Managing ad campaigns can be pretty tedious, especially when your time is spent making the same campaign changes on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. Luckily, AdWords and Bing Ads offer a way to automate your tedious campaign tasks using rules to automatically make optimizations for you.

In this week’s #PPCPodcast (now The PPC Show ), we chatted with Stephanie White, Account Manager at Hanapin Marketing, about automating PPC account management.

Before White was PPC master at Hanapin Marketing, she was an entrepreneur starting her own jewelry business back in 1999. In 2004, instead of hiring a marketing specialist, White took it upon herself to learn profitable online marketing. These self-taught skills, ranging from web design to email marketing to PPC advertising, led her down a fruitful career working with talented marketers from ReachLocal, John Eagle Dealerships, and now Hanapin Marketing.

Check out Stephanie's 5 best AdWords Automated Rules for every PPC account. Read on to learn how she uses automated rules to save time, money, and sanity.

What the Heck are Automated Rules?

Automated Rules are a series of actions you can choose to automatically perform across your ppc campaigns. To run these Automated Rules, you’ll need to define what conditions must be met for the rule to fire and apply these automatic changes to your account. Use rules to make changes to your ad statuses, budgets, bids, keywords and more.

PPC managers are under a lot of pressure to deliver results...quickly; clients’ increasing demand for deeper campaign performance analysis and insights combined with growing paid search and social platforms. The ability to automatically perform routine tasks, means you spend less time manually monitoring each campaign’s metrics and more time focusing on ppc strategy and optimizing growth opportunities.

Learn How Inflow Used Automated Rules to Grow Client Revenue by 23% and Saw 31% Decrease in Cost Per Acquisition

The 5 Best Automated Rules for Every PPC Account

1. Increase or Decrease Budget on Specific Date/Time

Use this rule if you either have additional budget you need to spend by a particular date OR if you want to automate increases or decreases to your budget on the first of the month.

2. Schedule Promotions to Run During a Set Time Period

Create an automated rule to adjust CPC bids for a particular ad group. This will come in handy when you build promotional campaigns for the holiday season.

In your ad group, you want to include keyword combinations for your product and any holiday terms. For example: Black Friday car deals, New Years car sales, Happy Honda Days, Christmas car deals, etc. Use a rule to automatically enable this ad group 2 weeks before the sale and end 1 week after.

For B2B clients: Be wary of the times you choose to schedule your ad campaigns

• B2Bs should schedule campaigns to run only during business hours. But if there is a weekend event your target audience will be attending, schedule your ad campaigns to run during the event’s timeframe.
• If you need to spend budget quickly, consider creating a rule to increase budget and schedule your campaign to run constantly for a short burst of time. Analyze the data and see what happens

3. Reduce Bids for Keywords with a High Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Save time manually adjusting bids with a rule that will automatically reduce bids for keywords with extremely high CPA, but have zero conversions.

4. Increase Bids for Converting Keywords Below First-Page Bids

This is a great rule to have in your time-saver toolbox.

Let’s say you have a keyword with high conversions, but just dropped below first-page bid. You can create a rule to automatically apply a 10% bid increase to all keywords that have over 10 conversions with more than 50 impressions and quality score greater than 5.

5. Set Up Email Alerts for Drastic Changes in Your Campaigns

Avoid ppc account surprises with performance-based email alerts that fire based on your most valuable KPIs. You can stay ahead of the curve with email alerts that notify you of any drastic changes to your account, campaigns, ad groups, ads, or keywords.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully you’re now able to set up, test, and iterate on these automated rules to save you time and money.

These rules are intended to make your ppc life easier because you won’t have to spend so much time doing the manual ppc account tasks, your time can be better spent thinking about your overarching ppc account strategy and how to optimize campaign performance.

For more PPC automation tips, listen to the entire PPC Podcast episode below!