Import Google Campaigns into Microsoft Ads

Key Takeaways

one of the cool features about microsoft ads is that it gives you the ability to import your google ads campaigns into the channel maybe you've never used microsoft ads before and you need to upload your entire account well you can do that but even if you are already using microsoft ads you do have the ability just to hand pick certain campaigns that you may want to upload so in this video i'm going to show you the two ways that you can do it first we'll be using the desktop interface and then we'll cover how you can import your campaigns with microsoft ads editor as i mentioned in the intro we're going to start off with in the microsoft advertising desktop interface and if we head to the top navigation you will see the import menu today i'm only going to cover importing from google ads as you can see you can import from a file most common file format will be a csv so this means you can export your account or specific campaigns and ad groups from google ads make sure all your column headers are matching and then upload them into microsoft ads definite possibility personally i don't use that one because i still think importing from google ads is the easiest and most common way to do this next we want to hit continue to sign into our google account now in my case i was already signed in so it automatically popped up the available accounts but if you've just signed up for a microsoft ads account or you haven't imported any campaigns in a while it will ask you to log into a google account and then you will have to approve the permission setting for microsoft ads to get access to your google ads account so you may see a few extra steps that i can't show in this video but within this google ads login we do have access to a few other accounts i'm just going to bring over the one campaign that i want to use so after i've selected that one i'm going to hit next and i've already renamed my import the first important step on this page would be setting your schedule when i clicked edit we had this appear on the left hand side and then we can select when the import will take place we can see the default option is set to auto this is giving microsoft ads the discretion on when they think it's best to import the campaigns or ad groups personally i never choose this one because i like to have that control i like to know exactly when it's going to be occurring i know certain settings won't be overwritten and i know exactly what i'm bringing over so typically i will choose one of the five other options we see in the drop down and that is scheduling our imports to occur monthly weekly daily one time in the future or as i'm going to select right now and then we have to save that option i could start the import but i do not recommend this option as a paid media person i hate giving up control i want to have as much control as possible while we still have it so i would recommend customizing your import if you are brand new to microsoft advertising there's a good chance you would want to import everything within the account but that's not your only option you can see that we can select specific campaigns and ad groups now after i click on this selection it will show me everything within the account because if i go towards the bottom these two menu selections are checked and it's going to show me all paused campaigns and ad groups so you could uncheck those and in my case it's not going to show me anything because we just create these accounts just to make these demo videos but now you know you can uncheck those menu options if you only want to see enabled campaigns or ad groups and then once you've been using microsoft ads for a while and you're still creating new campaigns within google ads you can go back to the import feature just select the few new campaigns that you've created within google ads and import those now i just selected two campaigns and when i select something at the campaign level it's going to bring over all of the ad groups and just the way i have my settings is going to bring over those ad groups whether they're enabled or paused most likely you have campaigns that are more robust so you could start unselecting certain ad groups if you don't want everything within a campaign but once you've chosen your campaigns and ad groups you can go down and hit next again and on this next page it could be really tempting just to scroll all the way to the bottom and go to the final step but i really don't recommend doing that that is because there are a lot of options on this page that we can customize to make sure your import is set up exactly how you want it to be and i consider some of these options to be pretty important and the first one i just went up and checked is account level url options i don't have anything set up within google ads but in many of my clients accounts we do have that tracking set up within the platform you can then see if you want to bring over items not previously imported into microsoft ads and if we click on the advanced options we get to see how we can break that down remember just on the last step that we were at we can hand select specific ad groups so if you go back and you're importing an entire campaign maybe you didn't import everything from that campaign the last time so as i uncheck a few different items here i'm telling microsoft you can import everything within these campaigns and ad groups just don't import the negative keyword lists and don't import the labels and there could be a good reason why i wouldn't want to import those maybe your strategy for microsoft is different than google but again here's that control i mentioned that we don't have to replicate everything that we're doing from google ads within microsoft if you want to tweak your strategy and as we scroll down we see there are other options for targeting ad extensions if you're using any ad customizer feeds you do have more control than just campaign and ad group of what you want to exactly import over into microsoft next you can associate a uet tag that's your universal event tracking tag to your import i only have one uet tag created for this account so it's just going to set that one as the default it's usually