How to Backup Your Google Ads

One of the most important things you can do is backup your Google Ads account. Whether big or small, all Google Ads accounts have an exorbitant amount of details that go into making their campaigns successful or just work correctly in the first place. From targeting options to negative lists, placements, bids, locations adjustments, tracking templates, etc. There is too much valuable data on the account for you to just wait for your account to be disapproved and then do something about it.

“But I’ve never had a disapproved account”

“We only advertise for registered reputable businesses so we will never get disapproved”

Okay, how about when a media planner on your team nukes your account? What then? We all know how tedious the Google Ads History feature is, it’ll be almost impossible to revert the account to a previous state when your campaigns were working fine before your intern or junior messed all of it up.

So What’s the Answer… Backup Your Google Ads!

BACKUPS, it’s simple, whether you are an agency or a solopreneur or a freelancer. It is essential that you keep regular backups of the accounts you manage so as to revert back to them in case you have issues with your Google Ads account.

What Do You Need?

For advertisers like us that manage hundreds of accounts, there is only one tool that allows us to create backups of our Google Ads accounts.

Meet the Google Ads Editor.

Google Ads Editor is a free downloadable software from Google that connects to your Google Ads account and allows you to edit your campaigns and manage your accounts as you would through their web platform.

It’s considered a high-level tool with access to more functionality than what you find in the browser version of Google Ads.

We’ll be making use of one such feature here to create backups.

How to Use Google Ads Editor

First, download the Google Ads Editor

Once downloaded; install and open it. You’ll be greeted with the Accounts Manager window.

Here, click on +Add to connect your Gmail account and gain access to your Google Ads accounts.

Once you’re successfully logged in, you would have all of the accounts that you have access to on this screen.

Click on whichever account you want to backup and click Open.

This is where you can make changes to the campaigns, do a lot of bulk edits or even import campaigns from other accounts here.

Note: All changes made to the campaigns (Bids, Targeting, Optimizations, etc) will have to be done and then in order to be made permanent on the account, you would have to click on POST in the top right corner.

Changes made on the account using this tool are not implemented until you click Post.

How to Make Backups

To make backups of your accounts, select ‘Account’ from the menu bar, and choose Export.

Export gives you the option to have 4 types of exports:

Export whole account creates a backup of the entire account.

Export selected campaigns and ad groups create a backup of all the campaigns and ad groups that you select.

Export current view creates a backup of the view in the account explorer, If you have some campaigns filtered based on some rules then this will create a backup of what’s on the screen.

Export custom rules creates a backup of the custom rules that you have set on the account.

Since we’re backing up the entire account, we’ll use Export whole account from the list.

When exporting, it’s important that you select the save as type option to “CSV files with Images in ZIP archives” if you want to see all of the data that is exported.

If you just need the backup to use with the Google Ads Editor and use the Import option here later then the Save as Account archives (.aes) will also work.

The exported zip or the AES file can be imported into the Google Ads Editor for any account that you have access to.

A couple of notes about the zip exports, the images from your display campaigns are not named the same as what you uploaded them as. However, since you’ll be importing them using the entire zip file or AES file into the Google Ads Editor then the software will match them to the right campaign and adgroup so it’s not a cause for concern.

What is Not Covered in the Backup

Pixel data or audience information from the campaigns are not saved in the export, that data still lives on the account and will be called on when you import it into the same account.

In the case of importing the campaigns to a different account that does not have access to that pixeled audience will give you the “Missing or ambiguous audience” error.

How Often Should I Backup

We believe that you should back up your Google Ads account every week to stay up to date with the changes being made on the account, the editor names them for the date the export is made so maintaining them and reverting to a prior state should be very easy.

Now go out there and never lose even a single datum of your Google Ads account.