This script was built to mitigate AdWord's recent change in the way daily budgets are handled. It should insure that the actual spend of a campaign on any given day is close to its daily budget.
The only part of the script that needs to be modified is the label you'll be using to limit the script to specific campaigns:
// Define your own label here
.withCondition("LabelNames CONTAINS_ANY ['Active']")This insures that inactive campaigns don't suddenly start running again.
You'll also want to schedule the script to run hourly.
- Adwords scripts can only run once an hour.
- This means that the actual spend of a campaign can still go over its daily budgets.
- However, in the vast majority of cases, it should pause the campaign before it spends twice its daily budget.
- This script has been tested in accounts with 10s of campaigns.
- There is a good chance it times out if it runs at the MCC level or in accounts with many 100s/1000s of campaigns.
While I understand why a tool like this one is necessary to certain advertisers due to limited budgets or non-monthly flighted campaigns, Andrew McGarry made some very good points as to why this might be going against Google's vision for AdWords.
There's no denying that this change could have been better advertised and that Google could have given us a transition period to educate clients/stakeholders. That being said, the features they have been adding in recent months/years have been pointing towards the increased role of automation in PPC campaign management. Furthermore, their algorithm-based products (universal app campaigns, smart bidding options) have been getting noticeably better recently.