← The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Paid Search Podcast | A Weekly Podcast About Google Ads and Online Marketing
The Best Scripts to Use in Google Ads (Episode 452)
00:35:00
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- [00:00]
Chris Schaefer
Foreign.
- [00:16]
Joey Bidner
Hello, and welcome to the Paid Search Podcast. My name is Chris and today we're going to talk about Google Ads scripts. We're going to talk about something that you may not have heard about. I actually very rarely bring it up. It's not a specialty of mine. So that's why I'm bringing in Joey Bidner to discuss the topic. He's going to be a little bit later in the show. I'm. He's going to bring up some really interesting points. You really, really need to stick around. If, if scripts are something you've ever wondered about, this is an extremely approachable way for you to understand a hidden aspect of Google Ads that brings the community of the Google Ads community into this project. It is really great. You can source some really good solutions from, you know, some people that are extremely generous with their time. So stay tuned to learn about scripts. And I also have a quick message to share before Joey jumps in on the main part of the show that I think will hopefully help some of you. Before I do that, I want to remind you about my sponsor, optio.com PSP that is the software to help you take your Google Ads further. You can get more done in Optio per minute than you can do in hours of Google Ads hand management. The reason this is is because Optio has built a tool to help you grind through each of the critical decisions that you need to make into bids, keywords, ad copy, sending reports, just a solid dashboard to help you make decisions on those key aspects. Everyone has to review their accounts, otherwise your accounts grow stale, they start to fail and stop performing. You must check on these key aspects and Opteo helps you make those critical decisions in a timely manner. Whether you're managing one account or a hundred, this system is designed for everyone, big and small. Try it for free for an extra amount of time. That's. That's the great part about this deal. If you listen to this podcast, you can go to opteo.com PSP to get the trial for 28 days. This is not available. If you go and sign up anywhere else, that is optio.com PSP and as always, I thank them for their sponsorship because it keeps me here, it keeps me willing to put my time into this. And if you appreciate them being here, I absolutely suggest that you go check them out. Okay, so before we jump into Joey, I have one quick topic I want to bring up. I don't have any questions this week because I wanted to leave plenty of room for Joey to. To grind through just some great Tips. I love the topic that he brought forward. It's not something I suggested, it's something he presented. And I think it is wonderful. So here's what I want to talk about. A couple weeks ago here in the United States, there was a big drama that was happening with the government. Okay, I'm not going to talk about politics, but it got me thinking. There was a very important email that went out to government workers. And the email's title was what did you do last week? Basically, if you don't know, it is a wake up call to some people to make sure, like, you know, that they're doing their job, that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing, that they're, they're active and being a part of, you know, what they're being paid for. And I thought, you know, what if I got that email? What if I got that email, which I do. I get those emails all the time. I have a lot of clients and they always want to know how are things going. So it's not like I don't get those emails, but just discussing what it's like to get that email. How can you talk about and justify what you do in Google Ads? And it got me thinking, you know, how do you have a conversation with someone who's paying you? Or maybe a conversation with yourself. Maybe it's your money you're spending and, you know, just asking yourself, is this investment worth it? And the way I see it, there's only two and avenues for you to be able to justify your time spent, your money spent in Google Ads. The first avenue has a dead end. The first avenue is quality of traffic. Okay? The only way that you can justify spending money or spending time and being paid to spend that time in Google Ads is that you can verify and show that the quality of traffic that you're sending from paid ads to a website is because the quality of traffic that, you know, the people that are searching, the integrity of those clicks is higher than what the account would get otherwise. Many times I'm running ads in Google Ads accounts where they're getting traffic that they would never get organically. They're getting calls and generating interest in ways that would never happen without these ads. Okay, but that sword cuts both ways. If you're generating traffic that they would never get otherwise, it better be an improvement on the quality they would never get otherwise. Right? Because there's another side to this. If you're getting traffic that they would never get because it's coming from a foreign country and it's on kid apps and it's spam bots and it's, you know, fraudulent clicks, right? That's traffic they never would have gotten and they're paying for it, Right? So absolutely that is not