How to Edit a Google Ad Campaign
Launching a Google Ads campaign is just the first step, the real work begins when you start refining it. Knowing how to efficiently edit your campaigns, ad groups, and ads is essential for improving performance and stopping wasteful ad spend. This guide will walk you through exactly how to make changes at every level of your Google Ads account, from high-level budget adjustments to specific ad copy tweaks.
First, Understand a Google Ad Campaign's Structure
Before you start making changes, it's helpful to remember the hierarchical structure of a Google Ads account. Understanding how everything is organized tells you where to go to make the right edits.
Account: This is the top level that holds all of your campaigns. Account-level settings include billing information and user access.
Campaign: This is a set of related ad groups. At the campaign level, you control big-picture settings like the overall advertising goals, budget, bidding strategy, and location targeting. For example, you might have one campaign for "Summer Sale Men's Shorts" and another for "Winter Coats."
Ad Group: Within each campaign are ad groups. An ad group contains one or more ads and a set of related keywords. A well-organized ad group has a tight theme. In your "Summer Sale Men's Shorts" campaign, you might have ad groups for "denim shorts" and "cargo shorts."
Keywords & Ads: Inside each ad group are your keywords that trigger your ads to show up and the ads themselves - the headline and description that users see. The keywords in the "denim shorts" ad group would be things like "men's denim shorts" and "blue jean shorts," and the ads would specifically mention denim.
Knowing this hierarchy is the key. To change your daily budget, you'll edit at the Campaign level. To add a new keyword, you'll go to the Ad Group level. To tweak a headline, you'll work at the Ad level.
Navigating to Your Google Ads Campaigns
Once you’re in your Google Ads dashboard, finding your campaigns is straightforward.
Sign into your Google Ads account. On the left, a main navigation menu is visible. Look for an icon of a megaphone or campaign sign and click "Campaigns." If the menu is collapsed, you may need to click the navigation menu icon (three horizontal lines) in the upper-left corner to expand it.
This view will show you a table with all your campaigns, along with high-level performance data like clicks, impressions, costs, and conversions.
How to Make Campaign-Level Edits
Campaign-level edits are for when you want to change high-level settings that affect all the ad groups and ads within that campaign. To get started, navigate to your Campaigns table and click on the name of the campaign you wish to edit, or select the specific campaign settings you would like to edit for one or multiple campaigns. Clicking "Settings" is how you access some of this.
Changing Your Campaign Name and Status
Organizational changes are simple but important, especially as your account grows. To change a campaign’s name, simply hover over it in the table view and click the pencil icon that appears. Give it a descriptive name that you'll easily recognize, like "Q4 Sale - Search - US/CAN."
The campaign status controls whether your ads are eligible to run. You have three options:
Enabled: The campaign is active, and ads within it can be shown to users.
Paused: The campaign is inactive, and ads will not run. This is useful for temporarily stopping a campaign without deleting its data, like a seasonal promotion you plan to run again next year.
Removed: Deletes the campaign permanently. Use this with caution, as you cannot undo this action and the performance data will be harder to access later. In almost all cases, pausing is a better option.
To change the status, click on the dropdown menu under the "Status" column and choose your desired option. Depending on your menu display, you just click the box of the campaign to adjust, or you can edit multiple campaigns at a time by adjusting them.
Adjusting Your Budget and Bidding Strategy
Two of the most common campaign-level edits are adjusting the budget and the bidding strategy. Again, inside that "Settings" page:
Budget: This is the average amount you're willing to spend per day on this campaign. You can spend up to twice your average daily budget on some days, but Google ensures you won't pay more than your daily budget multiplied by the average number of days in a month (about 30.4). To edit it, simply go to your campaign's settings or click directly into the budget field in the campaign list and type in a new number.
Bidding Strategy: Your bidding strategy tells Google Ads how to bid for your placements. This is a more complex topic in and of itself, but some common changes here are "Maximize clicks," which is very straightforward, or moving to "Manual Cost Per Acquisition." Many find success with automated bidding, as long as it has good conversion data on your audience, allowing Google's AI to work effectively.
Changing from, say, "Manual CPC" to "Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend)" tells Google to use its machine learning to bid for placements most likely to result in a purchase at your desired return level. If you change your budget, watch to ensure your bids don't go down if the total budget decreases. That's not a winning strategy unless the results are poor, to begin with.
