Disable Ads and Keywords For Out of Stock Items

UPDATE 2016-01-26: In response to some common issues, this script has been updated to include some enhancements. Please see the change log notes for v1.2.

As a follow up to my questions about cool scripts for Black Friday / Cyber Monday, today I put together a script to run through your urls and check if the item is out of stock on the website. If it is, we will pause the AdGroup.

This script has some of the same elements of my script on checking for broken links in your account, but it actually pulls the html source of each page and searches for a configurable string that lets it know when it is out of stock.

Let's walk through an example. I love some of the quirky gifts I find on ModCloth.com. But like any online store, some items go out of stock. Here is one I found while testing this script.

In order to get this script to work, I need to find out what is different about the page when it goes out of stock. If I right click and view the page source, and search for the work "stock", I can see a few different places where it is used. One of them is the following that says "in_stock":false.

That looks promising. I check on an in stock item and sure enough, "in_stock":true is on that page.

Alright, so now I know what text I need to use to fill in the OUT_OF_STOCK_TEXT variable in my code. Now each site is going to be a little different, so I have a simple script that uses the same url logic as the complete script that you can use for testing.

Once you find some HTML text in the source of the landing page that identifies if an item is out of stock, you should be good to go on the full script. There are a few other options in the script that allow you to enable or disable various url manipulations in the script. And remember, this will pause only the Ads or Keywords that link to the page with the out of stock item.

Thanks,
Russ