With an uncertain economic outlook, now is a good time for advertisers to make sure their technology stack includes the right tools and automation to save money in the long term.
Google ad scripts should be part of everyone’s toolkit, especially given that many scripts are freely available.
In addition to many free scripts in the best lists such as this And thisHere’s a brand new script for you to try.
I wrote this with my team to give advertisers a new way to control ad spend on the Display Network.
Ways to save money on Google Ads
Advertisers are always looking for an edge over their competitors, and a good way to level the playing field is to spend less on the same results. This means finding and eliminating wasted ad spend.
Common ways to eliminate wasteful spend are to add negative keywords, restrict match types, and add negative placements.
Here’s how to handle each of these methods manually:
- Add negative keywords – Search for ideas by searching the ideas search terms reports.
- Restrict match types – If you’re not using automatic bids, play it safe with your keywords and rely on exact match and phrase match more than broad match.
- Add negative positions – Look at your automatic placement reports to find non-converting placements that are eating up your budget.
Find Google Ads placement exceptions
The web is growing rapidly, which means there are more places every day your ads may appear when you participate in the Google Display Network (GDN).
exist More than 36,000 applications have been added to the Apple App Store every month, and there Over 250,000 new websites Fire every day. While not all of them join the Google Display Network, with this level of growth, it’s hard to keep up with the placement exceptions.
Unless you want to play a constant game of whack-a-mole and manually review new placements as they come in, you need to identify trends that are associated with low performance and use technology to help eliminate traffic from those types of placements.
Google provides several ways to be proactive Prevent Google Display Network ads from appearing In places you don’t like.
Exceptions can be based on:
- Sensitive topics – such as pages dealing with tragedy, conflict or sensational news.
- Digital Content Posters Similar to movie ratings, but for locations.
- Types of video content – Like live broadcasts or videos embedded outside of YouTube.
The script shared in this post provides another way to exclude placements.
While it can’t preemptively block all impressions, it can add a negative placement as soon as a new placement is detected in the automatic placement report.
Placement reports
The script analyzes the details of all placements in the placement details report.
This is the query you can use with it GAQLthe Google Ads query language, to find placements:
Select display_mode_details_display_name,_details_mode_display.mode,details_mode_in and_mode_type,details_mode_display.
The data might look like this when exported to a Google Spreadsheet:
Note that the position on line 12 in the screenshot uses Arabic script for the video’s name.
This is what this script will look for and add as a negative placement.
If your language uses non-Latin script, you can simply change the settings and allow your ad to appear in a position such as on line 12 and exclude all other sites that use the Latin character set.
Language targeting on the Google Display Network
You might wonder why advertisers don’t simply use language targeting to prevent their ads from appearing next to content that uses different text in their language.
The problem is that when you target a language, it’s not a very strict standard. The user will match the target language as long as they interacted with an app or website in that language recently.
This does not mean that they should see a site or video in this language when viewing your ad.
On the Google Display Network, Google Ads may detect and examine the language of pages or apps that someone is viewing or has viewed recently, to determine which ads to display.
So if a user reads some English webpages with Latin script but spends most of their time reading sites with Thai characters, they may still see ads targeting the English language.
This script fixes this by making the targeting stricter.
It gives advertisers extra control, and that’s usually welcome in an age of increasing automation from ad engines, and it’s something I wrote an entire book about this year.
Target Unicode characters with Google Ads script
Similar to language targeting, you can use ad scripts to detect when an ad has been shown in a position with a heading using a different Unicode character set and exclude that placement from showing your ad again.
Here’s what the script does.
You’ll find cases where your ad is shown with a video, app or website whose content is in a different character set than you want.
Then the script excludes positions whose names are not in the required character set.
For example, a placement titled ‘Create a Google Adwords account for beginners and how to link with the channel Google Adwords |’ YouTube Profit Treasure ‘uses Arabic script instead of the Latin character set, and can be made a negative placement.
Use this technique with caution though.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with showing your ad to users of their own language with different text. For example, they might see your ad because they got into your remarketing list and are actually very good leads.
So how does this ad text find placements using non-Latin characters?
Depends on identification Unicode character Combinations, a way for computers to display the different characters associated with different alphabets.
I am familiar with the A to Z alphabet used in English as well as in my native language, Dutch, and this is called the Latin alphabet. But many languages use completely different characters, such as Hebrew, Thai, Japanese (hiragana), etc.
Unicode is the way computers encode these different characters.
In Google Ads scripts, which are closely related to javascript, we can use the regex function to detect what the Unicode character set character is.
Text
Copy and paste all the text from the code on the link into a new Google Ads script, first deleting all sample code with which the new script is loaded.
Here’s a video explaining how to use the script.
Script settings
After copying and pasting the text into an individual Google Ads account, tell it which Unicode character sets you want your ads to be allowed to appear for, eg Latin.
Then name the common placement exclusion list that the script should use for new negative placements that it detects.
After previewing the script, you will see that a new shared exclusion list has been created.
If there are ad placements whose titles use a disallowed Unicode character set, those placements will be added as negative placements to the newly created shared exclusion list.
conclusion
Two things that many advertisers love are saving money and taking back control of automated systems.
Scripts like the one in this post help you do both.
If you have an idea for a script that could help a lot of advertisers, please reach out to me.
This text came about because someone asked me to help him with his idea.
More resources:
- Free Google Ads to dynamically change target ROAS
- 3 scripts to automate Google Ads reporting in spreadsheets
- Top 10 Pay Per Click Trends To Know In 2022
Featured image: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock
