How to stop underspending your free ad grant budget with a script

If you’re running a Grant account on Google Ads, you get a free budget of $10,000 a month to work with.

So how do you make sure you’re actually using all of that free money?

Naturally, you want to use your budget in its entirety every day. But you also want to make sure that budget goes to efficient keywords so that it’s not wasted on mediocre keywords and runs out at midday.

Manually, that’s a bit of a balancing act between hitting budget and using highly performing keywords.

This script should do the trick!

How does it work?

This script emulates standard delivery but allows you to turn certain keywords on or off depending on whether you’re on track to hit your budget.

You start each day with your most efficient keywords enabled. The script then checks your pacing and sees whether you’re on track to spend your daily budget based on a percentage set by you.

If you’re on track to use your $329, it doesn’t do anything. Good job!

If it thinks you’re not on track, it activates a labeled group of less efficient keywords to help you avoid underspending and missing out on potential traffic.

And if you then start overspending by a certain amount, it will pause those keywords again for you.

How to get started

Copy the script below and paste it in the scripts section of Google Ads. Before running it, remember to label your inefficient keywords so your script can recognize them, using extraKeywordsLabel to set your desired label.

You can update the tolerance variable to set the proportion above or below budget the account should be before the extra keywords are enabled or paused. For example, setting it to 0.05 allows the account to be 5% above or below budget without changes being made. You can also change your budget variable with monthlyBudget.

With hourlyTargets, you can set the proportion of the budget that should have been cumulatively spent by the end of each hour.

Finally, use emails if you want to be notified about changes made.