The Google Ads Automated Rules Setting That Can Screw Up Everything

11/19/19

Automated rules are good for situations where you know you’re going to need to make changes at some point in the future based on some criteria like performance or time. For example, you might increase or decrease a bid on a keyword if it meets certain performance thresholds. Or you might want to pause campaigns during a holiday and re-enable them the next day.

Recently, I ran into a situation where I wanted to use them, but things didn’t work out. The account I was working with was having a one-day sale and we wanted to serve messaging for that one day only in ads to people. So I created the new ads and paused them since the sale wasn’t starting until midnight. Then, I set up automated rules to pause the evergreen ads at midnight and enable the sale ads. Then, I set up rules to reverse it at midnight the next day when the sale had ended.

When I went back to check the next day that everything was back to normal, I noticed my sale ads had been paused, but my evergreen ads were not re-enabled. What? Why not? Setting these rules up isn’t that complicated.

So I went back and checked where my mistake was and found out that there’s a setting that, if you don’t pay attention to it, will cause you to mess up this process.

Watch this video below to see what happened and how you can avoid the same mistake…

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Mike Fleming

Mike Fleming is a Director of Paid Media at Granular, and has been managing PPC accounts of all kinds for over 10 years; with a strong emphasis in Analytics and Conversion Optimization. He’s a respected digital marketing blogger and speaker whose articles can be found on industry blogs like SEMRush.com and SearchEngineGuide.com. He also contributed to a published book called The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!. Mike enjoys playing, writing and recording music, playing basketball and investing. He resides in Canton, Ohio with a girl who threw a snowball at him one day…then married him.