If you are like many entrepreneurs, you no doubt have a very difficult time finding the time for time-consuming tasks like social media and AdWords management. You’d rather focus on the things you’re good at, like making great products, or even just marketing your business through more traditional means (you know, the stuff you actually understand).

Fortunately, for those of you who can’t stand AdWords management and/or can’t afford to hire someone to manage your account for you, Google released a great new feature recently called: “automated rules.”

What are automated rules?

Glad you asked! Automated rules are actions that the AdWords interface carries out based on conditions you set. So let’s give an example considering that was a real mouthful:

Suppose you’d like to pause all keywords that have resulted in a conversion rate of less than 1% after 1,000 clicks. No problem. Set up the automated rule and AdWords will pause all keyword that meet that condition at a specified time each day.

Or suppose you would like to delete all ad with a CTR < 2% after 200 impressions. Set up the automated rule, and you’re done.

Isn’t that great? This saves so much time, which is exactly what us busy entrepreneurs could use more of. Oh, and did I mention how easy it is to set up?

How to setup automated rules

From the campaigns tab, click the “automate” button above your list of campaigns.

Next, choose the rule type you’d like to use.

You can see that you have plenty of options here. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we choose the first option: “Change daily budget when…”

I’m not going to go into the details of the settings here, but you can see how powerful this tool can be. There are ample conditions to set, giving you endless combinations that will have your AdWords account(s) working like a machine without you having to do too much.

Don’t just sit back and relax though

I have to mention this because like all things, automated rules aren’t perfect. You do have to check from time to time to make sure everything is working as it’s supposed to. While this means that you will have to do a little management, it is way better than spending several hours a day tweaking campaigns to make sure they meet the conditions you want.

So what’s a good way to check to make sure everything is running the way you want it to run? Good question. First, click the automated rules “tab” on the left side of the interface.

From here, you will see a handy log that reports all the changes that have been made to your account from the rules you set. It will look something like this:

You can see that this account is pretty low maintenance . However, that’s because I’ve set pretty lenient rules. Which segues nicely into the next section…

What conditions should I set for my rules?

Now this is a subjective topic, and of course varies from account to account. But I will give you some guidelines that I follow that will help you determine your own conditions for automated rules in Google AdWords.

First, let me refer you to a great post by the folks over at PPC hero: 6 Quick Tips for Optimizing PPC Campaigns.

Here is a process I like to follow myself:

Determine average revenue per order/per lead

Obviously this is easier to do if you a) operate and e-commerce site and b) already have sufficient online sales data, but you can assign a value to anything, even leads. The other great thing about using this number as a starting point is that this number will be smaller than the lifetime average revenue of a customer. So say I sell toothpaste, and my average order size is $60…if I’m looking to grow, I probably won’t want to spend more than $60 on anything to get an order. So with that in mind…

Pause keywords that produce no conversions after average order size

($60) is spent

Now obviously this isn’t perfect, especially if you’re in a very competitive market with high CPCs. In cases like these, you might want to set a rule for the conversion rate instead. Say, after 100 clicks the conversion rate is less than 2%, ditch the keyword. But hey, if you’re operating on a shoestring budget, setting strict rules like the aforementioned may not be a bad idea.

Delete ads that have low CTR after X number of impressions

I like the condition PPC Hero recommends: <1% after 200 impressions. In fact, I’d even recommend tightening this up a bit and going for <3% after 200 impressions. It’s really up to you.

However, if you really focus on improving your CTR, your quality scores will also improve. With better QS, you will have a lower overall CPC, and therefore get a bigger bang for you buck with the account. So I’d say this is a pretty important rule to implement.

Increase bid for ads that fall below the top 3 positions

Those top 3 positions are pretty valuable. I mean, wouldn’t you rather click something at the top of the page than one at the side? I’m also pretty sure I’ve read numerous studies showing that the top positions are the most valuable. But hey, before taking my word for it, test it out yourself. Just make sure you are keeping ad positions in mind when setting up automated rules, they definitely have some significance.

The future of automated rules

While I think this is a great start by the Google AdWords team, there are some things I predict and hope will be available in the future.

1. Negative keyword additions

I would love it if Google could eventually predict what is not relevant to our landing pages. Clearly, adding negative keywords is one of the most important parts of optimizing a PPC account, so this would be an amazing feature.

2. Landing page tweaks and A/B tests

If Google could automatically setup A/B tests and/or make variations to your landing pages without you having to do anything, that would be pretty awesome. But I’m guessing this is pretty far down the line, and I’m not sure many entrepreneurs would want to yield this much control.

What are your thoughts?

Have you tried automated rules yet? What do you think of it? How about the conditions I’ve recommended? Agree? Disagree? Please share in the comments section below!

 

 

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