December may be the month for ecommerce PPC-ers to shine, but AdWords is not limiting the focus to only Shopping this holiday season. On Tuesday, the engine announced on the Official AdWords Blog that support for Scripts will soon be extended to include Video campaigns. Initially, this includes TrueView and six-second bumper ads on YouTube, with eventual expansion to YouTube Shopping anticipated in the future.
Scripts in AdWords have been available globally since 2012, and have proven themselves to be a valuable asset in real-time PPC account management (check this list of posts to see just a few of many ways they can make your life easier). Despite their healthy tenure in the digital marketers’ tool chest, though, scripts can be intimidating to embrace at first. This article from Hero Conf speaker Fred Vallaeys is a great resource for those just starting out. For more experienced scripters, these sample scripts from Google can provide inspiration and use-cases for the new scripting functionality in Video campaigns.
Using scripts, advertisers can now programmatically manage video campaigns, create in bulk, schedule reports, adjust bids and targeting, and more.
The availability of script support is not the only recent update for Video, however. AdWords has also announced that video and display ad groups without a specified targeting method will soon begin showing on the Google Display Network automatically. While Google claims that all current ad groups without targeting criteria will be paused as of January 18th, 2017 (to prevent unwanted spend from untargeted ads), advertisers should still take care to evaluate ad group targeting and bids before this change comes about next month. To this end, AdWords Scripts can be a useful tool for large accounts with numerous and/or complex campaign strategies in place.
