Simplify your AdWords management with automated rules

Marketers benefit when they have more time to think strategically and spend less time on repetitive tasks.  We were excited when we launched automated rules in 2010 to provide you with the benefit of 24-hour account management while leaving you free to focus on other things.

Looking across the web, search professionals have been sharing ways they’ve used automated rules to help manage their campaigns.

1. Prioritize your time over the holidays with these ideas from Krystal Kenlan (WebPageFX):
• Schedule ads for special events/holidays
• Pause campaigns that spend certain budget partway through the month
• Pause low-performing ads based on metrics
2. Swap ads while you sleep as Ally Malick (SEER Interactive) suggests:
• Upload your promotional/new price point ads in a paused state and make sure these ads have a unique identifying phrase (i.e. “Doorbuster Sale” or “Ends Friday!”) so you can segment them using a text filter (another option for this is to use labels)
• Create an automated rule to pause all ads currently running 
• Create another automated rule to enable the new promotional ads
3. Save money with these three rules from Dan Williams (Periscopix) 
• Decrease bids by 10% on keywords that trigger an ad in the top three spots but have not led to a conversion
• Set a maximum bid first, then set a rule to increase bids on all keywords not displaying on the first page
• Set rules that help you fine tune for optimal ad position (not necessarily the top!)
4. Save time with automated rules ideas by Joel Chudleigh (Deep Footprints)
• Pause keywords that have had many clicks but have not converted
• Increase your bids on keywords that have a relatively low CPA
• Decrease your bids keywords that have a high CPA and a position between 1 and 5
• Increase your bids on keywords in positions lower than 7

Automated rules are available to all AdWords accounts and if you regularly perform manual tasks in your account, we encourage you to give this feature a try. And once you’ve done so, we’d love to hear your feedback for how we can make automated rules even better. So do let us know how it goes!

Posted by Maria Nikishyna, Inside AdWords Crew

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Taking Automated Rules to the next level: Now in My Client Center

We’ve added My Client Center support, so you can now run Automated Rules across multiple client accounts, to help you manage many accounts more quickly, easily and efficiently. To get started, simply click the “Automate” drop-down menu on the Performance or Budget tab:

This AdWords Help Center article walks you through how to set up Automated Rules in My Client Center. As you may notice, the steps are mostly the same as for individual accounts, except that we’ve added sections for account and currency selection:

As always, remember to click the Preview results button to verify that you've set the rule up correctly. Previewing displays the time you’ve chosen for the rule to run in groups according to your clients’ timezones, and allows you to get a glimpse of the changes that the rule will make to the first account you’ve selected.

To see popular types of rules created by advertisers, please see this AdWords Help Center article. To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations.

Posted by Andrew Truong, Product Marketing Manager

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Create more Automated Rules and undo changes

We heard your feedback that you want Automated Rules to be even more flexible and useful, so we rolled out two improvements - increased rule limit to 100 and the ability to undo changes made by a rule.

1. Increased rule limit to 100

We increased the number of rules you can create from 10 rules per user to 100. This should allow you to easily try out new rules -- have a look at common examples to see how advertisers are using Automated Rules.



2. Ability to undo changes made by a rule

In the event that a rule doesn’t make the changes that you expect, you can easily undo them by clicking the “Undo” button in the Logs table. We hope that undo can help you feel more comfortable experimenting with Automated Rules. You can try out new strategies for a few days and quickly return to the state in which you started if you’re not happy with the performance. Please see this AdWords Help Center article for more information about the undo feature.



Not currently using Automated Rules?

Automated Rules is a feature that lets you save time by scheduling automatic changes to your account based on criteria that you specify. Please see this AdWords Help Center article to see popular types of rules created by advertisers. To learn more about Automated Rules, please visit Ad Innovations.

Posted by Andrew Truong, Product Marketing Manager

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New ways to take action on top of page bid estimates

A few months ago, we launched top of page bid estimates to provide additional assistance in optimizing your ads to show above the search results. Today, we wanted to let you know about ways to more easily and scalably take action on these bid estimates, now that they’re supported by Automated Rules and AdWords Editor 9.7.1.

Setting up top of page bid rules with Automated Rules

You can use automated rules with top of page bid estimates to raise the bids of your keywords to the recommended top of page bid, and run this rule on a daily basis.

To create this rule:

1. Click All online campaigns in the left panel of your AdWords account.
2. Click the Keywords tab.
3. Click the Automate button, and select “Raise bids to top of page CPC when..." from the drop-down. 
4. Fill out the form as desired.

Note: Be sure to specify a maximum bid, In addition, you might want to only raise bids for keywords that have a good quality score (for example, Quality score >= 6), so as not to bid up keywords that need to be optimized.

What you can do in AdWords Editor 9.7.1

AdWords Editor 9.7.1 launched last week with support for managing bids based on top of page bid estimates.  New functionality was added to allow:

• Viewing “Top of page bid estimates” on the Keywords tab
• Raising bids to “Top of page bid estimates” using Advanced bid changes
• Filtering keywords based on “Top of page bid estimates” within Advanced Search and “Find duplicates”

For more details on AdWords Editor 9.7.1, please see the release notes and the download center.

Posted by Andrew Truong, Product Marketing Manager

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