This is an overview of the process I implementd for automating Google Ads budget pacing throughout the month.
Sticking to a clients' budgets is key to the success of any agency. How much a campaign can spend can flucatuate depending on a wide variety of factors including the time of day, how much competition is present for a given keyword, etc.
Because of this, I used a combination of Javascript and SQL to find a way to automatically evaluate and update budgets daily, saving myself time to put towards larger tasks.
Budgets are shifted up or down in proportion to to how much of the total budget each campaign is used.
For example, if a campaign was using $30 out of a $100 budget, the adjusted budget would still maintain 30% of the new target budget.
To do this, data is passed from Google Ads, to Google Sheets, and is then re-uploaded to Google Ads using a Bulk Upload template.
The diagram below outlines the basic pipeline for how data is extracted, processed, and loaded back to the source.
![![Diagram of how data is passed between Google Ads and Google Sheets, using Javascript and SQL.] (/images/budget_pacing_diagram.png)](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/YoItsYong/google-ads-budget-automation/master/images/budget_pacing_diagram.png)
The first step involves pulling data from Google Ads and moving it to Google Sheets. To do this, getData.js runs every day to pull performance data for each of the active campaigns across each campaign type.
Next, we analyze the data in Google Sheets. Google makes it easy to inject Javascript to simplify a lot of this analysis.
Data is dumped into one sheet and then Google Sheets' built-in =QUERY formula function is used to select and filter for the desiered columns. An example of this can be found in queryData.sql.
The evalData.js code looks at the current daily spend (how much each campaign is spending)and the month-to-date spend and compares it to the target monthly budget.
If budgets need to be adjusted, a new target daily spend is calculated and data is then passed on to the Bulk Upload template.
Once data is passed to the Bulk Upload template, the uploadData.js script then uploads the adjusted budget data back to Google Ads.