New Google Ads Automated Rules Builder

Google Ads automated rules have been a part of the platform for as long as I can remember. And as the platform itself keeps advancing and making new iterations, they’ve been able to keep up with automated rules as well.

We’ve released videos in the past talking about Google Ads automated rules, but recently the builder has gotten a bit of a facelift. So we wanted to create a new rundown so that you can make sure that you’re still getting the most out of your automated rules on Google Ads.

Now, one thing to note for this video is that I’m going to be focusing almost exclusively on the new builder within the Google Ads interface. If you are brand new to automated rules or if you would like a refresher, I’m actually going to refer you to the video at the top of the screen right now.

It’s the previous video that we put together for automated rules, but in that, I talk a lot about the different levels within a Google Ads account that you can apply automated rules, talk about what they can do, best practices for look back windows, all of the basics and foundational best practices for automated rules. And in an effort not to duplicate a lot of the same content in this video and keep it more focused on the new builder, I’ll refer you back to that previous video for any of the basics.

So if you need that, check out that video first and then come back here and watch how the new builder works. So with that out of the way, I’m going to navigate directly to the automated rules manager within the Google Ads account, and that’s going to be up in tools and settings, and then under bulk actions, we’re going to look at rules.

This is Joe, and I’s placeholder account. So we don’t have any automated rules, but we’re going to create a handful of them in this video. The first one I want to start off with is going to be more of an evergreen type of rule where we’re going to increase or decrease our keyword-level bids based on recent performance and trying to make sure that we are optimizing toward a target CPA.

So to create a new rule, just like before, you’d come up to the Blue Plus. And here as a quick rundown of the different types of rules, which again, I would have covered more in-depth in that other video. You can create them at the campaign ad group, keyword, ad, placement, income, range, all of these different levels within the account you can create automated rules for.

But since we’re trying to do keyword-level bids, we’re going to create a keyword rule this time. I’m going to give it a quick name placeholder, and the name that I gave it hopefully will give you some insight into what we’re trying to do here. I’m going to make a number of different bid changes for a $150 target CPA within the account.

Now, if you didn’t go back and watch the previous video and you’ve used automated rules before, the first thing you’re probably thinking is bid changes for a 150 CPA. That could be a lot of different things. And that is the biggest change with the new Google Ads builder. I’m going to skip over the owner section and go right to action, where you can see here that this builder is a lot more robust than it used to be. And you can add up to five actions and then set them in the order that you want them to happen in.

So rather than having individual rules for one change within Google Ads, we can actually have a single rule that makes up to five changes in your account, all within one specific automated rule. I’ll admit when I first saw this, I was a little bit confused, but I think it is a pretty awesome adjustment from Google Ads because we now don’t have to create nearly as many automated rules in the account.

We can have all of the actions optimizing for one specific goal in a single automated rule. And this is an example of that. So the way this builder works is you can see all of the different actions that are going to be listed here. You can add and duplicate individual actions, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, but then the actual builder of all of the different criteria and levels and what the actions are, is going to be over here on the right.

So the first thing we can do is give this new action, this first line item, a name. And for my keyword bid adjustments, I’m going to make different stages of keyword bid changes based on the recent performance. So the first thing I want to do, if my target CPA is $150, if in the lookback window that I’m going to set my keywords, have had a CPA of anywhere between 25 and $50, I want to increase the bid on those by 25%, because that is drastically lower than my target CPA. I’m willing to bid more to get more aggressive.

So here’s what that would look like. The first thing I want to do is name it appropriately, so I’ll know what I’m doing here. You can see here I’ve got 25 to 50. I’m going to increase it by 25%, and then I need to decide what keywords I want to apply that to. It can either be all the keywords in the account, all the keywords in a selected campaign, or all the keywords in selected ad groups.

The default is in selected accounts. We’re only in one account. We are not in a higher-level MCC so that one is basically going to be all the keywords within this account, but the two down below allow you get a little bit more specific. So let’s just do keywords in selected campaigns and know that the keywords and selected ad groups is going to be pretty similar functionality.

Here, I get to choose which campaigns I want to adjust my keyword bids for. You can see I’ve got the drop-down of all the different campaigns that are in the account, and for right now, I’m just going to choose these two search campaigns because they’re the only two search campaigns that are eligible for this keyword bid change.

So now that I’ve decided which campaigns I want to look at keywords in, I need to set up the conditions to find those keywords that have seen $25 to $50 cost per conversion. So the first thing I want to do here is I want to change the status because it doesn’t help me to change a keyword bid on a keyword that’s paused.

So I want to look at the status only as enabled. And then, to add a condition, I’ll just click over here, and the different builder will pop up. Now I can start to filter for certain performance or conditions either at the campaign, ad, group, or keyword level. As you’ll see in each of those, it brings up a number of different high-level parent categories that I can then open up to see additional parameters down below.

For this specific example, I’m really only looking at CPA, so I need to set up a couple of different conditions. I’m going to come over here to conversions, and I want the cost per conversion to be between $25 and $50. And to do that, I need to say that it is going to be greater than $25. Need to apply that, and then I need to create another condition for the keywords that says the cost per conversion is also below $50.

