Adwords campaign maintenance has always been a bit of a pain for me. The process of looking through big adwords campaigns to find and remove poorly performing keywords is a necessary but incredibly dull one. I used to spend hours of my life dilligently clicking through from campaign, to ad group to keyword, rooting our poor performers. I did the work, but I cannot say it was enjoyable.
Thankfully Google have provided a way to automate that task for me. They put in a tool that allowed me to set up the rules that I was working to in my head, and directly put them into adwords itself. As a result I no longer had to look at a ctr, check the volume of impressions and then decide whether each of the thousands upon thousands of keywords I was working with needed to be paused.
“Ah, but automating adwords is a dangerous thing isn’t it?” I hear you cry. Well, yes it can be dangerous if you lose control, but the automation tool also sends you an alert email telling you exactly what it has done to your account each time it does something, leaving you free to change things back or amend your automation rules if needed.
How to set up adwords automation
The automation process itself is pretty simple. Log in to your adwords account and find the ‘automate’ button in a keywords panel.
As you will see the interface is simplicity itself and follows the standard way adwords generally works.
A typical use I make of this feature is to set a low ctr (0.1% to 0.5% depending on client/market/cost etc) and a high number of impressions over the last month. Every day the automation engine checks to see if these criteria have been fulfilled and pauses any keywords that match. If on a monday it does nothing, then nothing happends, but if on a tuesday it turns off five keywords then I get an email in my inbox telling me exactly which keywords were affected and where to find them should I wish to tinker a little.
More automation ideas
Another good use of the automation feature is to automatically raise your bids on good quality keywords that have dropped off the first page.
Google themselves offer a number of examples of how to automate adwords, in their support files.
This automation feature allows you set maximum bids to stop the system going crazy with your cash but nonetheless, do be careful when setting up these automated features. If you do it well your adwords account will be more profitable and easier to control than ever before.