a justification. So the justification is not that it's unique traffic, it's both unique and qualified and driving value that they would not get otherwise. So there is a justification in what is being spent and done simply because the quality of traffic is good. There's integrity in that quality of traffic. Now I said there's a dead end. This only goes so far. I can send qualified traffic in droves to a website, but if that website does not derive some kind of conversion, some kind of sale, some type of value that is tangible and not just numbers on a screen, then that justification ends. So now the real true option to be able to say that there is some kind of justification for what you're spending, for what you're doing, you know, what you did last week, what's the justification for that? It has to boil down to conversions, sales, purchases, phone calls, whatever language in your industry is important. That's what Google Ads must do. So what you did last week should be towards that end result. There needs to be some kind of qualitative value that can be seen, can be felt. Traffic is one form of that, but that is temporary. It must drive value beyond just numbers on a screen, beyond just clicks. So how, how can you prove this value? How can you prove the value of what you're spending? Well, there's only one way. On the first route, you must know the value of your clicks. You say, well, Chris, this is all very theoretical and, you know, very kind of, you know, you're not really being grounded here. What exactly are you saying? What's, what's the value of a click? Well, let me, let me get very real with you. What was that person looking for in the moment of the click? That's what Google's selling, right? That's what Google Ads is. It's moment marketing. Essentially, a person in a single solitary moment is looking for a thing. They've stopped what they're doing and they're searching on a phone, they're searching on a computer, they're doing something that, interacting with Google Search. And your job is to take that moment and drive them to your business, right? To, to drive that interest, that relevant interest. So the value of that click is, is in the fact that the, the moment that that person's searching is of value to your business because they're likely to Convert, they're likely to call, they're likely to buy in that moment. Okay? So again, that path has a dead end. You can only drive so many moments, and if those moments do not lead to conversions, it will in the end not justify what you're doing. So the final path, what you must know now, are you doing good? Right? You have, let's say you have lots of conversions happening in your account. You must now justify what you're doing because you know you're, you're converting those moments into conversions. Are those conversions converting and going and becoming sales, purchases, money, revenue value? Is that generating that for you? So the final piece of this that you must know is what is the value of a conversion, right? And what this looks like is. And then I've talked about this, I think Joey actually has talked about this before on the podcast. You know, you must know the value of what that conversion is. If it's a phone call, how many phone calls does it take to convert into a sale? So then you would know how much that conversion is theoretically worth, right? It, you know, takes five leads and five calls, five forms to lead to some quality qualified inquiry that you can drive a sale on. Okay? So you must know the value of those conversions. And if any of this falls through, if you don't know these things, if all of Google Ads seems to be a mess, if you can't answer these questions, then the question of what did you do last week? That question will terrify you. That question will be impossible for you to answer because you do not have the core value of what your job is in Google. You have no idea of how to, how to answer that. And that will cause you to panic whenever you write your answer, whenever you get an email that says, you know, how are things? What have you done to improve things? What have, what have you done to, you know, to make sure the money that I'm spending through you in Google, you know, is worth it. And hopefully you have a good answer because if you don't, you're going to give a bad answer. And there's only a couple forms of correct answer for something like this. So I'm sure many of you have gotten and will continue to get questions, what did you do last week? From your boss or just from yourself knowing, is this driving value, what I'm spending in Google Ads, does it make sense? All right, so we're going to jump now into the main part of the show. Joey's going to take over. And real quick, optio.com PSP before Joey jumps in, please go check out the sponsor. That is an important part of my podcast. Helps me justify, right? It helps me justify my time put here. And I know you guys sign up and use the software and so I'm looking at those that haven't tried it yet. Please do. It is a favor to me. And without further ado, if you're watching on YouTube, the answer is yes. Joey and I did plan our outfits to match. Okay, that's just for the YouTube viewers. You're welcome. Otherwise, for you audio listeners, just imagine we're two good looking matching guys in and we're both going to talk about Google Ads without further ado. Now. I promise. Now actually for real. Joey, take it away.
