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Have you ever had one of those days where you just stare at your account for hours, thinking to yourself – ‘Man, I wish there was an easier way to do this.’ Well, I’m here to tell you that there probably is.

AdWords Scripts are, simply put, a way to magically manage your AdWords data using simple JavaScript. You can do small things like fetching an account summary report and emailing it yourself, but you can also do other more complicated tasks such as adjusting bids for thousands of keywords across MCCs.

Here are 4 ways AdWords Scripts can save you time and sanity:

Bid Management is a Breeze

One of the most important aspects of optimizing an account is adjusting bids based on performance. Typically it takes a good 20-30 minutes of your time to run a few filters across the campaign and then apply changes in bulk based on your criteria. What if all you had to do was click ‘Run’ on a simple script that would do this in less than 1 minute?

Here’s a quick script that will help you save at least 30 minutes each time you need to manage bids on your account. How cool is that?

The script will perform the following operations for you:

1. Lower bids by 10% to keywords that have an average position better than 2.1
2. Increase bids by 20% to keywords that have an average position worse than 2.1 but better than 5.9
3. Increase the bids by 40% to keywords that have an average position worse than 6.

Setting up Account Health Checks Can Save Your Life

One of my biggest fears as an account manager is the thought of having an account go completely dead for days and not being able to find out until my next scheduled optimization. Avoiding this is actually pretty simple via AdWords Scripts.

You can add this script to your account and schedule it to run daily so that you’re notified when either of the following conditions are met:

1. Your account accrued less than or equal to 100 impressions in the last 7 days.
2. Your account accrued less than or equal to 10 clicks in the last 7 days.
3. Your account accrued less than or equal to 2 conversions in the last 7 days.

You can also accomplish similar results via Automated Rules, but you would have to create one automated rule per condition as these are checked as AND instead of OR.

Avoiding Over-Delivery When Running Time and Budget Constrained Campaigns

Now and then the advertiser will want to run a significantly higher budget ($1,000/day coming from $100/day) for a very short period, say for Black Friday Weekend. When this happens, I’ve noticed that they often feel weary about Google’s over delivery and they will usually ask if there’s a way we can avoid going over budget.

I will usually start by explaining how over delivery works, but when they insist it’s rather simple to setup this script which will check that the account hasn’t gone past the allowed budget, and if it has then it pauses it. Simply edit the ‘Max Spend’ field on the script and schedule it to run every hour.

Please note that it is still possible that your campaign will go over budget, but it won’t be as much as if there was no script running at all.

Evaluating Performance of Each Ad Text Line Has Never Been This Easy

Every time I optimize an account I like to review how my ad text is performing, and every single time I forget that there is no dimension view to showcase the performance for all my headlines. The truth is, I don’t get why they aren’t available yet, considering we already have a Destination URL view (hint: Google we need this!).

Until very recently I had to download my ad copy performance to Excel and spend 10 to 15 minutes setting up some Pivot Tables to show me which of my headlines were actually performing well.

Nowadays I just need to run this script to automagically get the performance for each Headline, Description Line 1 and Description Line 2 setup on a nicely arranged Google Spreadsheet – and all in under 30 seconds!.

It’s Easier Than You Think

It certainly seems overwhelming to look at all those lines of jibber jabber; thankfully, there are two things in your favor:

1. Google’s done an amazing job at keeping the Scripts API well-documented and easy-to-understand.
2. There’s plenty of resources out there (both free and paid) providing wonderful scripts you can use on your account without much effort at all.

So waste no more of your valuable time on those repetitive yet time-consuming tasks, Scripts can handle that part for you. Instead, start investing more into what truly matters like finding new keyword ideas, writing effective ad copy and learning about new AdWords product updates!