AdWords Editor’s new custom rules let you quickly see what’s missing in your accounts

Google really wants advertisers to adopt their best practices. The latest version of AdWords Editor, version 12, has a whole new section to show you where you’re not complying, along with some other new features.

Custom Rules

The new “Custom Rules” section can be found in the left navigation pane in AdWords Editor (AWE). It will report on warnings for not having at least four sitelink or callout extensions, using manual bidding, not having search audiences assigned to campaigns, not having conversion tracking set up and more. And if it wasn’t clear yet that Google really, really, truly wants advertisers to quit it with the basic A/B ad testing, there’s a built-in custom rule to show you how many ad groups have fewer than three ads.

Below is a screen shot showing the list of built-in custom rules. They will show up even if there are no violations, just with a “0” in that column.

Also shown in the screenshot is the editor pane for setting up your own custom rules to be able to quickly spot warnings and errors. You build the filter for the custom rule in the violation criteria box. Custom rules can also be set up to apply to campaign and ad group labels, which is pretty handy.

To then see what entities are in violation for any custom rule, there are a couple of ways to go about it:

1. From the Custom rules section, you can right-click on a rule and select “Show violations” at the bottom of the menu (h/t Jonathan Maltz).
2. You can build a filter by clicking in the filters box and scrolling down to select among the drop-down options under “Custom rule violation filters,” as Frederic Harnois pointed out in the tweet below.

Other updates

The first thing you’ll notice when you update to the new AWE 12 is a subtle new design change (you can tweet feedback to the AdWords team). As far as features go, the new AWE supports maximizing conversions bid strategy, image uploads for Universal App campaigns and responsive ads creation and editing.

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About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day to day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin writes about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.