Imagine checking your Google Ads notifications and seeing this update: Google Ads removes search term data for advertisers.

That happened and it was not a fun experience for any of us. Most advertisers working with smaller budgets not working in a niche or mainly targeting broader more volume-heavy keywords with their search campaigns paid no mind to it.

We knew it could mean some important changes are on the way for advertisers like us who handle clients in various niches and that market to people with very specific needs. Specific needs + niche means that the search volume is limited and that meant we could face the effects of this update come September.

Well, September is already here, what did we find?

Before we dive into that, let’s take a look at what actually changed and why Google decided to do this.

On Google’s Search Terms Report support page they state,

“Starting September 2020 [AKA now], the search terms report only includes terms that a significant number of users searched for, even if a term received a click. You may now see fewer terms in your report.”

What Does It Mean When Google Ads Removes Search Term Data?

It means that your beloved Search Terms report that you rely on to derive insights and optimize your campaigns, will start seeing less data show up in it based on the actual volume or the popularity of the search term itself. This is regardless of the fact if the search term results in clicks or conversion for your campaigns.

One more important thing to note here is that the search term in question will be looked at globally. Let us explain:

Search Term A: Relative Popularity = 90

Search Term B: Relative Popularity = 5

Because of this update, Search Term A could only be clicked on once in your Google Ads Search Campaigns and it would show up in the Search Terms Report but Search Term B could be clicked on 30 times but still not make it in the report.

Our Findings:

To determine how the Google update has impacted accounts, we crunched some numbers for one of our clients that has $20,000 monthly spend, and here is what we found: 

99 Robots Excel Chart

Allow us to put into words what you’re seeing.

Before the update, you could lose data on anywhere from 1% to up to 5% of your ad spend. Now after the update went into effect in September, it’s a different story altogether, we’re seeing days where we’re losing 59% of the ad spend data in the Search Terms report.

This is huge, as the search terms report is often looked at when you want to add negatives to the campaigns that do not amount to any conversions. The report helps advertisers everywhere keep a tight leash on their spend and allows them to cut back on wasted ad spend and have them put it towards more valuable keywords that bring in the audience with the right intent and which also converts.

How to See if You’re Affected by This

It’s simple, you need to calculate the visibility of your data, you will calculate the visibility of a specific metric hence the formula will be:

Search Term Visibility = (SUM of [metric] from Search Term Report) / (SUM of [metric] from Search Network Data)

So if you’d like to find out the visibility of the ad spend from your Search Term report then that formula will become:

Search Term Visibility = (SUM of Cost from Search Term Report) / (SUM of Cost from Search Network Data)

What Does This Mean for Advertisers?

We all have methods we employ to weed out the low volume, irrelevant, and poorly performing keywords from our Search campaigns. Now, with this update, a lot of those keywords will fall through the cracks since you will lack visibility on them. Regardless, advertisers like us managing millions in ad spend for our clients will always find ways to combat this and ensure that the conversion data and performance (bottom line) for our clients does not get affected.

Google has already been busy releasing updates and pushing advertisers more towards it’s automated ad products for a while and this is just another nudge from them in that direction where you rely on the machine learning of their algorithm to derive results and keep human intervention in the campaigns to a minimum.

Let us know what you think about this update or reach out to us if your business needs help demystifying the world of PPC.

The post Google Ads Latest Update Removes Search Term Data appeared first on 99 Robots.

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.

The post How to Backup Your Google Ads appeared first on 99 Robots.

One of the most important things you can do is to backup your Facebook ads. It’s easy but for some reason, a lot of advertisers and even Facebook itself, don’t really talk much about this very useful feature. Campaign export not only helps you save tons of time but is a great way to work on excel (if for some reason you don’t like the Ads manager). 

One of the reasons why this feature is not discussed as much as other features is probably because beginner or intermediate level advertisers may not use this a lot. 

I disagree with this because if you are a small scale agency working with small ad accounts (spending anywhere between $500-$5000/mo), you would still be interested in learning how to export and import campaigns. Now, why do I say this? 

