How to Manage Your Campaigns Using the Google Ads Editor

Want to make bulk edits to your Google Ads campaign?

Do you have multiple people working on a single campaign?

Or do you just want to tweak your ads and keywords while you’re offline on a flight?

Then the AdWords editor is the answer you’ve been looking for. I’ll show you how to use this free, yet priceless, tool that has a number of unique features not found within the web-based Google Ads admin area.

Your first step is to download the AdWords Editor, because this is a program that you’ll run on your computer. Just Google AdWords Editor and it’s the first result, so click on that. Then, you want to click on download AdWords Editor. Then, download and install the AdWords Editor just like you would any other program.

Once you’ve installed and opened your AdWords Editor your next step is to choose your default targeting. So, you want to choose a default language and a default location. And, if you want, you can enable anonymous uses tracking so then you can send data to Google and they can improve the AdWords Editor with that. I’m actually going to disable that and click okay.

Your next step is to add an AdWords account that you have administrator access to that will integrate with the AdWords Editor. To do that, click on add account, and then enter the information of your AdWords account, and click next.

Next, it’s time to choose which campaigns you’re going to integrate with the AdWords Editor. If you want all your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, et cetera uploaded choose all campaigns. Or, you can choose a particular campaign from the list by choosing campaign that I select, checking them off, and clicking okay. But, we’re going to use all campaigns for this video, then click okay.

Then it’ll take some time for Google to download the information from your AdWords account into the AdWords Editor. Once everything looks good and you see download complete, click close, and you’re ready to start using the AdWords Editor.

Now I’m going to go over some of the most important features of the AdWords Editor. The first feature that’s really cool is that you can manage multiple accounts within the Editor using the same interface. So, if you’re an agency that has several different AdWords clients, you don’t have to login to each account individually to manage them. You can just add one to the AdWords Editor and then choose it from the drop down menu.

To add a new account just click file, open account, add account, and enter the login details for that account. When you do, you can easily choose the account that you want to manage using the drop down menu.

Another feature of the AdWords Editor that’s very cool and something you can’t do when you manage a campaign within AdWords itself is the ability to make changes without incorporating them right away. This is very important if you have multiple people working on a campaign. Because you can have someone make a change, and then let the supervisor know. That supervisor can login using the AdWords Editor and either approve or reject the change.

Let me show you an example. Let’s say that I wanted to change the max cost per click bid for this keyword from 2 dollars to 2 dollars and 50 cents. When I make that change and click away you’ll notice that there’s a little triangle there. That indicates that it made a change, but that change is not live. So, if I wanted to run this change by somebody before I actually incorporated it into the account I would let them know. They would login to the AdWords Editor, and they would click check changes. From here that person could see what type of change was made. If they wanted to see details they’d click show details and see what changes were made.

Whether you’re doing this yourself or having someone else do it you want to check the changes before you try to incorporate them into AdWords account to make sure that’s okay. For example, if you set an account level max cost per click, and then you try to make a cost per click higher than that, that’s not going to work. So, what you want to do is click on check changes and make sure there aren’t any conflicts between the change that you made and any settings that you might have in your account. If you see green and it says pass checks then you’re good to go. Click close. If for some reason you change your mind or don’t want to incorporate that change just click on revert selected changes and, boom, that change is gone.

If you want to make multiple changes at once click on make multiple changes and choose the change that you want to make. So, if you’re under the keyword section of the AdWords Editor you can add or update multiple keywords or delete multiple keywords. And, if you were making changes to your ads you’d click make multiple changes and then you could add or update the text of multiple ads or delete multiple ads from your account.

When you’re ready for your changes to go live head to the top of the AdWords Editor and click on post changes. Then, click post. If you see that it says successfully posted then you know that that change is now live in your AdWords account.

The next feature that’s very cool is the ability to check for duplicate keywords. This isn’t a huge deal if you’re running a smaller AdWords campaign that has 1,000 or fewer keywors. But, if you’re running a massive, massive AdWords campaign with multiple campaigns, multiple ad groups, sometimes it can be very difficult to identify duplicate keywords that might show up in two different campaigns or ad groups. Fortunately, the AdWords Editor makes identifying these keywords very easy.

What you want to do is head to the top and click on tools. Then, click on find duplicate keywords and then you can set the setting. So, if you want them to be a strict word order, for example it’s the exact same keyword in the exact same order, you can do that. Or, you can use any word order. You can choose the match type. Then, what you want to do is click find duplicate keywords when the settings are to your liking. It’ll let you know if there are any duplicate keywords. If there are they’ll show up here. If not, it’ll look like this and it’ll be blank.

The next feature I’m going to go over is the ability to add draft campaigns into an account. This is really important if you have multiple people working on the same campaign, because then you can give them the ability to not just make changes but actually create campaigns from scratch including keywords, ads, and ad groups before they actually go live.

To do that click on add campaign and choose either a draft cost per click campaign or a draft CPM campaign. Then, you’d set the campaign up just like you normally would. You’d give it a name, include the budget, have a start and end date if you want, whether it includes a display network or just a search network, and then you’re done. You have a draft campaign which someone else can look at, and then approve, and then post it live to the AdWords account.

The last feature I’m going to go over is the ability to export data from your AdWords account. To do that click on file at the top. As you can see, you have multiple different options. You can export your entire account. You can export certain campaigns and ad groups. You can back up your entire account as a backup file. Or, you can export just the changes for sharing with other people.

That’s all there is to using the AdWords Editor. As you can see, this is a very, very cool feature of AdWords that is a lot more than just being able to edit your campaign without being logged in. There are a lot of unique features that can help you get more from your AdWords campaign.

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