Skillful making a campaign profitable requires a lot of commitment, time and concentration. Those of us, who are blessed with a small, clear campaign will see only a bit use in the optimization of their AdWords campaign. After a while it will be impossible to keep a clear overview of all your search words and advertisement groups. Even the most simple campaign structures will find out it's impossible to consequently maintain a campaign for thousands of webshop products by hand. The solution of Google to get the best out of it?

"Automated rules"

What are automated rules?

In principle, automated rules are simple "if-then" rules. They can be periodically performed from your Adwords account. You can go to the "Search words" tab page in your Adwords account to set these rules.

A few examples of automated rules are:

• "If average position > 4 then increase Max. CPC bid with X %"
• "If CPA > $5,- then decrease Max. CPC with X%"
• "If Bouncerate> X% then pause search word"

You can specify which criteria search words have to meet to be eligible for an automated rule. You can indicate from which period the data for an automated rule have to be and how often these have to be performed.

Are there any risks or disadvantages about using automated rules?

In one word: Yes!

Like always it seems too good to be true. A couple of rules and your account automatically becomes profitable! Not. There are a couple of well hidden pitfalls whereby it can go very wrong. And you can break many things without noticing it because an automated rule does not warn you when something goes wrong.

Significant data

Automated rules do not make any separation between significant and insignificant data. Decisions for the optimization of search words and advertisement groups can be made based on significant data. An automated rule who is set to raise search words with a high conversion percentage in Max. CPC bid will do this for search words with 10000 clicks as with search words with only 1 click and 1 conversion.

The 0 conversions pitfall

An ultimate dangerous pitfall is hidden behind rules whereby a CPA criteria is abandoned to raise search words that meet these requirements in Max. CPC bid. This rule can look, for example, like this:

"If costs/conv. (many-per-click) < $5,- than raise Max. CPC bid with 20%"

On first sight this looks quite easy. All search words who meet the CPA aim of $5,- and so are profitable, become raised in Max. CPC in order to get more clicks.

Unfortunately Google has determined that all search words with 0 conversions get a CPA of 0. This happens even though these search words, in theory, should have an undetermined CPA. As a result, this automated rule will raise the Max. CPC of all search words who did not get any conversion, with 20%. This is not really what we expected.

Which automated rules can we recommend?

If you wish to make use of automated rules, the first you could do is setting a couple of email alerts to be warned timely in case of any errors in your campaign.

Btw, for the use of the following recommendations, the conversion-tracking must be set and your campaign must already have a regular stream of conversions. It's also important to have set an CPA aim by determining your profit margins etc. Besides, the given values below are just a rough recommendation. Your specific section and campaign determine if you would do better using higher or lower values for requirements, frequency, etc.

Email alerts to warn for mistakes:

Sending email for search words when:

• Requirements:
  • Costs/Conv. (many) > 1.5 times your CPA aim.
  • Costs > 1 x CPA aim (or another amount which is in relation to the daily budget, like 2% of the budget)
• Frequency:
  • Daily with the use of the data of the previous day.
  • Weekly with the use of the data of the previous week.
• The aim of this email alert is that you are warned for search words who make high costs and convert bad.

Sending email for search words when:

• Requirements:
  • Conversions = 0
  • Costs > 1.5 x CPA aim
• Frequency:
  • Daily with the use of data of the previous day.
  • Weekly with the use of the data of the previous week.
• The aim of this second email alert is that you are warned for not-converting, expensive search words. The reason why this second alert is necessary for this and why it does not belong to the first email alert is the "0 conversions pitfall" and the way in which Google appreciates the CPA of search words with zero conversions.

Automated rules to optimize your campaign.

This is where the real work starts. The following rules will automate a large part of the optimization work.

Interrupting search words when:

• Requirements:
  • Conversions = 0
  • Costs > 1 x CPA aim
• Frequency:
  • Weekly with the use of data of the previous week.
• The aim of this automated rule is pausing search words with zero conversions but who do cost a lot. Something is clearly wrong with these search words and only after inspection by hand these can be activated again.

Lower Max. CPC bid with 20%

• Requirements:
  • Costs/Conversion (much) > 1.2 x CPA aim
  • Clicks > 100
• Frequency:
  • Weekly with the use of data of the previous week.
• The aim of this rule is to lower the Max. CPC bid for search words who convert bad and collected significant data within one week. These are middle and high volume search words. The amount of clicks needed to reach significance is to discuss.

Raise Max. CPC bid with 10%

• Requirements:
  • Costs/Conversion (many) < 0.8 x CPA aim
  • Clicks > 100
  • Conversions (many) > 1
• Frequency:
  • Weekly with the use of data of the previous week.
• The aim of this rule is to raise the Max. CPC bid of search words who convert well and have collected significant data within one week. The reason for the extra requirement: conversions (many) > 1 is to get around the "0 conversions pitfall".

Lower Max. CPC bid with 10%.

• Requirements:
  • Costs/Conversion (many) > 1.2 x CPA aim
  • Clicks > 100
  • Clicks < 400
• Frequency:
  • Monthly with the use of data of the previous month.
• The aim of this rule is to lower the Max. CPC bid of search words who convert bad and have collected significant data only after one month. These are search words of low search volume. The requirement “Clicks <400” makes sure that search words who have a middle or high search volume and are adapted weekly, are as much neglected by rules 2 and 3 as possible to prevent overlap.

Raise Max. CPC bid with 10%

• Requirements: Costs/Conversion (much) < 0.8 x CPA aim Clicks > 100 Clicks < 400 Conversions (much) > 0
• Frequency: Monthly with the use of data of the previous month.
• The aim of this rule is to raise the Max. CPC bid of search words who convert well and have collected significant data only after one month.

Which search words stay behind?

Even after creating these automated rules, there will still be search words who can't catch up with the others. We are talking about the extreme long-tail search words. Even after a month they didn't collect any significant data and they will not be optimized by any of these rules. For these search words we need a smart optimization. However, this can be done reasonably fast by treating them all as one group and making decisions on the combined data. To control the last group of search words a little bit better, the following email alert will probably be helpful:

Sending email for search words when:

• Requirements:
  • Impressions > 1000
  • Clicks < 100
• Frequency:
  • Monthly with the use of data of the previous month.

The aim of this email alert? Warning you for search words without enough clicks but who did get a reasonable amount of impressions. These search words are not optimized by any of the above shown automated rules. A large amount of impressions in combination with the low amount of clicks means problems. The advertisement text could be erroneous. It could be that the search word has a second definition which is used more often.