Reports which search categories are trending up or down in your Performance Max campaigns — last 7 days vs the 7 days before — using campaign search term insights.
by Nils Rooijmans·nilsrooijmans.com/google-ads-script-pmax-trending-search-categories
Monitors your account for unexpected performance deviations by comparing today's stats against historical averages for the same weekday. Sends an alert email when impressions, clicks, conversions, or cost deviate beyond configurable thresholds.
One 0-100 score for the whole account, built from seven objective checks — tracking flatlines, disapprovals, serving status, budget losses, negative coverage and query hygiene — with the deduction breakdown as your fix list.
Finds the structural gaps that stop ad groups from serving: ad groups without active ads, without an RSA, without keywords, keyword-stuffed themes, and multi-RSA ad groups.
Generates a daily at-a-glance performance overview of your entire Google Ads account. Writes prior-day stats to a Google Sheet with running history and optionally emails a formatted comparison of yesterday vs. two days ago vs. one week ago.
Generates a Google Spreadsheet with ad performance stats segmented by headline and final URL, including distribution charts. Covers all ad types and optionally emails the report link weekly.
Maps every campaign's ad schedule and flags forgotten narrow serving windows, stale schedule bid modifiers that Smart Bidding ignores, and (optionally) campaigns running 24/7.
PMax hides its search terms, but Google does expose aggregated 'search category' insights. This script queries campaign_search_term_insight for every enabled PMax campaign, compares category impressions for the last 7 days against the 7 days before, and writes the trending categories (with absolute and relative change) to a Google Sheet plus an optional email — early warning for demand shifts inside the PMax black box.
| Variable | Default |
|---|---|
SPREADSHEET_URL | (required) |
EMAIL_ADDRESSES | (required) |
IMPRESSIONS_MIN_ABS_DIFFERENCE | 100 |
IMPRESSIONS_MIN_REL_DIFFERENCE | 0.5 |
SEND_EMAIL | true |
Sheet rows per trending category: campaign, search category, impressions last 7 days, impressions previous 7 days, absolute and relative difference.
Search term insights are aggregated categories, not raw queries — Google exposes nothing finer for PMax. The insight resource only holds recent data, so weekly scheduling keeps a continuous trail. A high-performance MCC version is available from the author.