Adwords Scripts for My Client Center (MCC)
On May 8th Google introduced Adwords Scripts within the My Client Center (MCC) for all users. This feature previously existed as beta only, originally announced back in March. It allows MCC users to programmatically access the Adwords data through Javascript and produce anything from sophisticated reports to an automated bid changes or produce a list of broken URLs for example. Also, we can use automation rules to maintain and manage our Adwords campaigns with little interaction saving us time in the long run.
Unfortunately, there a few things that MCC Scripts doesn’t do very well but they are working on these. Thankfully there are some workarounds like hosting your scripts off-site for account wide use.
At Parallax we’ve set up a number of scripts within MCC that allow us to export data on keywords and analyse the quality of our PPC campaigns. We’ve also created extensions to pre-existing Google created scripts that flag anomalies within the campaigns right down to individual keywords. We’ll be running through some custom written scripts in the future.
So how can scripts help your PPC campaign?
Reports – Through MCC scripts we are able to generate custom reports in almost any format by campaign or across all your clients. These can then be either saved within Google Drive, hosted elsewhere or emailed. Reports can be as complex as you make them or simply provide you with a quick daily overview of how the Adwords campaign is going.
Maintain – Using scripts allows us to maintain and monitor our clients PPC campaigns and look for issues such as broken URLs, irrelevant keywords, conflicting keywords and potential budget caps.
Analyse and Change – The ability to bid by current Weather or perform manual changes by time and date are all things that can be accomplished with scripts. You can easily change whole campaign budgets or scale them with ease on an individual basis or across the entirety of your client centre.
How do I access Adwords Scripts within the MCC?
Within your Adwords MCC account section, navigate to the “Scripts” section within the sidebar on the left.
Now select the 
button which will allow you to create scripts for your Adwords campaign. You will now see the Javascript IDE provided by Google.
Accessing your scripts across multiple accounts
There is a slight issue with the current MCC scripts, it doesn’t allow you to use the same scripts across multiple MCC accounts so when you need to change something or fix a bug you have to do it on each individual account. However, if you keep the scripts off-site in Google Docs or an Amazon EC2 instance for example you’re able to manage them with ease. Here is a guide on how to do this.
We’ve also put together some of our favourite scripts from across the web. We have a number of our own that we’ll be highlighting this month but for now here are some of our favourites:
Adwords Script for Tracking Quality ScoreKeyword Performance Report
Script for Adwords Link Checking
Import Ads from a Google Spreadsheet
Account Anomaly Detector
Pause PPC Campaigns, Keywords and Ads when they spend too much.
If you need to reference syntax or usage please use Google’s reference tables or if you’re struggling with Javascript you can get a quick refresher from the guys over at Codeacademy
Also, get involved on Google’s Script forum which provides helpful advice and troubleshooting for MCC scripts.
We spend a lot of time carefully crafting PPC campaigns for our clients. If you’re looking for a digital agency to help you out with your online advertising we’d love to help out. Drop us a line.