AdWords Scripts: how to find landing page errors
If you are managing a large-scale AdWords account this holiday season, it’s important that you stay on top of it.
If you are managing a large-scale AdWords account this holiday season, it’s important that you stay on top of it.
If you are managing a large-scale AdWords account this holiday season, it’s important that you stay on top of it.
Aside from ad copy updates to promote seasonal offers, and bid adjustments to stay competitive, it’s also important that you have a simple way to check URLs in bulk to ensure everything is working properly.
This is especially important during Q4, when traffic to ecommerce sites grows significantly. You need to make sure everything is functioning as it should and no error responses are being returned.
To get prepared, my team and I decided to institute an AdWords Script for automated URL checks across all of our AdWords accounts. These can be set at the MCC level if you are an agency or at the account-level if you are a singular advertiser.
Depending on the size of your account, you can set the script to run hourly or daily. It is attached to a Google Spreadsheet that you can access at any time to see which of your URLs are in good condition, are redirecting or going to 404 pages. As a bonus, you can set up emails once daily to notify you of any errors.
For full transparency, this is a Google AdWords Script that we found in Google Developer tools, called the Link Checker.
Now, here’s some personal advice. When I’ve previewed the script, it hasn’t always worked as planned, so instead, I suggest you just click Run Script Now. If you select this and then navigate over to your Reporting tab of your Google Spreadsheet, you should start to see links being checked.
Normally, I would always recommend a preview, but this script is only seeking to look at the links, not pause them or take further action. The only change made by the script to your Adwords account is that each piece of data (keyword and/or ad) will be labeled with a link_checked label, so that the script can keep track of what has already been checked for the day.
Keep in mind that the script will only check the same URL once on a given day. A single execution of the script will review 800 URLS, as there is a 20,000 daily quota.
If you have less than 800 URLs, run the script daily. If you have more, schedule the script to run hourly, but keep in mind that you will only receive one email per day based on the previous day’s URL check.
If you have any questions about how to set up or run the script, comment below. Or if you’ve used any great scripts feel free to share them!