Managing Pay Per Click adverts is just another thing that small businesses have to think about and deal with. It is common knowledge how Pay Per Click ads, or PPC ads, help a small business, but whether they have time to implement it and do it properly and enough to gain some sort of benefit from it is a whole different matter.
Of course, it is something that you could outsource to a PPC ads specialist, but this is going to cost money. So, how can you make it easier on you, so that you can deal with it in-house, but not have to spend every waking hour monitoring and adjusting?
The answer is marketing automation.
Here, we are going to look at how Pay Per Click automation can make life a lot easier for your small business and they can be implemented, focussing on Google Scripts.
How Can PPC Automation Help Small Businesses?
Organic search engine optimization (SEO ) takes a lot of time for the results to be apparent, no matter how well optimised it is. When doing paid search advertisements, such as through PPC, the results are almost instant, as as soon as the adverts are visible, the traffic comes in.
When we are talking about automation, we are talking about the use of technology to run and optimize your PPC marketing strategies and campaigns. Automating your PPC campaign can save a huge amount of time and improve the performance of your ads.
Let’s take a look at how:
Time saving: When improving your performance, you can dramatically decrease the amount of time you spend setting up and maintaining your campaigns. You free yourself up to spend more time on other high-value jobs when you and the amount of time you spend on tedious, time-consuming activities.
Scaleability: Reducing the time needed to run your PPC campaigns makes it more feasible to scale up your PPC efforts. You can run more advertisements with PPC automation without spending substantially more time. With less effort and more versatility, you can scale up or down your PPC efforts.
Improved data collection: Tools for PPC automation can collect data from multiple sources and compile it into reports that are easy to read. This feature provides you with a more complete view of your campaigns and helps you to more accurately analyse your data.
Optimised performance: PPC automation software, when used correctly, will allow you to maximize the efficiency of your ads and increase your return on ad spend (ROAS). Thanks to better data, you can make more informed decisions with automation, and PPC automation can change your strategies with more versatility than manually doing so.
What are Google Ad Scripts?
Google Ad scripts are one of the Pay Per Click automation tools that are available to you as a small business owner. However, it sounds incredibly complicated for the uninitiated and new to the system. However, it really is not as daunting or complex as you may think. They are there to ease and automate your PPC reporting system so that once it is up and running, it is one less thing to think about.
Google Ads scripts are, in the most basic sense, snippets of JavaScript code that enable you to better monitor your campaigns. They can be used inside your Google Ads account to automate internal functions. They are also able to interact with external data.
You do not have to master the ins and outs of JavaScript coding and write your own Google Ad scripts as there are hundreds of free scripts available for you to download and use online. Once you have found a script that you want to try out in your PPC campaign, all you need to do is copy and paste them into your ad account.
How Can Google Ad Scripts Be Used?
You may not want to launch an aggressive PPC campaign, but instead, you want something that is to scale. The scale of your campaign also depends on your budget. Maybe you have a tightly fixed and limited budget, or maybe you are more flexible and want to go for it as long as you are seeing results. Scripts allow you to manage your bids precisely.
Get Access To More Accurate Data
It is not just Google Ads metrics that matter when it comes to PPC campaigns. Other things – Salesforce, or Zoho data for example. All sorts of external factors can affect your campaign, even the weather. Your Google scripts can adjust these as and when necessary.
The Google Ad Scripts can then work alongside things like Google Sheets, and add customized menus, sidebars and dialogues to them. It also enables you to write custom functions for your Google sheets and integrate them with other Google services such as your calendar, email, and Drive.
Operating with two-dimensional arrays, the Spreadsheet service handles Google Sheets as a grid. You need to get access to the spreadsheet where the data is stored to extract the data from the spreadsheet, get the range in the spreadsheet that contains the data, and then get the cell values. By reading structured data in the spreadsheet and creating JavaScript objects for them, Apps Script makes it easy to access the data.
They Can Speed Up Repeated Tasks
Reporting can be a challenge, requiring a lot of data manipulation, and it takes time to optimize your accounts for Google Ads or prepare your next step. You can run reports in Google Ads or Analytics automatically, but you can configure any external or measured fields you want and use the data to make custom dashboards if you code your own reports.
By using code where you want to make equivalent improvements to a large number of similar campaigns can also minimise duplication, such as if you have copies of campaigns with different location settings.
Ad Scripts Reduce Errors and Improves Reliability
can be very easy to make mistakes when setting up your Google Ads campaign, but it can be a lot more difficult to spot them. However, Google Ad Scripts allow you to identify the mistake before it becomes an even bigger issue.
They can pick up on broken links before your ads direct traffic to them, receive alerts if your campaign is mistakenly paused or canceled. It can also help you to keep a close eye on Google’s systems and if there are any payment issues or your budget begins to run out, you can opt to receive a text message.
Google Ad Scripts vs Rules – What Is best?
Google Ad Scripts are similar to Google Rules in that they both allow you to control your PPC AdWords account, whether that is at set times, regular intervals, or whenever you request it.
There are differences between them, however. Google Ad Scripts can be a little more complicated to set up, but in terms of the flexibility and precision when it comes to reporting and setting up bidding strategies.
It may be worth looking at automated Rules, to begin with, if you are new to the automation of AdWords, but then use the knowledge and experience from that to move forward in your Ad Scripts strategy.
Google Rules, as the name suggests, is a set of rules that are triggered into motion when a predetermined set of criteria is met. These can be also executed on a timely basis whether that is daily, weekly, monthly, or so on.
One example – Let’s say that you have a budget of £8,000 across all of your pay per click campaigns. As soon as you hit that budget, all of your campaigns are paused until your budget resets or you make another decision.
Limitations of Google Ad Scripts For Marketing Automation
Google Ad Scripts can only run for a maximum of six minutes per execution, whether you have the basic personal Google suite or the Google workspace account. If a script reaches a quota or limitation, it lets you know with a message similar to the following:
Script invoked too many times per second for this Google user account.This means that in a short period of time, the script started to run too many times. For custom functions that are called repeatedly in a single spreadsheet, this most often happens. Code your custom functions to prevent this mistake, so that they only need to be called once per data set.
There are too many scripts running simultaneously for this Google user account.This means that you have too many scripts, but not necessarily the same one, running at once. Like the above exception, this most often happens in a single spreadsheet for custom functions that are called repeatedly.
This barely touches the tip of Pay Per Click marketing automation, but it gives you a brief overview of the benefits if it is implemented in your PPC ads strategy, and how it differs from Google Rules.
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