What is a Google Ads script?

What Google Ads scripts are, what they can automate, and where their limits are.

A Google Ads script is a piece of JavaScript that runs inside your Google Ads account. It can read almost anything you can see in the interface — campaigns, keywords, search terms, budgets, conversion data — and change most of it: pause ads, adjust bids, add negative keywords, apply labels. It can also reach outside the account to write a Google Sheet, send an email or call another service.

What scripts are used for

Monitoring — check budgets, broken landing pages, disapproved ads or sudden drops in performance, and tell you when something is wrong.
Reporting — pull data into a spreadsheet on a schedule instead of exporting it by hand.
Optimization — adjust bids, pause poor performers or mine search terms by a rule you define.
Bulk changes — build or update many campaigns, ad groups or assets at once.

How a script runs

Every script has a main() function. Google Ads runs it on the schedule you choose — hourly at most — or when you click Run.

function main() {
  var campaigns = AdsApp.campaigns()
    .withCondition("campaign.status = 'ENABLED'")
    .get();
  Logger.log("Enabled campaigns: " + campaigns.totalNumEntities());
}

Scripts live in Tools → Bulk actions → Scripts. They can run in a single account or, from a manager (MCC) account, across many client accounts.

The limits

A run may take at most 30 minutes.
Google Ads tells you nothing when a script fails or stops running; you have to open the logs.
A script pasted into ten accounts is ten separate copies. Fixing a bug means editing each one.

Those last two are what chiliad is for: scripts are stored once, delivered to every account through a small loader, and every run is recorded. See Getting started for the full path.

What scripts are used for

Monitoring — check budgets, broken landing pages, disapproved ads or sudden drops in performance, and tell you when something is wrong.

Reporting — pull data into a spreadsheet on a schedule instead of exporting it by hand.

Optimization — adjust bids, pause poor performers or mine search terms by a rule you define.

Bulk changes — build or update many campaigns, ad groups or assets at once.

How a script runs

Every script has a main() function. Google Ads runs it on the schedule you choose — hourly at most — or when you click Run.

function main() { var campaigns = AdsApp.campaigns() .withCondition("campaign.status = 'ENABLED'") .get(); Logger.log("Enabled campaigns: " + campaigns.totalNumEntities()); }

Scripts live in Tools → Bulk actions → Scripts. They can run in a single account or, from a manager (MCC) account, across many client accounts.

The limits

A run may take at most 30 minutes.

Google Ads tells you nothing when a script fails or stops running; you have to open the logs.

A script pasted into ten accounts is ten separate copies. Fixing a bug means editing each one.

Those last two are what chiliad is for: scripts are stored once, delivered to every account through a small loader, and every run is recorded. See Getting started for the full path.