Welcome to our course on digital marketing and web analytics tricks. We are not focused on automation in digital marketing today, but some automatic features in Google Ads have been available for years. For example, automated rules can make your work much easier and prevent a lot of blunders. Today, you’re going to learn all you need to know about these automated rules.
Part1: Firstly, we will discuss “ What kinds of actions you can take using automated rules? and “Which elements you can edit”.
You can automate four different actions:
- status
- Bids
- budgets
- send email
These actions can be applied to elements like campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ads, display keywords, topics, placements, audiences, age ranges, gender, parental status, and income range.
Now, I’m going to show you how to create these automated rules. There are many different ways to apply them in the Google Ads interface. Let’s start with the first method:
- Go to the tools section.
- Under bulk actions, click on rules.
3. Click on add new rule.
4. Choose the element you want to automate, for example, a campaign rule.
5. Select the action you want to automate, such as “pause campaigns”.
6. Choose the campaigns to which you want to apply this rule, for example, all enabled campaigns, enabled and paused campaigns. You can select any campaigns over here.
Next, you will set your conditions.
These conditions will trigger your automated rule.
For instance, you can select a condition like “when the cost is greater than $1,000, pause this campaign.” You will also define the frequency of how often your automated rule will run, for example, daily. Specify the hour it will start, the date range it will use (e.g., data from the previous seven days), and the email notifications you want to receive from this rule. Finally, name your rule and create it. You can hit “Preview” button to see what changes it will make before finalizing.
This is how you can create these rules, and the process is similar regardless of the settings you select. You always have these options available.
Part 2: I’ll show you the second one. This method is useful when you want to apply automated rules at the keyword level, ad group level, or ads level. You can do this directly from these sections.
For example, if you are at the ad group level, you can just select ad groups, hit edit, and choose to create an automatic rule.
When you click this, you can select the type of rule and apply it to only the ad groups you just selected. Similarly, if you are in the ads section, you can select ads, create an automatic rule, and apply it there.
This can be done almost everywhere in the interface.
Part 3: I’ll show you my six favorite automated rules that can save you a lot of time and increase your productivity.
Automated Rule #1 : Send Email Notifications: Generally, send an email notification when something good or bad happens. You can apply this rule in different situations
- Impressions, clicks
- impression share
- Conversions
- average position
- quality score
- CPA, and others.
Here’s how this rule can look:
- First, select the Type of rule -> Send email
- Apply this to a specific campaign, all campaigns, or enabled campaigns.
- Set your conditions, such as impressions more than a certain number, cost greater than a certain amount, zero clicks, CPA greater than $10, or Quality Score less than 3.
- This rule will notify you about significant changes, allowing you to take action without constantly checking the interface.
- Define the frequency (e.g., daily at 8 a.m.) and data range (previous 7 days).
- Name your rule.
Automated Rule #2: Increase or Decrease Budget
To create a rule like this, select “Change budgets”
Choose the action (increase budget, decrease budget, or set a new budget).
For example:
- Increase the budget by 20% or by a specific amount.
- Set an upper budget limit (e.g., $1000).
- Set conditions, such as a conversion rate greater than 7%.
- This rule will run daily at 3 p.m. using data from the previous 7 days, and it will increase the budget by 20% every time the conversion rate exceeds 7%.
Automated Rule #3 : Pause Certain Keywords
To create a rule like this, select the type “pause keywords”.
And you can apply it to “All enabled keywords”.
These automated rules help maintain control and optimize your campaigns efficiently without manual intervention.
For example, you can select keywords from a certain campaign or ad group. Select all enabled keywords here, and here we have our condition. In this example, it would be when the conversion cost is greater than $100. This rule will run daily, taking data from the previous seven days. In this example, this rule will actually pause every keyword that generated a conversion cost greater than $100 from the previous seven days.
You can select the previous 30 days or any other date range, depending on how much data you generate. This rule will pause underperforming keywords for you.
I recommend selecting the option to get notified only if there are changes or errors.
Automated Rule #4: Keywords bidding
This way, you can see what kind of changes it made. This is a very powerful rule when you’re running manual CPC and it’s a keyword bidding rule. This rule will make significant changes for you.
You will select the “Change keyword bids” type over here. You can select all Enabled keywords or Keywords from a selected campaign or Ad group, depending on your needs.
Here, you can select an option to increase bids, decrease bids, or set new bids.
For example, if you want to increase bids by 20% and have an upper bid limit of $5, the condition would be when the cost per conversion is less than or equal to $10. At first, this rule looks great because it will increase bids by 20% when the cost per conversion is less than $10. However, in Google Ads, keywords that generated costs but zero conversions will also have a conversion cost less than $10 (zero dollars).
In this case, this rule would increase the bid by 20% on keywords that didn’t generate any conversions. Therefore, you need to be very careful here.
You should apply an additional rule for conversions greater than zero or one, because one conversion is not enough data to make such decisions.
You can select a frequency here; it all depends on how much and how fast you generate your data. It could be weekly, using data from the previous week.
This would actually increase my bids by 20% on every keyword that has a CPA less than or equal to ten dollars and has more than one conversion in the previous week. You can create another rule that will decrease your bids by 20% when your CPA is greater than, for example, twenty dollars. We can combine these rules together.
Automated Rule #5: Increase keyword bids to First-Page CPC
For example, if you don’t want to have these notifications about keywords that have a CPC below the first page, you can solve this problem simply by running our automated rule.
You just select the “Change keyword bids” option over here for “All enabled keywords”.
Then, you will select “Raise bids to first-page CPC,” and you can select our max bid limit.
Here, under the condition, you select status. Let’s run this from scratch: you select “Status”, and when you expand the “Limited” section you will see “Below the first page bid.” You select this and hit apply.
You can run this daily, taking data from, for example, the previous day. This will actually increase your bids to the first-page bid on every enabled keyword.
Automated Rule #6 : Activate special ads on a specific date and then pause on another date
The last one is great because it can activate special ads on a specific date and then pause them on another date. If you have a certain promotion and you prepared special ad text that you want to run on a specific day, and then pause them on another day, you can use automated rules to do it for you.
Start by clicking “Ads and extensions”
These three paused ads are my special promotion ads that I want to run on a specific day.
I selected these ads, and here I can Create an automated rule by clicking “Edit”.
And then select “Enable ads,”
Then we just select our condition and select Status.
Under this option, you will have “Paused,” so let’s select this one.
Under the frequency, it is important you select “Once”. You can select a certain date that you want to run your automated rules. For example, I want my promotion to start on this day over here at 12 a.m, using all-time data (it doesn’t matter over here)
In this example, to actually activate these three special ads on this day at this hour, and that’s it. You could create another rule to pause these ads on a certain date. For example, if this promotion only takes three days, it will pause on this day. You could create another automated rule to pause other ads—the old ads—when this promotion starts.
That’s how you can use automated rules in Google Ads to take your work to another level.