So now that I’ve narrowed down to the right cost per conversion, I need to tell Google Ads what I want it to do to those keywords. So I get to choose my action. The default list will show up for enable, pause, change the bids, change final URLs, change labels, or send an email. For this instance, I want to change the bids.

We’ll scroll down a little bit, bring this editor up to the top, and like I said, I want to increase the bid by 25%. So I’m going to choose that set my 25%. And now my rule is finished. There’s no save button or anything like that. The builder will just retain the information that you’ve set up here. But as I mentioned, for this rule, I want to make a tiered approach.

So I’ve been targeting keywords that have a cost per conversion between $25 and $50. But now, I want to create a second rule that has a target CPA between 50 and $100 and increase the bids by 10%. It’s a little bit less, but the cost per conversion is still lower than my target, so I’m willing to increase the bids.

In the previous version of automated rules, at this point, you would have to set your frequency, look back window, determine who is going to be emailed and save the rule and then create a second rule. But with this new builder, we can add up to five actions in the same rule because they’re all optimizing toward the same goal.

So I can create that $50 to $100 bid increase right here in this same builder. And I’m actually going to do that by using one of the two options down here below; just going to be duplicate. So since I’m highlighted on the one rule, I have here, when I click duplicate, it’ll create a copy of that target bid increase that I have.

So the first thing I want to do is change the name to reflect the new rule that I’m going to put in place that’s now updated to say that I’m going to increase the bid only by 10% for the CPA range. But since I duplicated it, you can see here that the apply to campaigns are the same, and it retained all of the other information as well.

So I don’t need to adjust what campaigns this is applying to. All I need to do is change the parameters for the conditions and change the percentage that I want the bid to increase. So I’m going to go ahead and do that real quick.

So now I have the two actions here to increase my keyword bids if I’m anywhere from $25 to $100 cost per conversion. As I mentioned, we have up to five actions within this automated rule. And whenever I go through and manually adjust bids, I look for different ways to increase my keyword bid. But I’m also going to look for places to decrease keyword bids for target CPAs that are above my goal.

So in this instance, I’m going to add a third layer here, and rather than using duplicate, we’ll just create a new one from scratch by clicking Add. Any time you click Add, it just starts over from the very beginning. So just a heads up on that one, and the first thing I’m going to do is give this new action a name. And just like before, the name is going to be descriptive of the parameters and the action that I’m going to take.

And then when I come down to apply to since I want to apply it to the same campaigns as the other actions in this rule, Google is actually going to retain that information. So when I click keywords and selected campaigns, it automatically defaults to the ones that are used in the other rule, so you don’t have to look them up specifically again, which is really convenient if you’re doing more than two campaigns for your rule.

Same thing here, I want to use just enabled keywords, and then I’m going to set a condition where the cost per conversion is over 200. And I want to make sure that we have at least one conversion in place. Lastly, I need to set the action. This time I still want to change the keyword bids, but now I want to decrease the bids by 15%. Now I have all my parameters set in place.

The one thing that I do want to call out is you can see up here that you can set the order with which these actions happen. In this instance, there’s really no overlap of these different criteria. So it doesn’t matter which one runs first, really.

But if you do have something that needs to be set up in a specific way, you can just come over here, hover over the two lines, you’ll see the grid pop up, and then you can drag and drop these rules in whatever order you want them to. That way, the decreased bid will happen first, and then bids will be increased after that.

But you’ll notice that when I did that, it defaulted all of the settings for that action right back to the beginning, and it erased everything that I had. Now, I don’t know if that is specifically a glitch in my account today or if that is considered a feature of this new automated rules process, but it is something I wanted to call out because that would be quite a pain. If you set up highly sophisticated conditions and actions and then just by changing the order, you erased all that work.

So this is my public service announcement for you to map out all of the different actions that you want to take, all of the different criteria you have in place. But more specifically, think about the order that you want them to happen in because if you start to move things around, the criteria is going to disappear.

Since this is just a placeholder account, these keywords aren’t actually running. None of this matters. I’m actually not going to go through and fix all the criteria for this rule, but instead, I’m going to close out and get the rest of this stuff set up.

So the first is frequency. If you watched the previous video, you already have a rundown of this. But given the fact that I want this rule to run regularly and I’m increasing and decreasing bids, I want to make sure that I’m not duplicating changes on the same set of data. So what I’m going to do is set this to be a weekly change. It can run on Sunday at 08:00 a.m., that’s fine. And then, the data that I want to use is only going to be from the last seven days.

That way, each week, whatever new fresh data has come in, I’m only adjusting the bids based on that performance and not back over the past 30, 60, 90 days on a weekly basis. You can then determine what you want your email results to be, whether you want to get them regularly or not so much.

And then, once you’re set up with that, all you need to do is click Save Rule, and it’ll show up in your library. Now, for those of you who are paying really close attention, because I didn’t fix that one action, it gave me an error, so I just deleted it. So you’ll notice that there are only two line items in this description here, but this is another change from the previous automated rules builder. Is that the description itself?

