22/05/2023

What Can You Automate With Google Ads Rules?

The global pandemic has changed the way we do business on a large scale and has greatly contributed to the growth of digital marketing. That's not to say that digital marketing wasn't already in place, but the lack of footfall caused by Covid19 has accelerated the need for businesses to adopt this strategy.

Almost all businesses, big or small, now have a digital profile running advertisements on various online platforms and are incorporating Google Ads campaigns into their marketing strategies.

Running campaigns on Google can be much work as many aspects need constant checking. Bids have to be changed, budgets reset, setting ads time frames, and so much more. Fortunately, there’s a built-in feature from Google that allows you to cut the hassle and automate some of these tasks using Google Ads Rules.

What Are Google Ads Rules?

These are also known as Google Automated Rules, and they’re a set of rules or guidelines that make changes to your ads account automatically within prescribed parameters.

You can design automated rules to best suit your business needs and optimize your digital reach through your ad campaigns.

It’s like having an account manager for your ads, and the difference is that this one is aided by artificial intelligence and is a lot cheaper. Also, this one is available to you at any time of the day.

Below is a list of the different types of rules you can apply:

Placement rules
Keyword rules
Display keyword rules
Audience rules
Campaign rules
Ad rules
Ad group rules
Parental rules
Gender rules
Age rules
Topic rules
Income range rules

These can be implemented easily in your Google Ads account settings.

There are six categories when setting up an automated rule.

Rule type: The different rules we have looked at above
Apply to: This is the specific campaign you want to set your rule to
Set action: Here, you add what the rule should do, for example, raise a bid
Conditions: Performance criteria for the rule, such as increasing bids per the number of views
Frequency: This has to do with at what time of day, and how many times you want your ads to appear
Email results: You can set the frequency at which Google Ads sends you notifications on the changes made to the rule you’ve set

Situations When Google Ads Rules Are Useful

Like with all aspects in this life, we need rules to keep order and to ensure fairness, among many other things. They can be rules on how your business operates or rules that you have in place for yourself.

Rules can help us to save money and time. Even gamblers have rules that prevent them from betting too much and losing their winnings or knowing when to exit a bet. It’s the same with marketing. You take a gamble by placing an ad to attract customers and make sales of your product or service.

Pausing or enabling a campaign during a holiday season is one scenario for which you can set a rule. We’ve often seen a seasonal ad run long past the actual season, and we often wonder if the business owners have not noticed that this is happening.

It’s easy to forget an ad campaign during a busy and chaotic holiday season. This wastes money and the funds saved can be redirected to other business needs.

The end goal of having automated ads rules is to avoid situations that can be costly to you and add value to your marketing strategies.

Here are a few more situations where rules can help you:

1. To Avoid Big Increase In Budget Spend

Campaign rules allow you to set parameters and monitor the performance of your ads. This way, if your return on ad spending (ROAS) is low and your cost per action/acquisition is high, then you’ll want to decrease your campaign bids. For example, it could be costing you $8 to make $10.

Therefore you spend more of your budget trying to win over customers than is actually necessary. Generally, you want your ROAS to be 4:1; that is, it will cost you $1 to make $4.

It is always best to set percentages to your rule when decreasing bids for campaigns, ads and keywords so that the rule percentage change will have an equal impact across all your campaigns.

A $1 bid decrease might not make much of a difference to a keyword with a bid of $50 but, if your bid budget is $5 or $10, you would then have decreased your bid by 20% and 10%.

When your CPA (Cost Per Action) is high, you might not notice and spend more on bids to try and get your ads and keywords noticed, but this rule allows you to set conditions that will stop you from increasing your budget spend in this regard.

2. To Increase The Budget When Campaigns Get The Status "Limited By Budget"

When you get a notification that your campaign is “limited by budget,” it could mean one of two things. Your average daily budget could be less than the amount recommended. In this case, because of an adjustment setting that increases your bids, the auctions your ad is eligible for could increase as a result.

Subsequently, having a bid that gets higher results can lead to your campaign getting the same status block and result in you not receiving new traffic that might be suited and available for your campaign.

It could prompt you to want to increase your budget, but that might not be necessary as you could still reach your business’ target goals even if your ads are being shown less. Your ads may still be successful, but they might not get you the extra traffic available.

Therefore, this rule is a good metric that can help you adjust your budget to gain more traffic or keep within the budget if ad goals are being reached.

3. To Pause Harmful Keywords

When using keywords in your ad campaigns to increase your website’s traffic or to generate sales, you need to be wary of some words that may be harmful to your ad spend.

Certain phrases or keywords do not relate to your website or business but direct traffic to your site when searched. To avoid bidding in these keywords, you will need to set up a performance rule to stop them before they drain your budget.

You can set rules to stop your ad from showing in any keyword that doesn’t fit your requirements. This will reduce the cost of your ads and minimize the bounce rate as well.

4. To Stop Non-performing Audiences

You can use the audience rule to determine which of your targeted audiences produce the desired results for your ad campaigns.

Not all your ads and campaigns will be suited for all audiences, and you will need to create and target different audience segments.

This rule allows you to pause or stop your ad targeting underperforming audience segments. You might realize that your campaign, targeted at three different age groups, is only getting the desired conversion rates from two groups. You can then set the rule to pause the campaign being directed to that particular group if it is not reaching the desired conversion rate.

What Is Not Possible To Automate With Google Ads Rules?

Google Ads rules are a great way to help you stay up to date with your campaigns and help you manage them better, but they can’t do it all and can fall short in a few areas. One major criticism that Google has received is that it prioritizes ad revenue over customer return on investment (ROI) and that the Google Ads rules are basic in essence.

And this is where OrbitalAds picks up and thrives. OrbitalAds is a third-party marketing tool that utilizes artificial intelligence and natural language processing (NLP) in keyword automation management. The tool can be added to Google Ads to offer a more comprehensive keyword campaign optimization and to manage your PPC for ad campaigns better.

1. Adding Profitable Search Terms As New Keywords

OrbitalAds makes it easier to manage your search terms are performing better each day and what new keywords to add to your campaigns to give you more value for your money.

2. Negating Bad-performing Search terms

This gives you an actionable report on all poorly-performing search terms linked to your campaign that you should avoid and help you create a better-targeted campaign.

3. Adding Cross Negative Keywords After Adding A New Keyword

OrbitalAds’ algorithms will automatically create negative keywords based on the new keywords you add to your campaign or before setting up a campaign.

This is done by creating a table of new keywords, and the tool will create a set of cross-negative keywords to avoid duplicate traffic and auto-inflation.

4. Attributing Keywords To A Specific Ad Group According To Lexical Similarity

Lexical similarity measures how a set of keywords in different ad groups are similar.

As such, you can attribute certain keywords to a specific ad group according to the lexical similarity.

5. Moving Profitable DSA Keywords To regular Search Campaigns

Dynamic Search Ads (DSA) are a tool you can use to put in place where keyword-based campaigns leave gaps and don’t adequately achieve your campaign goals.

With OrbitalAds, you can move all the profitable search terms generated in your DSA campaigns to your regular search campaigns. This will save you money and improve your performance.

6. Removing Cross Negative Keywords When Pausing Keywords

When narrowing down your keywords, one problem you could face is that cross-negative keywords may be profitable in the future. OrbitalAds prevents this from happening by removing the cross negative after pausing a keyword that shows seasonality.

Try OrbitalAds now, so you can start leveraging right now all that it has to offer to optimize your campaigns with minimum time and effort.