Google Ads Editor 3 Most Important Things To Know

September 16, 2022

Having spent the last 5+ years working in Google Ads Editor, I wanted to share my top 3 things to know to help you remain as efficient as ever when work on Google Ads campaigns.

1 – Filtering

Filtering in Google Ads Editor is incredibly important as it allows you to minimize not only what you’re looking at and reviewing, but the amount of things you’re editing. There are also a few levels of filtering we at Four15 Digital have developed, basic and advanced.

Basic filtering is filtering for things like keyword text contains or ad group name equals. 

 

This will allow you to quickly pair down to what you need to look at, review, and/or edit. This is basic in that you can do this traditionally on the Google Ads UI as well. There’s no much more to it than “hey I need to look at all my ad groups about shoes”. 

Advanced filtering is utilizing the ‘count function’ within Google Ads Editor. Imagine you have a task to ensure all of your ad groups have an active responsive search ad in them. Are you going to click one ad group at a time and review that? I hope not!! Instead use the count function that’s built into Google Ads Editor. 

COUNT(responsivesearchads, status = (enabled, paused)) < 1

The filter above will count to see if there are any matches at the level you’ve selected (campaign or ad group) that are less than 1 active or paused responsive search ad. You can see below that none of my campaigns or ad groups matched this criteria.




Imagine how long that would take to check if you went ad group by ad group and checked and you had several 100 ad groups. That’s inefficient!

2 – Bulk Find & Replace

Bulk find and replace is another good time saver tool to use within Google Ads Editor. This tool allows you to quickly make edits in Editor without having to export or import anything! 

Here’s a scenario, your client is updating a price that you call out in your ad copy. You can use your filter to look for any = {price} and then select all your RSA’s and use find replace to replace the old price with the new!



Very quickly you’re able to update potentially thousands of headlines and descriptions with the latest price update. I will say it’s still important to QA your work when all this is done!

You can use the find and replace function at almost any level within Google Ads Editor.s

3 – Editor and Excel

Last and certainly not the least, is understanding the relationship between Excel and Google Ads Editor. Google did all advertisers a major favor by building Editor to intake information from Excel. Without this, you’d be stuck clicking through ad groups and keywords one at a time in the Google Ads Ui (lame!).

Nearly all levels within Google Ads Editor can be created in an Excel sheet and uploaded via the ‘make multiple changes’ button, campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords, etc. Each level has its own set of requirements that allow Editor to intake the information properly. For example, keywords have the following required fields to upload from Excel and be error free

  • Campaign (if you’re mapping this to a specific campaign)
  • Ad group (if you’re mapping this to a specific ad group)
  • Keyword
  • Match type

If you were to not include the campaign and ad group mapping for your new keywords, Editor will still upload them, but into a new blank ad group within a new blank campaign it just made if you’re using the “My data includes columns for campaigns and/or ad groups” option.



At the end of the day, this tip is only as good as your Excel skills so I’d recommend you get those up to par as well. Once you fully understand the relationship between Google Ads Editor and Excel you can save yourself countless hours on builds, optimizations, edits, and so much more.

Conclusion 

These 3 most important Google Ads Editor things to know encompass a lot, but I do think if you knew them inside and out you’d find yourself spending half the amount of time working on campaign builds and optimizations as you are now!

What are your top 3??