Google Ads tools and settings

The Tools tab provides direct links to a variety of Google Ads account tools. Use these tools to monitor and make changes to your account, ads, ad groups, and keywords.

Change History

The Change History tool displays changes you’ve made to your account for the last two years. With easy access to your account history, you can make sense of performance changes, and keep track of how you’ve managed your account in the past.

Conversions

The Conversions section can reveal what happens after people click your ads. Do they purchase your product? Or sign up for your newsletter? To track this information, simply use a free tool called conversion tracking. By knowing more about your conversions, you’ll also understand which keywords are good for your business, so you can invest more money in your best words and boost your ROI.

After you’ve set up conversion tracking, you’ll find a complete summary of your conversion data here, to complement the reporting you’ll find within the Campaigns tab.

Attribution

Attribution is a set of reports about your conversions. Once you’ve set up conversion tracking, attribution reports show you the paths customers take to completing a conversion, and attribute the conversion to different ads, clicks, and dimensions along the way. With these in-depth insights into customer behavior, you can better optimize your advertising to reach people when they’re considering taking an action valuable to your business.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics shows you how people found your site and how they explored it. Using this information, you can improve your website’s ROI, increase conversions, and learn how to provide a better experience for your customers. With Analytics, you can also set up goals (website pages that serve as conversions for your site), and import them into Google Ads. Some examples of conversion pages are a “thank you” page after a user has submitted information through a form, or a purchase confirmation page.

Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner helps you build new Search Network campaigns or expand existing ones. You can search for keyword and ad group ideas and even see how a list of keywords might perform. That’s important because the keywords you create for a given ad group are used to target your ads to potential customers. In other words, good keywords can help you show your ads to the customers you want, when you want. Keyword Planner can also help you choose competitive bids and budgets to use with your campaigns.

Display Planner

Display Planner is good to use if you’ve chosen to run ads on the Google Display Network. On the Display Network, you can target your text, image, video, or rich media ads to show on specific sites, pages, apps, or videos across the network. Display Planner helps you plan your Display Network campaigns by suggesting keywords, interests, topics, placements, demographic groups, and remarketing lists to target. Along with all the ideas it suggests, you’ll see estimates for cost and reach based on historical data.

Ad Preview and Diagnosis

Use the Ad Preview and Diagnosis tool to search for your ad just like you would on a regular Google search results page. This is an easy way to check how your ad appears, and you get the exact same results as a Google search without accumulating any impressions (so there’s no cost to you). If your ad isn’t showing, the tool will explain why and provide steps to help you get it up and running.

Tools for advertisers with multiple or large accounts

Creative optimization tools

These tools can help you create, test, and update ads across accounts.

• Business data: Use this one-stop-shop for your business information within Google Ads. You can access this information to update your creatives in real-time.
• Ad customizers: Tell Google Ads how to customize your ads with real-time updates.
• Upgraded URLs: An improved URL management process within Google Ads that lets you differentiate between your landing page and tracking parameters. With these improvements, you can create custom URL parameters and reduce account management workload, ad review time, and web crawling on landing pages. 

Scale and efficiency tools

These time-saving tools can help you swiftly make large-scale changes to your accounts.

• Edit campaign settings in bulk: Use bulk editing to update settings like location, language, ad rotation, and more. You can use filters to quickly identify all campaigns that target a specific location, for example. 
• Edit ad extensions in bulk: Manage ad extensions more easily. You can change your extensions and edit device settings in bulk, create extensions across campaigns or ad groups with just a few clicks, and create and edit your extensions using spreadsheets. 
• Run powerful, cross-account scripts: Make large-scale, customized changes to your account — including accounts within your MCC — using simple JavaScript code. You can also create customized reports, and pull in data from your Google Spreadsheets. 
• Make changes with bulk uploads: Download spreadsheets, make changes offline, and then upload the updated spreadsheet back into your account — right where you want to make your changes. With integrated previews and error-checking, you can also make sure your changes are ready when you are.
• Use Google Ads Editor: Use Google Ads Editor to quickly download, update, or create campaigns with powerful bulk editing tools, then upload your changes to Google Ads. Google Ads Editor gives you the control to manage and view multiple accounts at the same time. You can also copy or move items between campaigns, search for items within your account, view your account statistics, and quickly undo or redo changes. Best of all, you can keep working even when you’re offline.

Automated bidding tools

If you’re managing hundreds or thousands of keyword bids, consider automated bid strategies to help you with real-time bidding at scale. These strategies can help optimize your bids for your performance goals — across specific campaigns, ad groups, and keywords — while giving you manual bidding control over your most important keywords.

Here are some bidding strategies you can use:

• Target cost-per-action (CPA): Automatically set bids to help you get as many conversions as possible while reaching your average CPA goal.
• Target return on ad spend (ROAS): Automatically set your bids to maximize your conversion value, while trying to reach an average return on ad spend.
• Maximize clicks: Automatically set bids to help you get the most clicks within a target spend amount that you choose.
• Target search page location: Automatically adjust bids to help you get your ads to the top of the page or the first page of search results.
• Target outranking share: Automatically set bids to help you outrank another domain’s ads in search results.

Powerful reporting and analytics tools

See actionable insights and reporting that give you a more holistic view of performance and help you make better business decisions.

• Auction insights: Compare your performance with other advertisers who are participating in the same auctions and see where you’re missing opportunities. This information can help you make better decisions about bids, budgets, and keyword choices. 
• Importing conversions: Sometimes your adwords-sourced leads convert offline. Or you want to report your online conversions 30 days after the sale so you can exclude orders that were returned. You can with Google Ads Conversion Import. 
• Labels: Apply labels to keywords, campaigns, ad groups, and ads to quickly filter and review the data that matters to you.
• Geographic reporting: Use geographic information to better understand how your ads are performing in different locations. See where your customers are physically located, or locations they’re interested in. If you use location extensions, use the distance report to see how your ads performed in varying distances from your business
• Search Terms report: See what queries are actually triggering your ads, so you can make better decisions on what positive and negative keywords to use. 
• Custom columns: Tailor the columns in your statistics table to segment and display your data in the ways that are most important to you. 
• Campaign details report: See which features, settings, and attributes each of your campaigns is using so you can identify account issues or new opportunities.
• Report Editor: Use powerful reporting tools to conduct multi-dimensional analysis and create pivot tables, charts, and graphs, directly within your browser.