A Google Script that creates your blacklists websites? Count me in!

Have you heard of Google Ads Scripts? Well, if you haven’t, let me do a quick summary for you: You know how every day you wake up, have a cup of coffee, and run the same usual checks on your different ad campaigns, and then proceed to make the necessary corrections? For example, you see that a certain Ad has been receiving more clicks than another, so you go ahead and increase its online presence, or you see that certain keywords haven’t really been searched for so much, so you remove them, among many other changes you can make. Google Ads Scripts is a tool developed by Google Ads to help you skip that tedious task, and run your checks and corrections for you. 

Basically, Google Ads Scripts provides a way to programmatically control your Google Ads data by using really simple JavaScript in a browser-based IDE, a.k.a, you have to learn a little of a simple software language in order to develop them and, once you do, they are a great feature to automate a lot of the processes that you’d take care of yourself. But wait! What if you are just like me and have absolutely no software nor tech capabilities, but still would love to save some time in your everyday checks? Well, then don’t sweat it because Google also has a bunch of pre-written scripts, whose code you just have to copy and paste to your campaigns in order to implement them. So you can browse through Google Scripts library (which is literally a catalog of different options for you to optimize your campaigns), and choose the one that best suits you. That way, you can take advantage of this great feature, without even having to spend hours crying for the lack of programmatic ability, yay!

Google Scripts provide a variety of benefits such as saving time in tedious tasks (since you won’t have to be checking the same things every day anymore), invest it in other stuff, avoiding mistakes (because basically, you’ll have a super certain code ready to check everything and not miss one thing), and well, of course, the reality where you don’t have to be 24/7 on top of your ads because you have someone else doing it for you. And all of that without even having to develop the script yourself! 

So today, we’ll be talking about one specific script that Google has developed, but that it requires a little bit of background. One of the things that matters the most when launching our ads campaigns it’s, obviously, who is actually going to see these ads. Meaning, where will these ads be placed, and how we’ll get them there. However, another very important thing to consider, especially when you are trying to stay on the good side of Google, is where your ads will absolutely not be placed, hence, blacklists websites to prevent your ads from being placed there.

We’ve recently been talking about how Google added a feature for you to import blacklists of websites created by external tools, and how useful that was in order to properly place your ads and avoid having them in random websites that had nothing to do with your target audience or might even damage your image. So the fact that Google allowed users to import these lists of websites from tools that created them automatically through different types of algorithms was definitely an awesome improvement in order to make the whole advertising process much easier. 

But now, they’ve taken one more step forward down that path and created a script that automatically creates blacklists for you. This script allows you to automatically identify and exclude placements that just aren’t providing the results you’d expect on your ads. It is called “Automatic Placement Exclusion”, and it consists of having the user define a couple of rules, and then apply them in order to place their ads correctly. For example, if an ad is not clicked more than 10 times a day on a website, exclude the website from my list of possible placements (of course, in a bit more technical language). And just like that, you paste the source code, implement it to your campaigns, and remove the websites that are doing no good to your campaigns. 

Personally, I believe scripts are a great alternative when it comes to campaign automation and optimization, and that they can do great things for saving your time, and energy. In this particular case, a script meant to avoid websites that don’t work for your campaign sounds like a great idea to me because, not only it helps protect your brand and budget, but it also makes sure that you don’t miss anything because it is literally Google who is taking care of it. Managed placements can be a tricky business, so pretty much any tool, feature, or algorithm that can help make it easier is a “yes” for me. 

In conclusion, the bottom line is quite simple: Are you ready to learn a little bit of software language in order to do great improvements to your campaign? Including making sure your ads are only featured on websites that work for them? Even if you have difficulties facing the tech world, just as I am, I can guarantee that this feature has a lot to benefit from, in exchange for a software language that even I could conquer.

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