- [13:49]
Chris Schaefer
Hey, what's up Chris? Good to be back. So, in today's episode, I would like to discuss scripts in Google Ads. So we're going to go over what a script is and how to use them. We'll talk about why you should or shouldn't use scripts, we'll discuss quickly how to install them, and I'm going to share with you some of my favorite free scripts. So first, for those of you who aren't aware what a script in Google Ads is, there is an area in Google Ads that allows you to install a JavaScript and this JavaScript can give you additional functionalities in Google Ads that do not come native to the platform. So this could be related to reporting or automating specific actions in Google Ads or giving you data transparency on pmax, for example, things that Google kind of hides from you. So there are scripts out there that can help pull this data, put it in a Google sheet, or like I said, perform automated actions. There's really like an ocean of free scripts out there that we can use and install in our Google Ads accounts. Now, before you maybe get scared at the term scripts, I want to verify for you. Like, no, you do not need code writing experience to use scripts. I know absolutely nothing about writing scripts, modifying them, anything to do with code. But I use scripts all the time. It's really easy because there are a bunch of really amazing Google Ads nerds out there who write these scripts. There's a whole community of script Google Ads script writers and a whole database of scripts we can use to help give us more functionalities in the platform. Now, before I go forward and mentioning what scripts I like and how to use them, I do want to mention that you should be cautious of scripts in the sense where there's nothing wrong with using them. But I just don't want it to seem like okay, install all these scripts in your accounts, right? I only install scripts when they're really intended to answer a question. Not to say that a script will break anything, not to say that it will do any harm. But you just want to be careful with how far a rabbit hole you go down because you know you'll end up just wasting your time fiddling with too many scripts. You know it you'll. I don't think the answer to good management is over complicating our daily lives with too much information or too many tasks or our is not about how many automations we can make or how many buttons we could push. It's about calculated measures and moving very methodically. So when it comes to scripts, be methodical. Only use scripts when they're really there to answer a specific question you have now, how to install a script is pretty easy. You basically go to the tool section, your Google Ads, bulk actions and scripts. There's an area and it'll open up a dialog window where you can copy paste the script that you get. There's always a few steps so that you need to take because every script will come with a There will be in the script like a little URL to a Google Excel sheet that you need to duplicate and then copy that link and put it in the script. There's just a little bit of copy paste you need to do. And I'm going to refer you to to a really amazing short like 2 minute YouTube video that was actually recorded by one of our listeners, Ryan Suchet. If you're listening, shout out Ryan Suchet. Great guy. He made an awesome little walkthrough of hey, here's how you install a script. Because the first time I installed a script I also kind of hit a little bit of a wall not knowing what to do. Again, not to say that it has anything to do with code, but like everything, there is just a few steps that you'll want to know about. So I'm going to include a link in the show notes and I suggest when you find a script you want to install, watch this video and he'll walk you through it in less than five minutes. So Ryan Such's video in the show notes. So that covers how you install a script. Now I want to share with you the juicy stuff how to or I want to share with you some of my favorite scripts. So the first one, this is kind of the the talk of the town these days. It's probably the most popular script out there and that is the Mike Rhodes performance Max Script. So if you're using performance Max, you are probably frustrated with the lack of data transparency in performance max. Google doesn't show us how much we're spending on search versus shopping versus YouTube versus display. It doesn't give you, you know, insights on, on your placements. There's a lot of data that you don't get to see. And in comes Mike Rhodes to save the day. He has been working on this script for a couple years now and he literally updates it like every month with new functionalities. And it's a free script. Well, it starts as a free script. There is a paid version you can use, but I use the free free script for a long time and it gives you again all kinds of data transparency on your performance max. He shows you how much did you spend on shopping versus video versus display versus Search. What are your conversions, conversion rates, return on ad spend between each channel you get to see campaign breakdowns of all this data. It also goes a step further and looks at all your product data and organizes it into what are your profitable products? What are your costly products? What are your fluke products? What are your zero converting products? It also gives you some product level bucketing data which is an extra bonus. There's, there's all kinds of really great pieces of data on this script and primarily for pmax. So like I said, you get placement data on, on where your ads showed. So I can't recommend enough installing this Mike Rhodes performance Max script. I want to share another really amazing script, another free script similar to, or if you recall I just mentioned in Mike Rhodes script if your ears got a little tickled when I mentioned the performance bucketing. Okay, Performance bucketing or we call labelizing, a labelizer is when. Yeah, there's scripts that basically bucket your products into into performance