s a counter balance to the action you are taking. Is there a rule that could run to increase bids on keywords with low CPAs? If you pause campaigns, do you need to activate them in the future?
Balancing rules might not always be applicable, but going through this exercise can help you better plan the strategy and ensure your rules are set up for success. Automated rules can help you save time in your account. However, you should carefully think through before setting them up. Moreover, you should not let these rules run the account without your involvement.
Specify minimum and maximum limits for your bids and budgets, so they don’t get too high or too low. Continuously increasing bids can result in unnecessarily high CPCs, while continuous decreases could significantly reduce your traffic.
Use a sufficiently long time frame or add an additional requirement to make sure you’re making changes based on sufficient data.
Previewing your rules before you save them will help you understand how they’ll impact your campaigns. Based on your requirements and settings, you can make big alterations to a large portion of your account. Therefore, it’s critical to double-check.
Implement a rule with a frequency of “one time” to observe the real outcome. Once you get comfortable with the way your rules are functioning, you can set them up to run on a recurring schedule (such as daily or weekly).
Stay updated with intra-day and intra-week trends (such as peak hour or weekday traffic that can be different from non-peak hour and weekend traffic). Also, keep an eye on how far away you are from your goals when setting magnitudes of variations. For example, vary in small increments of 5% when you’re closer to your goal, and larger increments of 20% otherwise. You can address all these issues by using several rules together.
Rules can’t prioritize themselves. So when you have two rules set to make concurrent changes to the same items, both rules will run and make the specified changes to all items. You shouldn’t schedule several rules simultaneously if they impact the same data set. If you want to have two or more rules making changes to the same part of your campaign, you should select different times of the day for the rules to run.
If there are several rules on the same items scheduled simultaneously, Google’s system does its best to run them all. However, there could be some problems originating from attempting to make conflicting changes simultaneously.
Specifying different times for your rules not only helps prevent these problems, but you can also prioritize your rules, running the one that’s scheduled earliest.
You should never leave rules unsupervised for long. If you still don’t want to be notified of changes made via email alerts, consider checking in regularly to make sure that these rules are working in your favor.
You may have to change a rule to make it more specific or more extensive or stop one altogether. The rules are only simple coding to implement changes. They can’t tell you if it’s the right choice. You can only manually review to assess this.
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns don’t have any set recipe for success. You have to test ad variations on everything from increased bids to increased budgets to ensure that any new additions will help your campaigns. So you should only create automated rules after you’ve manually tested them on at least one campaign and observed its outcomes.
Suppose you choose to pause all the campaigns you’re running for specific keywords as you noticed that one campaign had an issue. Now, if you have to restart them later, you’ll have to go back and manually restart the ones you want. This means you’ll have to sort through it all.
Alternatively, you can have rules in place so that any campaigns with a low CPC increase your budget to a specific point. But by doing so with all your campaigns, you can end up consuming a lot of your budget quickly and somewhat indiscriminately. All campaigns aren’t created equal – even with low CPCs hanging out below a specific point. Some campaigns will have higher conversion rates than others, or they may sell products with a higher profit margin.
Google Ads automated rules can help streamline things for busy advertisers. You’re doing it wrong if you’re spending all of your time setting budgets and adjusting bidding in your campaigns. Using these rules, you can automate the most time-consuming parts of your tasks and focus on the aspects that drive results.
Simplify your approach by setting the right rules for discrete ads. Ensure every ad is getting the appropriate amount of exposure for precise A/B testing. Specify the right time limits and make sure your ads are not disqualified. Also, set up your automation to tweak your keywords and carry out A/B tests to optimize ad performance.
Lastly, embrace good practices to help you check your results. You may not find success on the first try, but with patience and persistence, you’ll start seeing your PPC campaigns getting successful.
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