The best kept secret for saving time and improving results in AdWords may very well be AdWords Scripts, a lightweight automation tool that is easier to use than the API but more powerful than the standard interface and the AdWords Editor.
As highly as I think of the AdWords UI (I helped build it for 10 years, after all), when I recently started working with accounts of big advertisers, I found myself frustrated at how manual, repetitive, and slow it was to generate custom reports and act on my findings.
The API could let me automate to my heart’s content, but getting started meant waiting for Google to review my application for access and then working with engineers to build the desired functionality. I wanted something that would make me more efficient right away, so I turned to AdWords Scripts.
AdWords Scripts Have A Few Key BenefitsJust like Google Apps Scripts, they use JavaScript, a language that’s easy to learn and has tons of free support and documentation onlineThey come with a slew of built-in functions to interact with common structural elements like accounts, campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads so you don’t need to spend time figuring out how to write this code, and you can just focus on adding your business logicScripts can be scheduled to run automatically, as often as hourly or as little as once per month, making it possible to automate frequent tasksThey can be integrated easily with other Google services like Gmail or spreadsheets making it easy to create a workflow that is customized to your needsIf you’re worried that creating an AdWords Script will be too hard, fear not! Google has included several fully functional scripts in their documentation and some of these may even be the complete solution to one of your problems.
I was able to get started by making small tweaks to example scripts and slowly learning the full range of capabilities. Look at how few lines of code are needed in this example from Google to increase bids for keywords that are performing well:
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