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How to Set Up Automated Rules

So, today I'm going to talk about something on automation, where we can create automated rules in Google Ads.

So, it does all the heavy lifting for you, and you don't need to worry about doing all the manual and the trivial tasks on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. So, things which you might forget to do to switch something off which is not working or it's getting more expensive, you need to bring the bids down or increase the bids on a keyword, which are performing very well. So, lots of cool stuff, which you can do with automated rules, and very few people know that it literally exists in Google Ads. So, I'm going to show you how to set it up.

So, let's go first of all to the Google Ads Help Center. So, they've got quite a bit of content over here. You can go afterward and read about it, but I'll just go through the main bits before we go into the Google Ads Interface. Alright, so ways to use automated rules. So, it allows you to schedule your ads to appear at a specific time of the day, adjust bids, as I said earlier on, and control your budgets, costs pretty much everything. So, you think about the tasks you perform on a regular basis in your Google Ads account, write them down and it's best to write them down on paper and then you go into your Ads account and start to structure and set these rules up. Sometimes, I've seen people have gone overboard and they put in so many rules of different kinds, that if you run one rule, the other one when it runs, it negates the first one. So, you don't want to go crazy, because when you do find out about this rule, you are going to go crazy. Like I did many years ago and I'm thinking, I'm going to create this rule. I'm going to create that rule. So, everything is pretty much automated, but then at the end of the day, it was just a bit of a mess. So, you just want to do a few important things which will help you with your workflow.

Okay. So, they've got scheduling the ads, pausing low-performing ads or keywords, bid scheduling, controlling budgets and costs, all sorts of things you can do, and it can be set up at campaign, ad group, ad, and keyword level and I'll show you in a bit, but let's have a look at a couple of rules, as to what they are talking about. So, you've got several promo ads containing the phrase Memorial Day specials and you want to run them over this weekend. Okay. So, this is like time. So, if you don't want to run an ad after the event has finished, but what you can do is whether it's Memorial Day, Christmas, Eid, Diwali, or whatever you want to make sure that it runs, or it switches off the next day and it could be a day of the holiday. So, how do you turn them off? Because especially over here in the UK, we have a long Christmas break and somebody has to switch the campaign off. If the Christmas offer has expired on the 26th or the 27th of December. So, you can do it this way, you set it up and at the right time your campaign will pause.

So, they've given all the instructions over here, step-by-step, as to how you can do that. Turn on or off a special ad from a promotional event. So, the opposite. You can do it next year, as well if you want to, but I would not recommend you do that, to turn on an ad on a certain date or time, because you may want to change the text ad or run a completely separate set of keywords. This is quite good, low-performing ads or keywords. So, expensive keywords, non-converting keywords, keywords which are pretty much not costing you money. You can pause them on automation, especially when you've got thousands and thousands of keywords in a campaign, you can do that.

So, I know a lot of you run campaigns on skags, which is a single keyword ad group. So, what you can do is, in that ad group, if that ad group is expensive, pause it. Because you know there's only one keyword in there so this works quite well. Okay.

Bids and scheduling. Adjust bids for keywords based on cost per conversion. Good. So, if the keyword is performing well and is profitable, you don't want to miss out on the auction, so you can increase the bids and I'll show you in a bit how to do that. So, as you can see, they've written over here, a second weekly rule could decrease bids by 15% for keywords with a cost per conversion of more than 12 dollars. So, you can increase or decrease the bids and adjust them automatically. This is quite handy and I love this one the most of all the automated bids because if you are, it depends on how you are bidding, we bid at the ad group level. Whereas, a lot of you guys may be bidding at the keyword level. So, it doesn't matter which level you are bidding at. If you are bidding at the keyword level, then you can set up a rule and that is going to take a huge chunk of the workflow every day because the keyword biddings would be done automatically and you can create an upper limit or a lower limit, so it doesn't go crazy and it keeps on increasing every day.

Rules only run once a day. So, if you are running a very big account, where you are potentially spending tens of thousands of dollars a day. Then, you want to be running scripts, which can be run on an hourly basis and that is a lot more advanced and outside the scope of these. But for most of you who are running smaller campaigns, this is a great way to start up setting up rules, maybe put up four or five rules and you'll be good to go. It will ease up your workflow and also you won't be leaving it alone.

A lot of the advertisers or business owners, they set up the campaigns and forget that they haven't switched it on and then hardly go in there to make any changes, but at least, so with the rules whatever metrics you have set up these will be applied accordingly. So, you can see there are lots of different ways you can set up the rules. So, let's go into the AdWords interface and we will set up some rules. Okay. So, I'm at the campaign level right now, this is in my test account. There's no data over here and then what you want to do is to go here in the three dots on the right-hand side, create an automated rule, then the name of your rule, select the action. So, I want to only set up on enable campaigns. Sorry. Action is to enable campaign, pause or change budgets, right?

So, I can pause a campaign if it has spent a certain amount or I can change the budget. If it is, let's say not profitable. So, you can say the average daily or campaign total depends on what you want. You can either set up an action. So, let's say I want to increase the budget by 10% and I want to have an upper daily limit of hundred pounds. Then you can apply to your campaigns and selected accounts or to the selected campaign. So, I'm going to leave this alone for now. So, status all enabled because paused ones don't matter. So, I'm going to change that condition and then you can add over here the condition.

So, you've got all these metrics. So, let's say a good one could be conversions, let's say I'm increasing the budget, right? So, if I type in, conversions. Greater than, let's say five in this campaign and I add another. So, you're going to add as many conditions as you like and that's the good thing about these rules. My cost per conversion, let's say my target cost per conversion was 30 pounds. Right. So, if it is less than 25, then I can afford to increase the bid or I can go less than 30 because what I don't want to do is to be limited by budget. If my campaign is profitable. So, once there's a setup, you can either set it up for once, daily, weekly or monthly, and then you can look at the data from all of these date range, email, if there are any results or only if there are changes or errors to the rule.

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