Shortcuts to Save Time in Google Ads Editor

by Andrea Taylor | Dec 16, 2021 | Google & Bing Editors | 0 comments

If you’ve been in PPC for a while, you’ll be able to acknowledge how far Google Ads Editor has come! This offline, bulk editing tool has gone from pretty bare bones to having more and more features each month. It’s certainly a tool that you can’t live without if you’re managing sizable accounts!

The ability to bulk edit ads, quickly build out campaigns, etc., can be done much quicker in Editor than in the Google Ads interface, but there are additional features you may have missed that can save even more time!

“Show only items I selected” Option

When I’m bulk editing ads, labels are so important! However, in large accounts, it’s easy to have hundreds, or even thousands, of labels, which can mean a lot of scrolling hunting for the correct label.

Enter: The “Show only items I selected” option.

When the ‘Select Labels’ window pops up, you’ll see this check box at the bottom of the window.

Selecting this option will display only the labels that are on your selected ads.

This option has saved me so much time scrolling!

Custom Rules

According to Google, “custom rules notify you of violations to best practices before posting changes. These notifications can appear as warnings or errors. There’s a set of built-in, recommended rules set as warnings, and you can edit these to meet your needs.” These rules range from a warning when utilizing manual bidding in campaigns to inactive search audience(s) targeted to budget type mismatches.

You can find these Custom Rules in the left navigation options.

Once you click into Custom Rules, you’ll see all of the built-in options.

You can click the “+ Add custom rule” button to add an option you’d like to save. You can also choose to not allow changes to post if a rule isn’t met by selecting the ‘severity’ dropdown.

One of the most useful custom rules I have found is the option to see Display ad groups that are missing a responsive display ad (RDA) or a Search ad group is missing a Responsive Search Ad (RSA) but there is an expanded text ad. As we hurdle quickly towards the sunset of expanded text ads, making sure each ad group has at least one RSA is even more important.

Other ideas for rules you could create that would be very useful are:

Ads missing an optional field like “Path 1” or label.
A max CPC exceeds a certain amount.
A final URL is missing a domain.

The sky is really the limit here on what you could create to be useful for your specific accounts.

Search Terms Report

You can find the Search Term Report in the top navigation under Tools.

Select the date range and the stats you would like to see alongside of the search terms.

A new window will pop out and you’ll be able to review performance with the same columns that are available in the interface. You can sort by your preferred metric, add the term as a keyword or add the term as a negative keyword, all within Editor.

You can also easily filter and search using the search bar at the top of the window.

Identify Duplicate Keywords

There are times that you need to make sure you don’t have duplicate keywords across your account. This filter allows you to quickly find duplicates that have the same or different word order and the same or different match types within the same ad group, campaign, account or even across multiple accounts.

In the top nav Tools dropdown, you’ll see an option for Identify Duplicate Keywords.

Select your campaigns, ad groups and the criteria you would like to apply to your search.

You will then be able to see the keywords that are overlapping, with the dotted lines indicating a new ad group or campaign.

If you want to sort your keyword divisions by something else, click the dotted square button and select the metric you’d like to sort by. You’ll see the changes highlighted.