How to Automate Google Ads

A Google Ads campaign may spend twice its daily budget on a busy day

Google Ads is where a business pays to appear in Google's search results, on Maps and YouTube, and across partner websites. It was Google AdWords until 24 July 2018, when the sign-in address moved from adwords.google.com to ads.google.com.

The account belongs to whoever owns the marketing budget: a small firm's owner, a marketing manager, or a PPC specialist at an agency with a manager account full of clients. They build the campaigns and give each one an average daily budget.

Once live, a campaign runs day and night. On a busy day Google may spend up to twice its average daily budget, keeping within a monthly limit, so money moves whether or not anyone has opened the account since Friday.

Yesterday's spend lives in three dashboards and a spreadsheet

The marketing manager sets Google Ads to yesterday each morning and copies each campaign's spend, conversions and cost per conversion into the sheet the owner reads, then does the same in Meta Ads Manager. The CRM comes last, to see which of yesterday's leads were real.

When an ad has spent a good share of the week's budget without a conversion, the manager decides whether to pause it. The search terms report lists the queries that triggered ads, and some are plainly wrong: people looking for jobs, for a free version, for a competitor by name. The manager adds each one as a negative keyword by hand.

The manager also works out mid-month whether each campaign is on pace for its monthly spend, in another spreadsheet.

Rules, scripts and Ads Advisor all work from inside the account

Automated rules change ad status, budgets and bids when conditions are met, at a frequency you choose, and can email the results. Scripts go further: JavaScript written in a browser-based editor, which can run on a schedule and pull in outside data.

Recommendations can be set to apply automatically in four areas, and Google leaves budget increases out of auto-apply. Ads Advisor, Google's AI assistant inside the account, suggests changes and applies them with your review and approval. For the plain case, an automated rule that pauses any ad after a set spend with no conversions takes a few minutes to set up.

Offline conversion imports bring the CRM's record of which leads became customers into the account, through a file upload, Data Manager or a connector such as Salesforce's. Meta's spend stays in Meta Ads Manager, and a booking diary that is full for a fortnight stays in the booking system; Google's own ways of pulling those in are scripts and the API, which someone technical has to build and keep working.

The CRM turns cost per lead into cost per sale

One sheet could hold yesterday's spend, clicks, conversions and return on ad spend for every campaign, Google's rows beside Meta's, with any campaign running ahead of its monthly pace marked for the owner. With each campaign's leads matched to what the CRM says happened to them, the manager sees cost per sale next to cost per lead, and which cheap-looking campaign has not produced a customer in a month.

When the booking diary is full for the next two weeks, the owner could get a proposed budget cut for the booking campaign; when the stock system shows a product sold out, a proposed pause for its ad group. The manager could find last week's wrong search terms already drafted as negative keywords every Monday.

An agency's PPC specialist would see each client's figures in that client's own tab, with the accounts that need a look at the top and no script to maintain in any of them.

Ads pause only at thresholds the owner sets

Every figure in that sheet sits on a screen the account owner can already open: the Campaigns page in Google Ads, the campaign table in Meta Ads Manager, the lead list in the CRM. WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. Each morning it reads those screens for yesterday and writes the sheet and the Slack digest.

One card also pauses ads. When an ad passes the spend limit you set with conversions below your minimum, the agent switches it to Paused, logs it in the sheet with its numbers and the reason, and lists it in Slack so anyone can re-enable it. It never edits bids, budgets or targeting, and a negative keyword or a smaller budget reaches the owner as a proposal.