When you’re running AdWords campaigns for your business, you’ll know that if you’re planning a promotion, it may need to start and end outside of office hours. I’d like to share with you a brilliant way to save time and ensure all your promotions start and end at exactly the times you want.
You may have promotions that run every weekend or perhaps one week a month. If you are currently handling these manually, you may find yourself staying up till midnight to stop and start campaigns at the right times!
Google AdWords Rules changes all that. It’s an incredibly powerful tool which allows you to perform a series of actions in your AdWords account – automatically.
In a series of articles which will be appearing on this blog over the coming months, I’ll show you some rules we use to make life easier. This month I’m going to show you the steps of setting up an automated rule to enable and pause promotions.
Let’s assume you’ve set up a promotion for certain ad groups and want it to stop on a certain date and then restart it later in the month.
Pausing an Ad Group
Using the new AdWords interface, first go to the spanner in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
In the menu that appears, go to Bulk Actions and then click on Rules:
Click the big blue + button at top right…
And choose ‘Ad group rules’ from the drop down menu. To create your rule, click the drop down menu next to ‘Select an option’:
And choose ‘Pause ad groups’
Then fill in the form by choosing which ad groups you want to pause. I selected just one, but you can choose as many ad groups as you like – so for example, if you have several ad groups running a sale that all finish on the same date, add them to your list by clicking +ADD and then clicking ‘Ad group’ as many times as you need.
When you choose the Frequency, choose ‘Once’ and the date. Then add a rule name and save your rule.
Your new rule will pause your chosen ad groups on the date you’ve chosen.
Enabling An Ad Group
If you decide that you’d like to re-run your promotion, the procedure is the same as above then pausing an Ad Group.
The difference is that when you click the blue + button, instead of choosing ‘Pause Ad Groups’, choose ‘Enable Ad Groups’.
Add in the Ad Groups you want to enable, at ‘Frequency’ choose ‘Once’ and add in the date and time. Name your rule and Save.
Regular Weekly Or Monthly Promotions
Follow the same instructions for both pausing and enabling your campaigns or Ad Groups as outlined above. When you get to the Frequency section, choose ‘Weekly’ or ‘Monthly’ instead of ‘Once’. Add in the days and times you wish to stop / start your promotions.
If you have chosen ‘Weekly’ choose the ‘Previous 7 days’ for ‘using data from’. If you have chosen ‘Monthly’, choose ‘Previous month’ for ‘using data from’. 
Managing your Rules
If you want to change a rule you’ve created, just click:
Spanner > Rules > Edit Rule and make your changes.
Don’t forget to ‘Save Rule’ when you’re done.
And that’s it! A time saving rule which means that you can get on with managing other things within your business knowing with full confidence that your promotions will start and end on the right dat
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