You don't have to start from scratch! Sometimes cloning and tweaking a currently running campaign is so much faster.
Mark Scholl
April 15, 2019
Let’s say you built a paid search campaign that is running in one region of the country. The results are strong, and it’s nicely optimized. Now you would like to run a similar campaign, but in another region of the country. But you don’t want to start from scratch, as tweaking the currently running campaign for the new region would be so much faster.
In this case, cloning your campaign into a new campaign is the perfect solution. It gives you the optimized and well performing campaign as your starting point, allowing you to just apply tweaks and keep on moving.
Previously, in order to do this you had to export your campaign and settings into a CSV file, then upload it. This generally worked, but was clunky at best. And, if you are anything like me, I hated wielding a giant spreadsheet around. When I exported, it was hard to know if everything I needed was actually in there, as there were so many columns and rows.
Thankfully, this is so much easier now. In fact, it’s literally ctl+c, ctl+v type simple now.
How to Clone a Google Ads Campaign
In order to do this, you’re going to need Google Ads Editor. Make sure it is connected to the account in question.
Click on the campaign you want to clone. Hit CTL + C (or CMD + C for my Mac brethren).
Now click on any open space below to deselect that campaign. Then hit CLT + V (or CMD + V). It will completely clone the campaign with an exact duplicate.
Just begin modifying the parts you need to adjust: campaign name, geo-targeting, etc.
In this case, we were launching a campaign in another part of the country. In this case, the campaigns are identical, except for the geo, ad copy, and a few keyword tweaks. Cloning the campaign saves a lot of time getting the build done fast.
