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31.01.2017

2 min read

Automatically pause Google’s new ‘Added by AdWords’ ads in your AdWords account

This article was updated on: 07.02.2022

AdWords may be about to roll out an automated feature that automatically injects new Expanded Text Ads into your account. It’s currently rolled out to approximately 2,000 accounts as a pilot, and if that goes well it’s likely to become a permanent fixture in AdWords’ toolset.

It’s not yet clear how it will impact all advertisers on the platform, but to be sure your account is safe from automated ad injection, we’ve created this handy script to automatically pause these ads the moment they’re found.

It’ll also send you a handy email summary, too, because we’re not expecting the ads to be too bad — just unwelcome.

If you’re one of the advertisers currently in the pilot, you’re likely more than aware that you can opt out of the pilot simply by pausing the ads manually and completing this form.

If you’re running a well kept account, you may never see these ads, as they’re so far being rolled out to accounts which have the following settings;

  • ad rotation settings of either “Optimize for clicks” or “Optimize for conversions”
  • ad groups with few ads in them

For the pilot, the ads have been ‘written by humans’ (we assume machine learning is somehow involved) and go through quality control. They’re based on current ads and landing page content. There are thousands of AdWords account advertisers in the world and it’s fair to assume that this process will not scale without automation.  If these are automated in the future, we can only assume they’re not going to 100% show your true USPs and therefore do you a good service.

Theoretically, given the selected rotation settings, if they perform worse then they will be shown less and less over time, therefore managing themselves out of the account.

Anyway, this below script will ensure you get an alert if you think you might miss the welcome email from Google themselves (assuming this rolls out further). If you’re a previous AdWords Script user, go ahead and copy the below, inserting your email. If you’re new to AdWords Script, check out this link to find the correct page within AdWords.

Don’t forget to set a schedule on the script so that it’s running regularly in the background. I’d suggest once per day should be fine.