This column will give you a rundown of what the individual actions are within the automated rule that you just built. If you hover over one of them, you can see the name of the action, the exact criteria, and the action that it’s going to take place. This is a very helpful overview so that you don’t have to go into the builder to make adjustments and understand what’s going on.

As of the recording of this video, we are well into the holiday season of 2022, and I know there are a lot of times where promotions will change, and ad messaging needs to change to be able to support that, and budgets need to be adjusted based on where we’re trying to lean in.

So I want to give a couple quick high-level ideas of how you can use these automated rules to make sure that your holiday ads are in line for whatever promotions you have coming up through the remainder of the season.

So, as I mentioned, you might need to change your ad copy messaging. So I want to give an example of that. So let’s go ahead and come up here and create an Add Rule. Again, we’re going to give it a quick name, and then I’m going to scroll down to the Action Builder down here. Now, when you need to turn on holiday promotion ads, there are two things that need to happen. You usually need to turn on the holiday ads, and you need to turn off the original ads.

So I’ve already created some labels in a sample campaign in this account that will help us do just that. And I personally like using labels for this because they’re very easy to customize. Choose exactly which ones you want and then adjust later on if need be.

So I’m going to go ahead and give this action a name. I’m going to narrow down only to the Halloween campaign that’s in here because that’s where I put my labels, and it’s a holiday, even if it’s not the one we’re talking about. In this instance, I’m going to leave enabled versus paused because you never know when an ad group might get paused or enabled during a holiday season.

So it’s best to make sure that you’re doing this in all ad groups just to cover your bases. And then, for my condition, I’m going to choose labels or label singular. And since I’m activating the holiday ads, I’m going to choose this one because that is the holiday promotion. So I’m going to click Apply. And now, I need to tell it that the action I want to have is to enable the ads.

As I mentioned, at the same time, I also need to pause the original ads that are in that same ad group. Since most of my criteria are going to be pretty much the exact same, I’m just going to click Duplicate, but then I’m going to change the name so that we’re now going to pause the original ads. I’m still narrowed down to Halloween, doesn’t matter if the ad group is already paused or enabled. And then, for label, I just need to click here.

And now, I need to check the box next to Original and uncheck it next to Holiday Promo, click Apply, and then change the action to Pause. Now, all of my ads are going to be paused or active in the way that I need them to be to reflect the right messaging. But the frequency, rather than being a regular occurrence, is actually just going to be once.

So let’s say this is going to take place on December 1. Scroll down a little bit, and I want it to happen first thing in the morning. So anybody looking is going to be able to see the ads right away. For this type of change, the data that I’m using doesn’t really matter because I’m not making an adjustment based on data. I’m just making it on messaging.

So I’ll just leave it as all time and then I can scroll down and save the rule. Now, unlike the keyword level change that we made here, where we can increase and decrease bids at the same time. For this type of change, where we’re pausing and enabling ads for the holiday start, we cannot forget to create a second rule to reverse the change that we just made.

In this instance, we’re enabling the holiday ads and pausing the regular ones, but since you can only set a rule to run one time with one date associated with it in the frequency column over here, you can’t have the ads turned on to holiday messaging and then reverted in the same rule.

So if we wanted to set an automated rule to turn the holiday ads OFF and the original ones back ON, we would need to create an identical rule to this one that we just made but reverse the actions that were in place. We would turn ON the originals and turn OFF the holiday ads.

So even though the automated rule builder has gotten a lot more advanced, and you can do a number of different actions within the same rule, you still have to make sure that you have all of your automated rules thawed out from start to finish. And you’re not just setting things to turn on, but not turn off as they need to be. And you’re not only increasing bids and not decreasing them, all those types of things.

Overall, automated rules are only getting more powerful. In my opinion, we haven’t lost any functionality. If anything, we’ve gained it. Rather than utilizing a rule to create an individual action the way that we used to, I now see individual automated rules as optimizing toward a single goal rather than only executing one action toward that goal.

For instance, to turn ON holiday ads, there are two different actions that I needed to take. For instance, to turn ON holiday ads, I needed to both enable and pause different sets of ads. In the prior version of automated rules, I would have had two rules that did this. Same thing with the keyword bid adjustments rather than having three different rules, which, again, I know it doesn’t show the third decrease bid here because it threw an error, but just imagine with me that it’s in there.

Rather than having three individual rules to optimize for our target CPA, we have all of those three actions within the same rule. So if you’ve been using automated rules for a while, you might need to shift your perspective on them and not think about them as individual actions but think about them as optimizations toward a goal that have multiple actions that can lead toward that goal.

So each rule should be a high-level objective that you’re trying to reach that has actions that fill that out. If you’re brand new to automated rules and you don’t have that previous mindset to get past, congratulations! You’ve started off with a pretty good set of automated rules and a pretty awesome builder, in my opinion.

But again, don’t forget to go back and watch that previous video that I talk about more of the foundational pieces and some of the best practices just to make sure that you don’t use this new fancy builder and get yourself tied up into some problems.

If you have any questions about the new automated rule builder or any of the best practices for automated rules, or, quite frankly, anything else that has to do with Paid Media, please leave us a note in the comments below.

Written by Michelle Morgan