How do I set up Google Ads alerts?

Google Ads’ automated rules can send an email when a condition is met, as well as change bids and budgets. A rule of the type Send email changes nothing in the account.

1. 01Go to Campaigns › Campaigns.
2. 02Select the three-dot icon above the table, then Create an automated rule.
3. 03Under Type of rule, select Send email, and choose the campaigns it applies to.
4. 04Under Condition, select +ADD and choose a metric. For spend, Cost above what a usual day costs; for a campaign that stopped, Impr. below 1.
5. 05Set Frequency to Daily, using data from the Previous day for a stop, or from the Same day at midday to catch spend while there’s still time to act.
6. 06Name the rule and save it.

Google’s own example is a campaign with a $100 daily budget and a rule that emails at 12:00 PM if it has spent more than $50 that day. Your rules are listed under Tools › Bulk actions › Rules.

Two things to know before relying on one. Google runs a rule within about 2 hours of the time you set, so a rule for 9 a.m. may run as late as 11. And a rule compares with one number for every day, while Google’s own tips ask you to allow for intra-day and intra-week trends: a threshold that suits a busy Monday lets a Sunday’s surge through.

Google publishes a script for this, the Account Anomaly Detector, among its Google Ads scripts solutions. It compares the account’s impressions, clicks, conversions and cost so far today with the average of the same weekday over the 26 weeks before (you can change how many), and sends an email when one is far from usual, one email per alert a day. Google’s statistics can be up to 3 hours behind, so a run at 7 p.m. reads the day to 4 p.m.

1. 01On the script’s page, use its button to create the script in your Google Ads account.
2. 02Use its second button to make a copy of the template spreadsheet the script reads its settings from.
3. 03Put your copy’s address in the script’s spreadsheet_url, and your email address and thresholds in the spreadsheet.
4. 04Schedule the script to run Hourly. Google suggests Daily around midday if it alerts too often.

It reads the account as a whole, which is what makes it quiet. A campaign that stops while the others carry on moves the account’s total a little, so a rule on that campaign is still the way to hear about it.

Every day Goldbeater reads each enabled campaign’s last 30 days and judges yesterday against the campaign’s own days before it, so no threshold has to be set:

• A stop: a campaign that showed ads on every one of the 14 days before and none yesterday, where its usual day spent enough to matter. Where every campaign stopped at once, it’s one finding about the account, whose billing is the first place to look. The account is judged after a week of ads, and on a day under a twentieth of its usual, so a new advertiser whose ads Google limits is told the next day.
• A spike: a day, or a run of days to yesterday, spending at least twice the campaign’s highest day of the four weeks before, on more clicks than chance explains. Google may spend up to twice your average daily budget on a day, so the bar is the campaign’s own busiest days, not its budget.
• A sharp change: the account, or a campaign carrying a twentieth of its spend, showing under a quarter of its usual impressions or clicks for that day of the week, or over four times as many.

When a daily pass finds one that wasn’t there the day before, Goldbeater emails your workspace’s owners and admins that day, at most once an account a day, and each of them can turn the alerts off. A pass you run yourself mails nobody, since you’re already looking. Each finding stays on the Checks page with the days it was judged on, and says what Google’s status for the campaign is now. The monitoring page shows the email, and the other sudden changes it’s sent for. Two of those are about conversions, an action that goes quiet and an account converting less week after week, and the not-converting guide covers both.

To see who paused them, and when, Campaigns › Change history lists the changes made to the account with the person who made each. If a campaign is spending less than it should rather than more, the search impression share guide is where to look. If a spike looks like click fraud, the invalid clicks guide lists what to rule out first.

Goldbeater reads the last 7 days of that change history too, for a change to what spends most: one of the ten campaigns that spent most in 30 days paused or removed and still so, one of the top three whose daily budget stands changed since the week began, or one of the ten keywords that spent most paused or removed and still so. The finding says how it was changed and what else changed within two minutes of it. It reads medium where the change carries a thousandth of the account’s spend, for a budget where it moved by a fifth or more, and low otherwise. Undoing the change is offered, never recommended, since someone made it on purpose or by mistake and only you know which. A change Goldbeater applied for you says so and offers nothing. The optimization guide shows that finding beside a week of changes read by hand.

Can Google Ads email me when my spend goes over a limit?

Yes: an automated rule of the type Send email, with a condition on Cost. Google’s own example emails at noon when a campaign with a $100 daily budget has spent more than $50 that day.

Why did my campaign spend twice its daily budget?

Google may spend up to twice your average daily budget on a given day to catch rises in traffic, and no more than 30.4 times it over a month. A day at twice the budget is within that; days on end of it are worth a look in Change history.

How often should alerts check the account?

Google suggests running its anomaly script hourly, or daily around midday if it alerts too often. A daily check of yesterday’s full day notices a morning later, and judges a whole day rather than part of one.

Who changed my campaign?

Change history lists the changes made to the account, its campaigns and ad groups over the past 2 years, and its User column shows who made each one through Google Ads.