Step-by-step playbooks you can run on Monday. Tested in real accounts.
Teams running several European markets argue about splitting campaigns per country, and settle it with a number somebody half-remembers. Google publishes it as the sample you need to read a result, not the volume the algorithm needs, and that changes the decision.
The whole path, in order: the Google Cloud project, the credential, the connection, and then the part that actually pays for itself. One scheduled pull becomes a dashboard, a cohort grid the interface cannot draw, a written weekly summary, and a Slack alert that stays quiet until something real moves.
You can run Google Ads from a terminal now: read the account, draft the change, spend the money, all in plain English. This is the build guide. Which of the four paths to use (scripts, the official read-only Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, a community write server, or the raw v25 API), what v25 quietly broke, and how to wire a write path that fails safe instead of fast.
Google Ads scripts still earn their keep in 2026 doing deterministic, boring work: budget alerts, zero-conversion flagging, out-of-stock pausing. AI can now draft them from a sentence. The judgment about the rules is still yours, and that’s the whole point.
