Use automated rules in your manager account to make automatic changes to your client accounts' campaigns based on conditions that you select. These rules can help you manage your bids, budgets, or ad statuses.
This article explains how you can use automated rules in your manager account.
How it works
If you think about the frequent tasks you do manually, it's easy to put together a list of work you'd like automated rules to do for you. There are many common ways that advertisers use automated rules. Here are a few examples:
- Scheduling ads for special promotions or events
- Pausing low-performing ads or keywords
- Adjusting budgets or scheduling budgets for certain days each week
- Raising keyword bids to ensure ads show on first page
Manager accounts can have 100 active rules per user and can run rules on up to 1,000 accounts. A rule is considered active if the rule status is “enabled,” and it’s not a one-time rule that’s already been ran in the past.
Create automated rules in your manager account
To create and manage rules, click the tools icon and select Rules under “Bulk Actions”.
Here’s a step-by-step example on how to create a rule that raises the bids of your keywords to the recommended top of page bid, and runs on a daily basis. In this example, a condition is set to raise bids only for keywords that have a Quality Score greater than or equal to 6 in order to avoid paying more for keywords that need to be optimized:
- In your Google Ads account, click the Tools icon
.
- Click the Bulk actions drop down in the section menu.
- Click Rules.
- Select the plus sign
to create a new rule.
- Select the category of the rule you’d like to create (for example, you can select Keyword rules).
- Select one of the rule types from the menu options (for example, Change keyword bids).
- Pick the currency that applies to the accounts for which you’d like to create rules. You can choose only one currency per rule.
- Set the action for your rule, such as Raise bids to top of page CPC.
- Make sure to specify a maximum bid limit if necessary.
- In the “Condition" section, click Add, and select the relevant criteria. You may select Quality Score and set the condition to >=6.
- Select how often you want your rule to run (for example daily, or only once on a particular date and time) from the “Frequency” menu, along with the date range to evaluate your requirements. If you’re managing client accounts in different time zones, the time at which your rule runs will be based on your manager account’s time zone, not that of your client account. Learn more about time zones in automated rules below
- Select how you’d like to be notified when your rule runs.
- Select the accounts to which you’d like to apply the rule. You can only pick ad serving accounts in the currency that you originally selected.
- Name your rule.
- Click the Preview button to verify that you've set the rule up correctly. Previewing displays the time you’ve chosen for the rule to run in groups according to your client accounts' time zones, and allows you to get a glimpse of the changes that the rule will make to the first account you’ve selected. No permanent changes will be made.
- Click Save.
- To manage your rules in the same place, click Tools & settings, select Bulk actions, and then click Rules. You set up your rules under “Automated Rules.” There, you'll see a list of your rules; you can pause/enable/remove them (by clicking the status icon) or edit them (in the "Actions" column). Learn more about managing rules
- Each time a rule runs, an entry will appear in the table in the “Rule History,” which you can find by clicking Tools & settings, Bulk actions, and then Rules. The table provides details on each execution of a rule, including the client accounts impacted and the status.
Currency and time zone settings for rules across multiple accounts
Choosing a currency
When managing multiple accounts, you have to choose a single currency for each rule that you create. After you pick a currency, accounts in any other currencies will be greyed out in the Accounts box, and you won’t be able to select them for your rule.
For example, if you pick Euros as the currency for your rule, you can only select accounts that are in Euros in the Accounts box.
Time zones and multiple accounts
If you’re managing accounts within different time zones, the time at which your rule runs will be based on your manager account’s time zone, not that of the selected accounts.
Example
Say your manager account is set to the Pacific time zone, and your client account is set to Eastern time, which is 3 hours later. Your client is having a shoe sale that begins at 9 a.m. on Monday morning in their time zone, and you’d like to create a rule for them that will enable any ads with the text “shoe sale.” If you set the rule to run on Monday at 9 a.m., it will run at 9 a.m. Pacific time, which is actually 12 p.m. Eastern time.
Time zone is a particularly important consideration when you’re selecting a frequency for a rule with a time of day that extends across two days because of time zone differences.
Say your account is set up in Eastern time but your customer’s account is in Pacific time. You set up a daily rule to run at 1 a.m. using data from the previous day. Because the rule runs according to your time zone but depends on the client account's data, it will run at 1 a.m. for you, which is 10 p.m. for your client account. The rule will use data from the day before based on your client account's time zone, not yours, which could mean that the data used is two days old. You may wish to base a rule on “yesterday’s stats,” but remember that yesterday may be defined differently according to time zone.
| You set up a daily rule. Today it runs at: | From the client account's perspective, this rule runs at: | Rule uses data from: |
| Friday at 1 a.m. Eastern | Thursday at 10 p.m. Pacific | Wednesday (Pacific time) |
