Find anomalies in your campaign spending with this Google Ads script

Contributor Daniel Gilbert shares a customizable script that lets you check for overspending or underspending in your Google Ads account by finding changes in spending.

Have you ever had a campaign spend a touch more than expected and taken a too long to spot it? No one likes to catch their campaigns underspending, let alone overspending, but even pay-per-click (PPC) superheroes aren’t entirely infallible. If a change or issue pops up, it’s best to be warned about it sooner rather than later!

Here’s a customizable script that will let you check for unusual behavior in your account by finding changes in spending. It takes the average spend of individual campaigns during a selected time period and compares it to the spend on the day the script runs. If the spend on the current day is higher than it was by a specified percentage, it will send out an alert email.

There are many ways to modify this script to satisfy your needs. For example, you can tell the script what percentage change threshold should be met so an email alert is sent. This way, you will know when there is an increase or decrease in spending.  You can choose the number of days the script covers to create an average of historic spend (the default time period is a week). You can pick the time of day when the script starts gathering data to alert you, and you can set a minimum value to avoid being warned about small changes in campaigns that are historically low-spending.

How the script works

Let’s get started and see how this works.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]