Google Ads Scripts Built as Guardrails, Not Dashboards

The scripts worth writing are the ones that stop money leaving. In a hundred-thousand-dollar-a-month account, a landing page returning 500s for six hours costs about two thousand seven hundred dollars before anyone in the office notices, and a broken tracking template costs the whole day's optimisation signal on top of it. What we build: A landing page monitor that follows redirects to the final URL, retries before acting, and pauses the affected ad groups after two consecutive failures on a 404 or 5xx. A conversion circuit breaker comparing this hour's conversions against the trailing twenty-eight-day median for the same hour and weekday, pausing and posting to Slack after two consecutive breach hours. A disapproval sweeper reading policy summaries daily. A tracking template validator confirming the final URL resolves with parameters intact. A budget pacer with a hard stop against the monthly plan rather than the daily average. For furniture and pet subscription catalogs, a feed freshness check that pauses Shopping when the feed goes stale. What we refuse to build: Bidding scripts. Smart Bidding sees query, device, audience and time-of-day signals a script will never have access to; a script bidder is a 2016 artifact and we will not sell one. Dashboard scripts writing rows into Sheets — the BigQuery Data Transfer Service and Looker Studio do that better and do not fall over at the execution limit. And alert-only scripts, with three exceptions: disapprovals, tracking breakage and budget overrun, because those three need a human decision. Everything else must act, or it becomes another email nobody opens. Where the line falls: Scripts run under a thirty-minute execution cap with entity limits that a large account crosses easily. When the logic needs more than that, it belongs in the Google Ads API on Cloud Functions with Cloud Scheduler, and we tell you which side of that line your request falls on before quoting, not after. Where the same logic serves several accounts, it runs once at manager-account level rather than being copied five times and drifting apart. How it is built to be owned: Configuration lives in a Google Sheet — thresholds, campaign scopes, Slack webhook, and a kill switch — so your team changes a number without opening JavaScript. Code ships in a Git repository with a README and a dry-run mode that logs every change it would have made without making it. We run a full week in dry-run before anything is permitted to pause a campaign. Every action writes to a change log with a timestamp and the rule that fired it. A paused campaign should never be a mystery on Monday morning. Not included: Bid strategy, budget planning, ad copy generation, tag manager work, server-side tracking, and anything requiring a Google Cloud project we have not been given access to. We do not take over daily account management under this engagement, and these scripts are not a substitute for someone doing it. Who this is not for: Single-campaign accounts where two automated rules cover the same ground. We will say that on the first call and decline the work rather than install machinery you do not need. Teams hoping automation replaces a strategist — these scripts protect an account, they do not run one. And organisations where nobody will own the configuration sheet after handover. Unowned automation drifts into false alarms within a quarter, and then somebody switches all of it off, usually the week before it would have caught something expensive.