Refining Your Targeting Settings
Effective targeting ensures your ads are seen by the right audience. If you aren't sure where people are clicking and who to keep targeting or exclude, this area offers some easy-to-spot data points in table format. In your campaign settings, you can adjust:
Location Targeting: Are you a local business wasting money showing ads to the entire country? Use location targeting to add or exclude specific countries, states, cities, or even ZIP codes. Be as precise as needed to reach relevant customers.
Language Targeting: Make sure you’re targeting users who speak the language your ads and landing pages are written in. Even smaller, more precise adjustments could result in significant performance improvements.
Device Targeting: If your analytics show that your mobile traffic performs poorly but desktop traffic converts well, you can set a negative bid adjustment for mobile devices to spend less on those clicks by going an extra step into "Device Targeting."
How to Make Ad Group-Level Edits
To make edits inside an ad group, navigate to your Campaigns dashboard, click on the campaign you want to adjust, and then you’ll see a list of the ad groups within it. From here, you can choose what ad groups you wish to adjust, one by one or in bulk.
Managing Keywords within an Ad Group
Keywords are the foundation of any search campaign, and managing them is an ongoing process. After a campaign runs and obtains data, you have many choices about a keyword or sets of keywords in that campaign. These edits can be applied campaign by campaign or across all campaigns simultaneously.
Adding New Keywords
Click on the ad group, select Keywords in the left side pane, and just at the top right above your words, there's an edit panel that reveals bulk options or to add new ones. They should be thematically aligned with other words in their group for that set of ad(s).
Pausing/Removing Keywords
If you discover certain terms are spending a lot of money without delivering results, they need to be paused or removed. Hover over the line level view of these keywords, and use the options panel to pause or delete them. If a keyword has low quality and little to no historical data, it may warrant pausing. Ensure that keywords that shouldn't run live are removed to maintain or improve your quality score and overall campaign performance.
Updating Phrase & Broad Keyword Types
Be sure to regularly check if your phrase and broad match keywords are triggering relevant traffic. You might discover these settings are allowing loosely related terms that do not meet your goals. Focus on achieving a balanced mix of phrase match keywords for better long-term results.
Adding Negative Keywords
Adding negative keywords is crucial to prevent irrelevant traffic from draining your budget. This ensures people aren't landing on your site without genuine interest in your products, and it refines your campaign's efficiency. As your keyword list expands, continue updating your negative keywords to block irrelevant traffic.
Best Practices for Editing Campaigns
Knowing how to make changes is only half the battle. Knowing when and why to make them is what separates good advertisers from great ones.
Make One Significant Change at a Time: If you change your ad copy, bidding strategy, and location targeting all on the same day, you'll have no idea which change led to the resulting performance shift - good or bad. Be scientific and test one major variable at a time.
Give Changes Time to Take Effect: After making a significant change to a campaign (especially to a bidding strategy), Google’s algorithm enters a "learning period," which can last several days. During this time, performance may fluctuate. Avoid the urge to make additional changes immediately. Allow the system at least a week to adjust and gather enough data before making further judgments.
Use the Change History Report: If you didn't track your changes, check the "Change History" report, located under the account tools. It's an excellent way to monitor team collaborations and adjustments. For well-established campaigns, copying campaigns before significant changes helps preserve old data and ensures you're not overwriting successful settings. This is particularly useful for large accounts managing multiple campaigns.
Final Thoughts
Editing your Google Ads campaigns is a continuous cycle of monitoring performance, identifying areas for improvement, and making methodical changes. By mastering the ability to edit settings at the campaign, ad group, and ad levels, you gain direct control over your budget and results, turning your campaigns into finely-tuned engines for growth.
The hardest part isn't making the edits - it's knowing which edits to make. Sifting through Google Ads data to determine campaign ROI, CPA, or other marketing channels can require hours of exporting data and building reports. At Graphed you help you connect all those data sources like your website with a Google Analytics dashboard that runs alongside ad performance to find the best ad copy and more to adjust. This fast setup inside our platform maintains clarity and coherence across campaigns. You don't need to know everything to see growth, make informed changes based on results, and business growth will follow.