Google Lets Advertisers Copy Column Preferences to the New Google Ads

Google is undoubtedly one of the most powerful companies on the planet. It has a suite of tools and applications that make the overall browsing experience simpler and easier for us. Most of Google’s revenue comes from its ad platform known as the Google Ads. In 2017 alone, Google made 109.7 Billion USD out of which 95.4 Billion USD directly came from advertising revenue.

There are plenty of reasons why advertisers invest so heavily in the Google Ads platform. Here are 5 solid reasons from that list.

1. Excellent Reach – Google Ads platform allows you to reach millions of people at the same time.
2. Powerful Analytics – The Google Ads platform is backed up by the Google Analytics aka, Google Trends platform to give you excellent insights into the marketing campaigns.
3. Competitive Research – The Google Webmaster tools can help you track the progress of your competition and analyse their growth factors seamlessly.
4. Support Community – Google provides round-the-clock support with its active communities and forums.
5. Remarketing – Google has the special vantage point in the data analytics industry that you can leverage to identify and target the purchase-intent of your prospects.

Google also has an active developer community that listens to the needs of its customers and audience to capture their interest. This developer community is known for bringing multiple customer-centric updates and features for its audience.

One of the most recent updates on the Google Ads platform allows users to now copy column preferences easily. Let’s understand how this affects the digital marketing for your business.

How Does This Feature Help Me?

This feature allows the Google Ads users to copy column preferences from one Google Ads experience to another in a seamless fashion. Before this update, copying the columns repetitive, manual and completely mundane task. Here’s how this feature helps you in your day to day marketing activities.

1. Accurate Copying

The manual and repetitive task of copying columns from one ad experience to the other created multiple loopholes in the procedure naturally. As humans, we tend to make more mistakes in doing a mundane task over an extended period. On the other hand, a machine/computer can effectively repeat the same process, again and again, a million times without producing a single error. This study suggests how over 48.8% of the errors in the tasks carried out by humans occur only due to stress, repetition and fatigue. At an organizational level, you cannot afford to have even a single minor mistake. A mistake in calculating a single critical value, it can easily throw off the overall calculation by a huge amount at an enterprise-level.

Copying columns from one account to the other becomes extremely simple with this update. Users need to perform only a few clicks to complete the entire process. Even the overall order and look of the columns can be maintained easily across different Google Ad accounts with this feature.

2. Saves Time

Copying columns between two accounts is relatively simple. The complexity comes into the picture when you are dealing with more than two Google Ad accounts at the same time. This happens usually at an enterprise-level. Larger organizations usually have an entire team of digital marketers instead of a handful of people. Depending on the type of business and the overall number of people in the organization, the number of marketers can go from 10 to more than 10,000 at a global level. These digital marketers have individual KPIs and goals to achieve every quarter.

With this new feature, you can easily copy the columns into a new account with the click of a single button. This helps the organization streamline the overall marketing efforts by a huge extent. It also ensures that the whole digital marketing team has access to fresh data directly from the latest campaign. Copying the columns across thousands of different accounts with a single click saves a lot of time. With this feature, the digital marketing team can on-board a new employee within a couple of days instead of weeks/months.

3. Copying Statistics Tables

This feature is not limited to copying the overall look and feel of the columns. Instead, it extends out to the statistics tables as well. You can copy your personalized preferences across multiple accounts easily along with the statistics tables of the main account. This practice ensures that there is a single source of truth for the entire digital marketing team. Having access to the same type of data streamlines the overall SEM efforts of the team by a huge extent.

Once the baseline is copied from one account to the next, the user has the chance to personalize the columns according to his/her needs. This practice makes room for the flexibility of operation on a single Google Ads Experience platform.

1. Digital Copies for Backup

As a part of best practices, marketers often leave one account untouched for measurement and blueprinting purposes. They can easily create a backup of a fresh account with this untouched account for a new employee. This feature can leverage the availability of an untouched account in an extremely efficient way. Google now allows you to copy columns, tables for statistics as well as preferences all with a single click.

Once you have given the access to the new duplicate account to the new hire, he/she can customize it at a later stage. The customization helps the digital marketer focus on the most critical aspects of his/her job while avoiding all the other distractions. Also, creating a digital backup of an original account is always a wise idea for disaster recovery. Studies show that over 60% of companies that lose their data shut down within the next 6 months. So, if you want your marketing department to grow sustainably for the foreseeable future, make sure that you create a digital backup of the original account.

2. Selective Copying

This feature is not limited to copying the column preferences as it is. Instead, you have the freedom to copy only a certain number of columns in the initial stages. This gives you a complete control of the amount of data that you wish to share with the new hire. Selective copying is much like RBAC (Role-Based Access). You don’t need to reveal all the critical information about the campaign to a person within the organization, instead, you can reveal only a small portion of data that will help him/her do the job effectively.

You can always copy more columns at a later stage if needed.

Now that we know the benefits of this new feature on Google Ads, let us quickly discuss how to implement it.

How to Copy Column Preferences to A New Google Ads Account?

The overall process is very simple and takes only a few clicks. We can break down this process into 5 quick steps.

1. Login to Your Original Google Ads Account

You need the administrator access to the original Google Ads account to carry out this procedure. Google has incorporated extremely high levels of security within all its applications now. You may need to access the original account with a two-factor authentication when you are logging in after a while.

1. Link The Original Google Ads Account with the New Account

To copy all the statistics tables and column preferences you need to ensure that you have the new accounts linked to the original account. You can easily link a new account to a manager account using this simple procedure given on the Google help forum. Ideally, you should link a new account to the original one as soon as you create it.

2. Navigate to Columns Preferences

Once you have linked the necessary accounts you need to navigate to the right tab in the manager account. To do so, access the navigation menu located on the right side of the screen. Click on Tools > Preferences > Columns performance. Once you do so, you will be taken to a new page where you can manage all the existing columns on that account. This page will also have a small button at the bottom that says ‘Copy Columns.’

3. Copy the Columns

Click on the ‘Copy Columns’ button and you will see that the copying process starts across all the accounts linked to the manager account. Your existing column preferences on the individual accounts won’t be affected. Only the new columns that you might have set in the manager account will be copied on to the linked accounts.

1. Wait

Once you have completed this process. You need to wait for up to 24 hours to see the results across all the linked accounts. If you have linked only 1-2 accounts, the process might be completed within a few minutes. However, with more number of accounts, it may take up to a full day.

Google has truly changed everything about how we access the internet today. It is hard to imagine a world where Google did not exist. Keep an eye out on the new updates by Google so that you can leverage the best features to expedite your success on the internet.