One of my clients is getting too big for its britches, so recently I had to split their AdWords campaigns into three separate accounts. AdWords will only allow 25 campaigns per account, and they had a lot of campaigns because they are running ads targeted to different geographic areas. In addition, they wanted to use separate accounts because they are paying for their ads with different parts of their budget and it will be easier to track this way.
Obviously, moving all those campaigns – thousands of keywords, hundreds of ads and numerous settings – would be a time-consuming nightmare to do manually, and it would be much too easy to make mistakes. The online AdWords interface does not have an import/export feature, although I seem to remember that it did at one time. You can download different parts of your campaign to a spreadsheet, such as keywords, but not the entire campaign or account. Thankfully, the AdWords Editor client makes moving stuff from one account to another possible and relatively painless. Here’s how it works:
- Create the new account that you want to move campaigns into. AdWords requires a separate email address for each account, which is a PITA if you’re managing multiple accounts. The way I handle this is by creating a new Gmail account for each AdWords account, and then forwarding each one to a central Gmail address where I can monitor all notifications. If you’re managing several different accounts, you will probably want to set up an AdWords My Client Center – this has saved me a lot of time and effort over the past few years.
- Back up your existing AdWords account. It’s a good idea to do this periodically anyway, just in case you make any changes before you’ve had coffee and you can’t revert. Log in to AdWords Editor, and go to File / Export Backup (AEA). You can choose to back up your entire account, or selected campaigns and ad groups. AdWords Editor then creates an .aea (AdWords Editor Archive) file with today’s date on it for easy reference. In an emergency, you can use this file to restore everything to the way it was on that date.
- Export your campaigns to a spreadsheet. Go to File / Export Spreadsheet (CSV) and choose Export Whole Account or Export Selected Campaigns and Ad Groups. In my case I chose about a dozen campaigns that I wanted to move to their own account.
- Log in to your new account in the AdWords Editor. Go to File / Open Account, and type in the email address and password for your new account. You will be asked to download all campaigns or selected campaigns. Select All Campaigns, even if you don’t have anything to download, and click OK.
- Import your campaigns to the new account. Go to File / Import CSV, and select the .csv spreadsheet you downloaded in Step 3 (not the .aea file). AdWords Editor will show you an example of the way fields are mapped, but they should all be OK because you’ve just downloaded them from AdWords. Click OK to accept, and wait for your campaigns to populate.
- Check your campaigns to be sure everything imported correctly. DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP. Your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and ads should all be fine, but your settings may not be imported. I had to go in and manually add my Max CPC bids and bidding options. If you’re using managed placements and negative keywords, be sure those have also imported. Once you are satisfied with everything, pause all of your campaigns and then click the button at the top to accept your changes.
- Upload your campaigns to AdWords. Click the Post Selected Campaigns button, and select the campaigns you want to upload (all of them, in my case).
- Check your campaigns again in the online AdWords interface. Log in to your new account in a browser and be sure everything looks the way you expect it to. Pay special attention to financial settings like daily budget and bid values. I’ve never had a glitch with uploads, but I have missed something in the AdWords Editor that was obvious in the online interface. Once you are satisfied with all of the settings, unpause your campaigns and let them run.
Questions, feedback, comments, concerns? Don’t be afraid to comment!