categories. What are your profitable products? What are your costly products? What are your flukes? What are your zombie products? This is called, you know, labeling your products. And yes, micro script gives you that data. It shows you your products that are in those bucketed categories. But there is a script out there that forms these buckets of performance for you but then also links to your merchant center and creates custom labels and organizes your products into these groups so you can segment by them. So I'll take two steps back and explain that a little slower what this script does and it's called ppc Leap link will be in the show notes takes your products and you set your thresholds of okay, what is my benchmark return on ad spend? What is my threshold of how many clicks I would consider to be a forgotten product. It's got a few little settings in its interface and it looks at your data and it buckets your products. Which ones are you spending what products are you spending a lot of money on but are not reaching your turn on ad spend goals? What products are you spending very little on and you are exceeding your turnout spend goals, what products are the algorithm is the algorithm forgetting about that are getting no clicks, which is the thing by the way, algorithms can, can forget about products because it doesn't see, it doesn't have enough data on them. And if you have your turn ad spend goals too high, it will forget them. We call those zombie products. And what this script does, it takes those buckets them into custom labels so you can then serve them accordingly. You could have a campaign for your high performers. You want more ad spend there. You can have a campaign for your low performers, less ad spend, maybe a different bidding strategy on them. You can have a campaign for your zombie products, the products that Google forgot about and you can collect data on them. And the beautiful thing about this script is that every week it will update or you can set it to whatever frequency you want. I have it updating every week, but every week it'll update and reshuffle these products in your buckets. So if, let's say you had that zombie product campaign that you know, took your forgotten products and serves them at a very, you know, low CPC because you know, you don't, you don't know if it's a risky bet or not once it starts collecting data and oh, we found a really profitable product that's selling well and not spending too much, it will then bump into your high profit products and you could put the gas on it. Vice versa. Let's say that product no longer is performing well, it's spending too much, it will bump down to another group. So this is product labelizers. There's a few out there, but PPC Leap is the one that recently hit the market that's free. There's a lot of other ones that are paid, they cost like 200, 200 bucks. You get it for life. But PPC Leap is free and I really like their dashboard. They give you this really beautiful visualization of all your products. You get pie charts to see the different labeled products so you can do analysis as well. Like what I typically do is I'll install the script in my campaigns and just let it run in the background. Right. I won't just jump into segmentation and restructure my account, I'll install it in my accounts and just let it run and use it for observation. And then when I see a need, oh yeah, like I'm way overspending on these products. And then I'll use it to restructure things. But what's great is that you can just have it running in the background without having it affect any ads at all. It will just be collecting data and slicing and dicing the data for you so you can see what's performing and what's not. They also added a really cool functionality recently where if you have a sale, it will identify. It'll basically create a blackout period. And this is important because if you have a sale and you have certain products that like skyrocket in profitability, it's not the true story of how that product performs regularly. So you wouldn't really want it to be in that, let's say profitable bucket after your sale because it doesn't deserve to be there because it only jumped up in profitability with the sale going on. So you can say, okay, I've got a sale going on between this date and this date. And it won't consider that data for reshuffling your products. So really sweet. That is PPC Leap. So I want to talk about one more really cool script. This is one that I started using recently on an account where I needed to create a branded shopping campaign. So in search we have brand campaigns, right? We want to segment our brand in its own campaign sometimes. So you're. Well, for a number of reasons, I won't get into why we need to segment brand. I know Chris has spoken about that a lot. There's differing opinions on if you should. But I'll use this example of why I needed to do it in my shopping campaign. And usually there is no option to create a brand campaign for shopping. So in comes this script. So I had an account where I was getting too much branded traffic in my shopping campaign. Usually, I'll be honest, if branded traffic in a shopping campaign is minimal, I usually don't care that much, you know, because brand is part of the consumer's journey. It's not to say that every brand search is just, you know, is just a repeat customer. It could be somebody who's clicked on a few of your ads and now they're ready to buy and their last click is on is on your is on their brand term. But what's. What you don't want is too much brand, right? If you've got like 80% of your clicks Being brand. Because what ends up happening is the algorithm sees, oh, okay, you've got a 300% return on ad spend target. In order for me to get that, I'm just going to lean into brand and then bye, bye. There goes your, your new customer acquisition. So it's important to sometimes segment so you can keep that campaign going after cold traffic. By cold traffic, I mean new visitors in a higher ratio than return