Google Ads scripts are small pieces of JavaScript that run against your account on a schedule. They are unglamorous, largely unloved, and a handful of them catch the expensive problems that otherwise go unnoticed for weeks.
The useful ones share a shape: they watch for something going wrong and tell a human. The ones that disappoint try to make optimisation decisions automatically, which is work the bidding algorithms already do better.
Broken landing page checks
This is the single highest-value script most accounts are missing. It walks every active final URL and reports anything returning a 404, a redirect chain or a server error. A landing page that breaks after a website change keeps costing money at full rate until somebody notices, and the failure is invisible in the ad reporting because clicks and impressions look perfectly normal.
Run it daily. The cost of a false alarm is a minute of attention; the cost of missing it is a week of spend pointed at a dead page.
Budget and spend anomaly alerts
Spend rarely doubles for a good reason you did not already know about. An alert that fires when daily cost, cost per conversion or conversion volume moves beyond a threshold catches auction shifts, tracking breakages and accidental setting changes on the day they happen rather than in the monthly review.
Set the thresholds from your own variance rather than from a round number. An account that normally swings thirty percent day to day will produce constant noise at a twenty percent trigger, and a noisy alert gets ignored within a fortnight, which is worse than not having it.
Search term monitoring
A script that surfaces new search terms above a spend threshold with no conversions turns the negative keyword review from an archaeology exercise into a short weekly list. It does not decide anything; it just puts the candidates in front of you, which is the part that otherwise never gets done.
This matters more since broad match became genuinely broad. The negative list is now the main constraint on what your ads can appear against, and it needs maintaining rather than setting once.
The scripts that survive are the ones that email a person when something is wrong. The ones that get switched off within a month are the ones that quietly changed bids and nobody could explain the result.
Olivia Grant, Head of Paid Media, Media @ Marsons
Ad and asset disapproval alerts
Disapprovals happen quietly and can take an ad group out of rotation without any obvious signal in the topline numbers, particularly in a large account where one paused group hides in the average. A daily check that lists newly disapproved assets is a small script that prevents a specific and recurring kind of silent loss.
What is usually not worth it
- Automated bid adjustment scripts. Smart bidding already does this with far more signal than a script has access to.
- Automated pausing of “underperforming” keywords, which usually fires on statistically meaningless samples.
- Elaborate reporting scripts that rebuild what the interface already shows, and then need maintaining forever.
- Anything that writes changes without leaving a record you can read later.
The pattern is consistent: scripts that observe are durable, scripts that act tend to be either redundant or dangerous. If a script does change something, it should log what it changed and why, or the account history becomes unreadable.
Run them on a schedule somebody actually reads
A script emailing an address nobody monitors is worse than no script, because it creates the impression of coverage. Send alerts to a person by name, review the frequency after a month, and delete any alert that has never once prompted an action.
Maintenance is the hidden cost
Scripts break when Google changes its API, and they break silently. Check quarterly that each one still executes without errors, and treat an unexplained gap in alerts as a failure of the script rather than as an unusually quiet period.
For how this fits with the wider account work, the PPC hub indexes the market and sector pages.
Want the monitoring without the maintenance?
We run these checks across accounts we manage, so a broken landing page or a budget overrun surfaces the same day rather than at month end.
