How to use the AdWords Time Machine to save you hours of time reconstructing a damaged AdWords Account.

Have you ever spent ages making updates to your AdWords account, only to find you've got to somehow undo all your hard work because your numbers are now suffering?

And which change was it that did the damage?

As a rule, it's safest to make only single changes in your AdWords campaigns.

That way you know whether things improved or not, and which change to revert or try again.

However, that can take time to show results, so, often, many of us will make wholesale changes to ads, keywords, ad groups and campaign settings, hoping to see that magical lift in CTR and conversion rates.

But when things go wrong - what then?

How do we get back to where we were before?

Is there some Time Machine feature in AdWords we could use to perform a "system restore" like on your Windows PC?

Unfortunately not.

You’ll have to check your account Change History (it's in the Tools section) and manually go through all your modifications and undo them all.

Keeping a long-hand journal can help a lot with this, but that's also time-consuming, so many of us won't bother with that.

There is one built-in safety feature in your AdWords account, which is that entire campaigns, ad groups and ads can be "undeleted" if you have deleted them.

But keywords cannot be undeleted, they're gone, so you have to enter them all again by hand if you want them back (TIP - rather than deleting keywords, take the precaution to Pause them first, before really deleting them).

But what about this Time Machine we're talking about? Does it exist?

Yes! It’s called the AdWords Editor.

It’s a free desktop application provided by Google to manage your AdWords account offline, right on your desktop, rather than having to manually login to your account every time as you're used to doing.

You get a complete top-down view of your entire account for vastly easier management.

Any changes you make in the Editor don't take effect until you "post" them up to your AdWords account.

But although the Editor has been around for well over a year, most AdWords users seem either unaware of it and its benefits, or have tried it and given up.

It certainly is very different to the manual interface.

And there is quite a steep learning curve, but it's well worth it to master the many powerful features it offers. I manage over 80 accounts and the Editor is indispensable for me to do this.

However, there's one great function you can make use of immediately to protect yourself without having to learn the whole thing.

Step One: You can download your entire account to the Editor database on your PC

Ste Two: export a local copy of it on your PC to an "archive" file.

Step Three: if you need to to undo any changes, simply use the "Time Machine" to open an earlier saved archive of your account, and post it back to your account to undo all the changes you weren't happy with.

Voila! "System Restore" in AdWords …

Because the Editor can potentially make enormous changes in your account, i was initially concerned about the effects on the performance history data that  Google maintains and monitors on all the keywords and ads.

This data is kept at the AdWords Account level, so any keywords, ad groups and ad texts you move around in your account using the Editor will be maintained, even though you don't see it on the screen.

There's a world more of things the Editor can do, and it is not 100% perfect, but at the least, I encourage you to install it, experiment, and download your precious AdWords account for safe-keeping, with regular archives.

In addition, if you're still making manual changes online, be sure to always "synchronise" your online and off-line copies to the Editor by downloading all recent changes.

Otherwise, next time you make loads of changes and wish you hadn't, you'll be spending hours trying to figure out what went wrong and what to do about it.

The AdWords Editor seems to be one of the Industry's Best-Kept Secrets.

If you'd like to know more, there's more about the AdWords Editor, and Training here

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