something i don't have to worry about but i'm always paranoid about tracking so i at least like to make sure and double check that this box is selected next you can choose to update your bids in a variety of ways as well as your daily budget and bid strategies before uploading them into microsoft and this can be an extremely common practice we do see differences in performance between google and microsoft so for whatever reason if you're seeing a better performance in a particular campaign in microsoft over google you can still import that campaign from google but then adjust your bids ahead of time and be proactive to have it be in line with the difference in performance you're seeing in microsoft so i can say on my import i'm okay increasing my bids for the campaigns i'm importing so it's clear right here i'm saying increase my bids by 25 and it'll do that automatically when i'm importing and then i hit the other options section just so you can see you can change specific urls and tracking templates yes microsoft advertising does have auto tagging but if you need your final urls to have very specific parameters for a crm or just to match the naming conventions that you're already using you can see we can update specific urls tracking templates you can update your campaign naming conventions there's some find and replace options same things for ads and targeting one option you may want to include is importing your paused ads then under tracking and campaign options will see an option to include paused ads when importing under tracking and campaign you will see add options so if you're looking to import any ads that may not be within microsoft ads yet you do have the option to include any paused ones if you want to test those out later on and then options for targeting and the merchant center like i said a lot of these options may seem overwhelming but it's good to know what control we have before importing any campaigns or ad groups i personally like to keep my account as clean as possible so i really hate bringing over any components from google ads that i know i won't use or they won't help my microsoft performance but if you're okay with all these customized options we can go to next again and there's confirming my import as well as my schedule that i selected earlier and now let's start the import and the import went through we're good i don't see any errors popping up i can look and see what microsoft ads skipped and that's a google ads combined list that's a feature not available within microsoft ads so no surprise that it was skipped but if you do see errors pop up you could see right here what those errors were you can download those errors right there but if everything looks good we can look and view those imported campaigns and here we see the new campaigns that were brought over and we're only seeing just the new elements because right above the campaigns this blue link right here there's going to be a specific filter and you can see it's just the items that were included in the most recent import so to get back to seeing everything within the account just remove that filter it could be just me but again i'm that person that likes to double check and go back in my campaign settings and make sure everything i actually wanted imported came through but most likely you're gonna be good and now let's hop into microsoft ads editor it's gonna be a lot quicker to go through with this one because the steps are pretty much the same i have editor open i got my most recent changes so we can see the two new campaigns that i just imported and within editor up top we see the import feature with the same import options and once again i'll have to sign into google there's a little cut scene here so they took me off to a new tab within chrome had to log in and now we see the google account pop up which is kind of blurred out then i can go to next choose the right account again go back to next we see the same option to choose all existing and new campaigns or hand selecting the specific ones again this time i'll choose one of our dsa placeholders let's do next there are all the same custom options that we had when we looked on desktop and then with editor we get the schedule at the very end and i'm glad it's showing you a different view because default right now it's going to weekly and there we can see we can choose the day and then we can go over to the time and make that adjustment let me hop to monthly really quick and then we can say every month on this specific day at this specific time and whether you're doing a weekly or monthly one you can also run it right away before the monthly schedule kicks in but just so we can see this within the account again i'll do it right now and then i want to import and post those changes live with an editor and again we will have to wait now don't be alarmed when it pops up to this screen yes i did select import now but it's still giving me the option to schedule a future one so don't freak out most likely you did it right but we're back on the screen so we can scroll down but this is the view that we get of what was uploaded it was a dsa campaign and we're using a feed for it so there's the fee the campaign specific dsa criteria all those things and i'm not seeing any errors so i'm going to close this out and in this blue bar up top that i'm highlighting right now it's telling me my import is complete but i can't see it right away until i get updated changes so let's do that click on the get changes button it's a small account so i'm just going to download everything again downloads complete everything looks good and there's my paws dsa placeholder campaign imported from google ads i honestly don't have a preference it's really depending on what i'm using at the time but you can see how similar the desktop and the editor interfaces are for importing campaigns from google ads it's just a little slight differences especially at the end when reviewing those changes but now you know no matter which option you choose you're good to go thanks for watching our video if you found it useful give us a thumbs up below we release a new video at least once a week so if you want to see more from the paid media pros channel be sure to subscribe