Let’s assume you’re running ads for a Chinese restaurant that has many franchises or branches across the country. Instead of running all their campaigns under one account, you would obviously want to segregate the budget, campaign, and targeting, etc for administrative purposes (even though you are running the same ads). 

The export-import option here lets you duplicate the entire account structure from one ad account to another and I’m going to tell you exactly how this is done below. 

How to Backup Your Facebook Ads from Any Ad Account 

Step 1 

Go inside your Facebook ads manager and select the campaign you want to export, once that this done and you’ve selected the ad sets and ads inside, then click the export-import button and hit ‘Selected’. See the screenshot below. 

Step 2

Once you have clicked on selected, another window will appear, here select ‘export as CSV’ 

After you have exported the data, the exported file should look something like this below. 

Notice how this file will have everything related to the campaign that you were running. 

Here are some of the important settings/data this file contains: 

Campaigns, ad sets, and ad names 
Budgets and schedule 
Audiences and targeting 
Optimization and other ad set settings 
Placement details 
Ad level data including ad copy, headline, destination links, and CTA
UTM parameters

Now you can save all this data on your cloud storage or anywhere safe and come back to analyze or view campaign settings for this particular account OR you may use this file to duplicate the exact same campaign and ads on another account. 

Let me quickly tell you how that is done in the next section. 

There are a number of reasons why everyone should be able to back up their Facebook data and all the juice that runs inside the ads manager. 

You may want to back up this important data for one of the following reasons: 

Saving data as security and backup (in case of account or business manager ban) 
Helps in transferring campaigns and ads in bulk across ad accounts (if you’re running the same ads through different ad accounts) 
If you want to quickly send over an ad or campaign approval to your clients (not the best way to get your ads approved but certainly the quickest)! 

For whatever reasons you want to backup, saving that important data is crucial as it may save you thousands of dollars in the testing budget in the future. 

So in this blog post, I am going to share a few tips and tricks that will help you backup your Facebook ads effectively and efficiently. 

How to Import Facebook Ads to Another Ad Account 

Now this is super simple to execute, once you’ve shared all the audiences to account #02, you’re simply going to take the file you exported and import that using the same import-export option. 

Once you select Import >> Ads, here’s what you will see 

You will simply upload the same file you initially exported and hit on ‘import’ and boom!

All your campaign settings, ad set settings, and most importantly, ads will be exported to the new account!  

Quick Hack: How to Import Deleted Campaigns and Ads 

Facebook would give you some sort of error if you try to import a file that contains deleted campaigns or ad sets. 

To go around this error, here’s a quick tip. 

Once you’ve downloaded the CSV file, open and start editing and get rid of the following columns (note delete the data inside the columns but let the headlines of the columns stay as is). 

Here’s what you want to delete: 

Campaign ID and campaign status 
Ad set ID and ad set status 
Ad ID and ad status 

Just get rid of the data (highlighted above and the ad id and ad status). Once that is done, save the file and then upload it to another ads manager and it will successfully duplicate the campaign. 

How to Backup Facebook Campaign Results and Stats

Now, we have learned how to export the campaign settings but let’s find out how we can export and save results and statistics. 

Step 1 

Line up the metrics you want to export, we usually have as many metrics as we want including the most important ones. 

Step 2 

Click on reports > export table data… 

Step 3

Select the file type you want to export and also select ‘include summary row’ and hit on export. 

Once you’ve exported the data, the saved file will look something like this 

This includes all the metrics that you saved on the columns inside the ads manager, data depends on the date range selected. 

You can also include campaign and ad data of deleted items on the file. 

What is Not Covered in the Facebook Backup? 

Pixel data or audiences are not covered in backup, the backup is really to save your campaign data and the actual ads and their permalinks. 

To save pixel data, you can either share audiences with other accounts, share the actual pixel, or the old school way of keeping all your customers in a CSV file and uploading it whenever needed to create custom and lookalike audiences. 

How Often Should you Backup your Account? 

Facebook ads and ads manager have in recent times been unpredictable. We recommend you backup your Facebook ads once a week or if it’s not possible then at least once every month. This ensures that you never lose access to important data and settings and most importantly proof of work you’re doing on your or your clients’ accounts!

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