visitors. And I don't necessarily want to just exclude brand, put it as a negative keyword, because I want my products to still appear if someone searches my brand name. Right. I want my product to be in the carousel. So. And unlike a search campaign, you know, we can't just have, we can't just have a search campaign where we put our brand keyword in there because there's no keywords in shopping. So, so what do we do? So there's this script, okay. It's really cool. It's called I'll put it the list, the link in the show notes, but it's called Shabba IO Shabba IO. Okay. And it's a, it's actually, it used to be a hundred bucks. It's free now. I think it's like, pay what you can. Really nice guy makes it. And what's cool is that you create a campaign with this script and you give it your brand name and once it runs, it will automatically make a negative keyword for any search term that you get. Not just clicks, but impressions. Any search term that you get. Or it could be clicks only, I'm not sure, don't quote me on that. But any, any search that you get that is not your brand name or doesn't have your brand term in it. So it takes a couple days for it to really filter everything out. But it, it works. After a couple days, you'll see there are like hundreds of automatically created keywords. Thousands, tens of thousands. And over a pretty short period of time, it becomes a brand campaign because there's no other options. And the other thing that I do with it, and this is a key thing, is put a really high target roas on the campaign. So typically for brand campaigns, I don't use automated bidding. Like for a search campaign, I'll always do manual bidding because we have the ability to pick the keyword and I want to spend as little for that keyword as possible, right. So I always do manual on search. But for shopping, we just don't have that same luxury. So by putting a high target roas in, in conjunction with this script, it's going to end up leaning into brand because one, it has no other options with the negative keywords. But primarily the algorithm is also, it sees brand as that ability to get that high return right. If you know, if you set it to like a 800% return on ad spend, the algorithm is going to say, okay, no kidding. The only thing I realistically can serve to get that is brand. Anyways. Now not to say that that strategy just works in general. You can't just have a shopping campaign, put a high T roas and expect it to be brand only. In my experience so far, it only works when it's got this script involved and it's working great. I've got a few campaigns already where I have the script adding the negative keywords for everything. That's not my brand term. I've got the high T roas and boom, I have a shopping campaign with all my products in it. All my products are in there, but it is brand only. And then my other campaign running alongside it also has all my products in it. And it's, and it's only non brand. It's cold traffic. And at that point, once I start seeing that this brand campaign, you know, has enough negative keywords to get that branded traffic, I will add a negative keyword of my brand name to my other campaign just to really, you know, split, split, split the divide. So yeah, so there's a few sweet scripts that I wanted to share. I'm also going to put one more thing in the show notes of a big database of scripts. Now don't go crazy here. I don't want everyone to just take this database and install all these scripts, use it as like a search function where if you've got a question like huh, you know, I'd really like to get a. I'll give you an example. I used it once, I really wanted to get a, a daily notice of if I had any disapproved products in Merchant Center. The reason why I need this is because I disapprove. I turn off Merchant center notifications because they're annoying. But I still want to know if a product gets disapproved. So there's a script out there that does it where gives you a sheet and anytime you have a product that's disapproved, it goes in the sheet, it notifies you by email and then in that, that line item on the script it shows you, it gives you a link to the information on how to work with whatever you're disapproved from. There's another Example of I had a question, I went to this database, I searched for a script, found an answer, installed it. Happy customer. So yeah. So once again in the show notes I'm going to give the instructions on how to install scripts from Ryan Suchet's YouTube video. I'm going to give this database from, it's from this guy named Nils Ruhman. He's like a script nerd and he put together this database of scripts. I'm going to give you the Mike Rhodes Performance Max script. I'm going to give you the PPC product Labelizer script and the Shabbat IO negative keyword script for a branded shopping campaign. So I hope that helps. I hope I didn't just lose anybody in the the opener talking about scripts and code. But I have confidence in all of you. You don't need code experience and this can really help level up your Google Ads game. But don't go crazy. Be cautious, be methodical. That's all I've got to say. All right, back to you Chris.
- [34:00]
Joey Bidner
Awesome. Thank you Joey. Wonderful stuff. All of the links and things that, that that Joey mentioned in his segment there will be in the links in the show. If you're watching on YouTube it'll be in the show notes. If you're listening on podcast will be in the show notes, everything will be there. Be sure and check out those links. Thank you guys for for being a part of this podcast. Thank you for listening and participating in this crazy years long discussion about a very critical tool in businesses nowadays. And my name is Chris Schaefer. If you'd like to reach out to me you can find my information about consulting management of Google Ads@chrishaefer.com Joey also is a great consultor of Google Ads and manager of Google Ads campaigns. You can find him@joeybidner.com and otherwise. Thank you so much for being here. Catch you guys next week.