Hi Readers, Just a quick note that I seem to have been missing some comments lately due to some messed up notification settings in Google+.  I think I've fixed it (feel free to comment here to make sure ;). I also went through the last few posts and tried to reply where I could but if I missed any, just give me a nudge and I will do my best to get to them. Thanks as always for reading, Russ ..read more

I was browsing through some old WordStream blog posts and noticed this one from Phil Kowalski about an AdWords Account Audit Checklist. It seemed like most of that work could be automated using AdWords scripts so I figured I'd give it a shot. The following script runs through as many of the checks as possible and tries to report areas to check out first. This would be useful for making sure that an account you take over has at least the basics going for it. To see the results, run the script in your account, then click on the "View details" link and hit the "Logs" button. You should see all ..read more

The other day, I was looking into how I could report on how many times my AdWords scripts were running. I figured that since I use Google Analytics reporting for everything else, maybe I should try to use it for reporting on my scripts as well. So using some information gathered around the web, I put together this simple script to push data into Google Analytics. This will register each script run as a pageview. If you want to keep track of account ids where the script is running, you will need to add AdWordsApp.currentAccount().getCustomerId() somewhere in the CAMPAIGN or PAGE values. Once y ..read more

I was trying to build a report on problems in an account and I was thinking to myself, "Man, it sure would be nice to deep link directly to the entity that was having issues." Then I realized that is the script change logs could do it, I probably could too. It turns out, there are two magic numbers that you need in order to get this to work. When you login to your account, in the url, you will see __u= and __c=. According to this blog post, these values are the 'effectiveUserId' and 'customerId' respectively. Unfortunately, there isn't a way to access these values when using scripts, so you w ..read more

Google changed how Close Variants work and now exact match keywords may also show an ad when Google believes the meaning of the search is the same as the keyword. Kind of like a synonym, but potentially even broader. So here's a script you can use to see exactly what Google considers to be a 'close variant'. The script pulls all queries that were triggered by close variants. It also pulls the associated keyword. It joins the query and keyword and then puts the data on a spreadsheet. On the spreadsheet, you can see line by line what the keyword is and what the close variant is. If you want ..read more

Bidding by weather is a classic example of the power of AdWords Scripts but the code from Google can be daunting to implement for scripting newbies. Recently my company Optmyzr launched the ability to connect external data to a Rule Engine, making it possible to bid by weather without writing any code. A solution like this uses a Google Sheet that is automatically updated with current weather conditions. While adding the API calls to fetch the weather is straightforward, getting it to automatically refresh this data is difficult. This post covers a solution for updating ex ..read more

I've written several free scripts that export AdWords data to a Google spreadsheet but the one I'll share below does something a little more and pivots the reports so that segment data shows up in columns rather than rows. The Problem With Google's AdWords ReportsHere's what the typical output from an AdWords report looks like if you use a script like this one to add it in a Google sheet. AdWords report data that was automatically added to a Google spreadsheet. The report contains keyword conversion data segmented by conversion type name and day of week, resulting in multiple rows of da ..read more

If you've started using Google's Draft and Experiment campaigns, you may have noticed some odd behavior with scripts. We were getting these campaigns back in our selectors, even if they were no longer active experiments. And if we tried to change their status to 'ended', we couldn't do so. I'll explain the similarities and differences so that hopefully you can avoid some of the frustration I faced when we started using experiments in AdWords and some scripts started to break. Experiment campaigns are like other campaigns in the following ways: Experiment campaigns are returned in API repor ..read more

AdWords lets advertisers show ads on the Display Network (GDN) and while it has ways to target ads to show on specific domains, or to exclude specific domains, they don't have a wildcard placement exclusion feature.  So if you want to show your ads on all relevant placements, except those with a Polish domain extension (.pl) or an extension like .org, you would need to monitor automatic placements and add exclusions every time you saw one with this extension. The following script makes it possible to automate excluding placements when the domain includes a particular string. Run this d ..read more

Automated Rules in AdWords are great to set up alerts for when things spend too much without converting enough. But unfortunately these Automated Rules can only be run once per day, so they're not very useful if you want to get notified as soon as a keyword or product group exceeds your thresholds. So here's a simple script that queries for keywords or product groups that have exceeded a specific amount of cost, and have fewer than a specified number of conversions to show for that cost. It then emails the list of alerts to the user. The email can include deep links to AdWords to make it rea ..read more