Fluctuations in Google Ads performance can occur for a variety of reasons. The cause is often difficult to determine, but automated rules can help.
Automated rules in Google Ads send notifications or make changes based on preset criteria. For example, an advertiser can set a rule to schedule a campaign or receive an email if a keyword receives 75 clicks and zero conversions.
The same goes for automatic rules. to script But even more turnkey. Scripts are more dynamic and comprehensive than rules. For example, in an ad group responsive search ads.
To set up automatic rules, go to the left navigation bar and click (Tools) > (Bulk Actions) > (Automatic Rules). Next, set up rules for accounts, campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and more.
Here are my top four automation rules.
Disapproved ads or keywords
A common reason for performance fluctuations is Google disapproval. Disapproval of an entity at the ad or keyword level can result in significant changes. Google’s notifications option is located in the top navigation bar, but it’s easy to overlook it. I spent hours diagnosing the slow performance and found that it was caused by disapproved ads. Setting up separate rules to notify you when your ad or keyword is disapproved is easy and saves you time.
Rules can be applied at the account, campaign, or ad group level. I prefer the account level to capture all campaigns. Ad rules set conditions that check the disapproval status of all ads in active campaigns and ad groups. You can preview the rule before saving it.
Set conditions such as “rejected” status and actions such as “send email.”
The action is to send an email. Daily emails are good for rejections. I only receive emails in case of changes or errors. Therefore, you will only receive an email if your ad is newly disapproved.
Select the email frequency and prompt (for example, “Only if there are changes or errors”).
The process for keyword disapproval is pretty much the same. The only difference is that you select “Disapproved” as the reason for the keyword status you want to be alerted to. Keyword-level URLs can cause your link to be disapproved.
Limits by budget or bid strategy
Limiting monitoring of multiple campaigns and bid strategies can be difficult. For example, your profitable campaign might reach its daily budget by noon every day, or your bid strategy’s budget might be too high. ROAS target Traffic may be restricted. Rules can identify such restrictions.
Rules are set at the campaign level and require status conditions to be set. Google offers 20 statuses to check, but in my experience the first five are sufficient.
Choosing the first five stats is probably sufficient.
The relevant actions are to change the budget or send an email notification. There are no actions to adjust the bid strategy. I prefer to receive notifications rather than Google automatically changing my budget. You can then review your campaign and bid strategy to decide next steps. Similar to the disapproval rule, I have chosen to run the restriction rule daily and only receive emails about issues.
threshold rules
Threshold rules identify tactics that are ineffective at any stage of your account. For example, a threshold rule can review all campaigns with 200 clicks and no conversions in the last 60 days, or ads with a ROAS below your goal and a conversion rate of less than 1%. The possibilities are endless and depend on how you evaluate performance.
Here are some scenarios.
action: Pause a keyword if “Keyword status: Active”, “Keyword clicks > 100”, and “Keyword conversions < 1 using data from the last 60 days".
Set threshold rules by specifying targets, conditions, and actions. Next, choose the frequency and prompt for your action.
action: Using yesterday’s data, send an email if ‘Campaign Status: Active’, ‘Campaign Search Impression Share < 20%'.
In this example, we will apply the action to “Selected Accounts”, set conditions and select the action. Next, you will see the frequency and prompt for the action.
If you run rules based on yesterday’s data, keep in mind that metrics may naturally be lower over the weekend. For example, a campaign’s impression share may be greater than 20% every day except Sunday. Therefore, a 20% impression rule would generate an email on Monday.
No activity
Your ad group may stop showing impressions because your ad or keyword is disapproved. However, your ad or keyword may receive zero impressions for reasons such as negative keywords blocking your traffic or Google rejecting your payment method.
The solution is to create a rule for the ad group where the previous day’s impressions were zero. Missing impressions doesn’t necessarily mean an error, especially for ad groups with low-volume keywords, but it does at least alert you to check your rules.
If you set an inactivity rule at the campaign level, you’ll only be notified when there are zero impressions across the entire campaign, not on individual ad groups.
You may want to set a lower than normal impression trigger. For example, if your ad group typically gets at least 50 impressions each day, you can create a rule that alerts you when the number of impressions drops below that number.
