Automate your in-market audience bidding with this Google Ads script

If you’re out of the loop (or new to the biz – welcome!), in-market audiences are a relatively new addition to the paid search world. As the name suggests, they are audiences that Google/Bing deem to be in the market for a certain product, based on intent signals from their browsing history. In a nutshell, in-market audiences are probably more likely to convert than your average user. There’s a huge selection of categories, with more to come.

And generally, it works pretty well. Add a couple in a campaign with a 0% bid modifier, collect data on how they perform, and then bid up or down on them. You can probably expect some pretty good results, in which case you’ll naturally want to raise bids as soon as possible. But before you go wild, keep this in mind: they’re not infallible. You need to keep a close eye on in-market audiences because sometimes performance can decline with them.

So, monitoring campaigns and adjusting bids accordingly is the key takeaway with in-market audiences. But manually? No thanks!

If you’re reading this and asking yourself if any part of this process can be automated: this one is for you.

How the script works

This script will implement bid adjustments to your in-market audiences for you. Simple as that. I’ll admit, it wasn’t easy to formalize, because in-market audiences aren’t the most script-friendly. I encourage you to make good use of it!

The script looks at your campaigns’ CPC over a given time range and sets bid modifiers to each of the campaign-level in-market audiences based on performance. If there are no campaign-level audiences, the tool will apply bid modifiers to all in-market audiences at ad group-level.

The modifiers are applied according to this formula: Modifier = Entity CPA / Audience CPA, where ‘Entity’ is the campaign or ad group.

Here’s what it looks like in action:

Setting the script up

In Google Ads, go to Bulk Actions, then choose Scripts. On the Scripts page, click on the big “+” button, and paste in the script below.

Before you start, there are a few options available for you to customize the script to your liking:

• Use DATE_RANGE to choose the time period the script should analyze. You can find a list of supported values here.
• With MINIMUM_IMPRESSIONS, you can set whether a campaign needs to have a certain number of impressions to be looked at.
• You may want to exclude certain campaigns entirely with CAMPAIGN_NAME_DOES_NOT_CONTAIN. If you’ve got a good naming system, you can use this to filter out campaign types, e.g., brand or generic campaigns.
• Alternatively, you might want to only look at specific campaigns by specifying CAMPAIGN_NAME_CONTAINS

Happy bidding!