This page is for UK businesses and in-house teams who already run Google Ads and want problems caught within hours, not at the end of the month. I write Google Ads scripts and set up automated rules that watch for broken tracking, runaway spend, disapproved ads and dead landing pages, then tell the right person what changed and where.
A Google Ads script is a short piece of JavaScript that runs inside your account on a schedule, reads its data and can send an email, write to a Google Sheet or make a change. Automated rules are the simpler, built-in alternative: conditions you set in the interface, such as “if this campaign spends more than £150 by midday, email me”. Most accounts need a handful of each, not dozens.
What changes when the account watches itself
The faults that waste the most money in Google Ads are quiet ones. A website update stops the thank-you page from loading the tag, conversions fall to zero, and bidding treats that as a sign the ads have stopped working. A product or service page is removed and the ads keep paying for clicks that land on an error. An ad is disapproved on Friday afternoon and nobody notices until Tuesday. A budget raised for a January sale is still raised in March.
With guardrails in place, each of these produces an alert the same day, naming the campaign, the number that moved and the first thing to check. Your account manager, or you, still decides what to do. Nothing is changed automatically unless we have agreed in advance that the change is safe and easy to reverse.
Who it suits, and who it does not
It suits accounts where a lost day of spend or a missed enquiry genuinely matters, and where nobody looks at the account every morning. That usually means in-house marketers who run ads alongside five other jobs, businesses with many campaigns or several locations, online shops whose stock and pages change weekly, and anyone overseeing several accounts through a manager account.
It does not suit a small account with two campaigns that the owner checks every day; Google’s own notifications and a weekly review are enough there. It is also not a substitute for running the account well. If the campaigns are aimed at the wrong searches, a script only reports the waste faster. In that case monthly PPC management is the better place to start, and the guardrails can follow.
What is worth automating, and what is not
Tracking checks
This is the check I would install first. It compares each day’s conversions with the same weekday over recent weeks and flags a fall that is too large to be normal variation, plus any conversion action that has recorded nothing for longer than it ever has before. On UK sites the threshold has to allow for the cookie banner: some visitors decline consent, so the count varies more than it would elsewhere, and an alert set too tight soon gets ignored. If the alert fires, the walkthrough in how to check your conversion tracking works is what I follow to find the cause.
Spend and budget pacing
Google can spend up to twice a campaign’s average daily budget on a single day, and balances that out over the month. That is by design, but it surprises people. A budget pacing check projects month-end spend against the figure you have agreed, for each campaign and for the account, and warns early enough to act. Where a hard ceiling is needed, a rule can pause a campaign once the monthly total is reached, and that pause is one of the few automatic changes I am usually comfortable with.
Disapprovals and broken landing pages
A script can list every newly disapproved ad and asset with the policy Google gave, so it is dealt with the same day rather than discovered when an ad group goes quiet. A second script requests each final URL in active ads and keywords and reports any that return an error or redirect somewhere unexpected. It matters most for shops and service businesses that retire pages regularly.
Search term housekeeping
Scripts can pull the search terms report into a sheet each week, highlight terms that have spent without converting and suggest additions to your negative keyword lists. I keep the final decision with a person, because a script cannot tell that “cheap” is a bad word for a solicitor and a perfectly good one for a car hire firm.
What I leave to a person
I do not write scripts that change bids on campaigns using Smart Bidding, because the two fight each other and the account becomes impossible to read. I avoid rules that pause keywords or ads on a few days of data, and anything that could switch off your best campaign because of one bad Monday. Writing ads, judging offers and deciding where the budget should go stay with people.
How I run the work
- Review. I look at the account, its change history and any scripts or rules already running, and list the failures that have happened before or plausibly could.
- Agree thresholds and recipients. For each check we settle what counts as a problem, how often it runs and who receives the alert. One named person per alert works better than a shared inbox.
- Build and preview. Scripts have a preview mode that shows what would happen without changing anything. Every script runs in preview against your real data before it is scheduled.
- Run in alert-only mode. At first nothing changes the account by itself while we tune the thresholds so alerts are rare and worth opening.
- Hand over. Each script and rule is documented, and the account owner, not a personal login, authorises the scripts where possible.
Problems I see most often in UK accounts
- Orphaned scripts. A previous agency installed scripts years ago under a login that has since lost access. Some fail silently; others keep making changes nobody remembers agreeing to.
- Copied code nobody has read. Scripts pasted from forums with permission to change the account and no comments explaining what they do.
- Alerts nobody opens. Thresholds set so tight that the inbox fills with warnings, so the one that matters is missed.
- Rules on too little data. Keywords paused after a handful of clicks, which starves new campaigns before they have had a fair test.
- No check on the checks. A broken script raises no alarm of its own, so I add a simple heartbeat: each script logs when it last ran, and a separate check flags any that have stopped.
What you receive
- The agreed scripts and automated rules, installed in your account, commented in plain English.
- A register in Google Sheets listing each one: what it checks, when it runs, its threshold, who is alerted and who authorised it.
- A one-page note for each alert saying what it means and what to check first.
- A tidy-up of old scripts and rules, with anything removed recorded so it can be restored.
Everything stays in your account and works whether or not you keep working with me. If you want a wider view of account health first, the Google Ads checklist covers the setup that these guardrails assume is already in place.
Next step
Tell me which problem has cost you most in the past year, whether that was tracking that broke, a budget that ran away or ads that were offline for days. On a free 30-minute call I will say which two or three checks I would add first and whether rules alone would cover it. You can book the call through my contact page.