Embracing Automation: Saving Your Time, Money and Sanity.
Automation is becoming a bit of a “buzz word”… to the point where we are losing it’s meaning. But this is certainly not something we should be ignoring.
For me, there are a few types of automation which have become more and more prevalent in my working and home life.
There’s the type that means when I’m working at the kitchen table, I can have Alexa play my favourite music. Or when I’m driving, I can have Siri type and send a text message. This kind of automation is all about making life easier for people. It’s from this kind of ‘home automation’ that voice search will become increasingly important – but that is for an entirely different article!
Then there’s our advertising platforms. That kind of automation is less well known by the general masses, and more specific to those lucky enough to work in our digital space. This is where I’m going to focus today.
Automation within the Ad Platforms
You might not know it, but if you are running ads on any advertising platform; Facebook, Adwords, or any native networks, you’re already using automation. In fact, the less sophisticated your campaigns are, the more automation you are using…
Pixels
The pixels we use to track visits to our landing pages and conversions on our order forms aren’t just working to give you a number in a dashboard. In fact they have a far more sophisticated role in your advertising. Take the Facebook Pixel for example. The Facebook Pixel uses ‘Events’. These Events are there to help Facebook understand your funnel, and every other advertisers funnel. For instance:
Lead = someone who decided they were interested in what you have to offer, and converted to a lead.
Add Payment Info = someone who entered credit card details but hasn’t completed the purchase yet – perhaps on an order form.
Purchase = someone who did what we all want our audience to do – converted to a paid customer.
Because these are now standardised, Facebook understands that your definition of a “Lead” is roughly the same as Company ABC’s. It can now build up an understanding of your goals and of the behaviour of its users, so it can better match the two.
For example, if I enter a lot of funnels, reach the “Add Payment Info” page but never check out, and you are optimising your campaign for a “Purchase”, Facebook might look at my data and determine that I wouldn’t be a good purchaser.
With the data Facebook is gathering on its users from both it’s own platform, but also other websites around the world, not to mention the third party data points it uses (although dwindling, thanks ios14), it’s becoming better and better at finding the right customer for you. Most of this can be attributed to …automation.
Rules
Both Facebook and Adwords have started to embrace rules within the platform. These are “If this, then that” style rules, and they’re not too sophisticated just yet. They allow you to send an email if your CPA is too high, and even pause campaigns based on results, automatically.
Bidding
When starting a campaign on Facebook, we would usually leave Facebook to find the right bid for us, leaving the setting to “Automatic” bidding.
With Adwords, once we have found the best CPC to use and have a stable, converting campaign, we might switch to CPA bidding, or go even further and allow Adwords to optimise towards the best ROI using ROAS bidding.
Both of these scenarios are allowing the platform a significant amount of automation, and trusting they will get it right in terms of spend. It makes the campaigns easier to manage and honestly, often the platform is better at bidding and managing all those variables than we humans are.
Ads
Hands up who is using Smart Display Ads?
In a nutshell, you supply Google with your creative (multiple pieces of copy and images) and a TCPA. Then, you let the ad do the rest of the work. With zero input from the marketer, these ads automatically go and find you the right placements, show your ads to the right audience and see a great volume. I have seen however, high numbers of duplicates on lead gen campaigns in Smart Display along with really bad placements creeping in quickly. But I see this flaw as a good thing; it means that Adwords is so good at finding the right people, it has found them twice!
The Next Step in Automation: Scripts
Yes, Scripts. They brought fear to my bones too… they sound technical, and feel like a lot of responsibility is being given to an automated process.
But as with anything, if you start small you’ll get the hang of them before you know it. First, lets back track:
What are Adwords Scripts?
Adwords scripts are pieces of “code” which are added into an adwords account either at account or MCC level. They are added within the Shared Library, and can be managed from there; scheduled to run on specific days, paused or deleted.
A lot of people write scripts out there, in fact if you have something really specialised you want to do automatically, you could have a script written for you.
If you search ‘Adwords Scripts’ you’ll see just how many sites there are out there hosting scripts for free for you to use.
Warning: Scripts are like magic powers… they can be used for both good and evil. If you don’t know or trust the source, be very cautious about implementing it. My advice is to either use Adwords own scripts, Optmyzr scripts, or have them built or modified by your in-house or trusted development team:
Adwords Scripts: https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/
Optmyzr Scripts: http://www.optmyzr.com/scripts/
How will they help me?
There are a plethora of Adwords scripts to help an advertiser manage their accounts. From basic reporting outputs, all the way to managing bidding on your behalf, based on the weather in North Carolina… and everything in between. They can even change bids based on the stock market… certainly something of interest to our financial publishers.
Essentially, any “maintenance” tasks you do on a daily, weekly or monthly basis within your account, can be handled by scripts. They save you time, save you money, and deal with millions of pieces of data in order to make a decision; far more than our brains ever could.
More time, more money, and less stress? Sign me up!
Ok, to get started we won’t use any scripts that modify our accounts in any way. Instead, we will use scripts to produce actionable, useful reports and alerts which will give you an at-a-glance view to check everything is OK.
Here my 4 favourites:
Account Summary Report: https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/docs/solutions/account-summary
An at-a-glance report showing the performance of an entire AdWords account. Additionally, it sends an HTML-formatted daily email with current account statistics.Declining Adgroups Report: https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/docs/solutions/declining-adgroups
I really like this report, because it tells you at a glance information you just can’t see easily within the platform. Declining Ad Groups Report fetches ad groups whose performance Google considers to be worsening. For example: Ad groups' Click Through Rate has been decreasing for three consecutive weeks. Personally I use this report weekly to check nothing is amiss without me realizing.Account Anomoly Detector: https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/docs/solutions/account-anomaly-detector
Alerts the advertiser whenever an AdWords account is suddenly behaving too differently from what's historically observed. When an issue is encountered, the script will send the advertiser an alerting email stating “Your Adwords Account is Misbehaving”. Only a single email for an alert is sent per day.
Live Link Checker: https://developers.google.com/adwords/scripts/docs/solutions/link-checker
Live ads may be pointing to non-existent pages, meaning you end up paying for clicks that yield 404 errors. This script emails you when error responses are found, and saves the results of its analysis to a spreadsheet.
Warning: This script has a label automatically enabled so once it has completed, it labels all of your campaigns to say it has checked the links… it’s pretty easy to remove this line from the script without breaking it if you’d rather not plaster your accounts with irrelevant labels… like I did… ☺
Conclusion
Whether we like it or not, automation is creeping into our everyday lives as well as our working lives. But what has become clear to me, is that despite the day-to-day work within our accounts that must be done, time spent on creative, on strategy and on executing good copy and campaigns is far, far more lucrative than time spent pressing buttons…
In my opinion, anything the platforms can do to make our jobs easier, and reduce the heavy lifting within accounts is a good thing. It means we get to spend time adding real value to our businesses. Yep, I’m all for it!