How do I COMPLETELY DELETE and Adwords campaign?

Jul 12 2009

I have Adwords campaigns that I’ve deleted but they’re not exactly "deleted" but I can still SEE them! It makes it hard manage my Adwords account because the "deleted" ads are still visible. Is there are way to completely ERASE the deleted campaigns?

Tags:

2 responses so far

  1. Mark Welch
    on 12 Jul 2009 at 10:36 am

    I’ve had the same experience, as I conduct many test campaigns for clients and sometimes for prospective clients. I have many hundreds of "deleted" campaigns which, as you note, remain accessible within the account.

    You can’t "erase" or "obliterate" them, for two very good reasons.

    First, someone might want to "restore" a deleted campaign, whether it was deleted by accident (!) or because circumstances have changed (for example, maybe I deleted a campaign because bid rates were too high, but now I’ve discovered that bid rates are more affordable because one or more competitors has dropped out).

    The second reason is that Google wants clients to have continued access to reports for deleted campaigns; if that data were erased, we couldn’t "audit" past activity, nor could our auditors (nor Google’s) examine the books properly.

    Note that there is one strategy to eliminate those "deleted" campaigns from view: create an entirely new Google AdWords account, and after you’ve replicated your current campaigns in the new account, you can "close" the old account. The only cost is the standard $5 fee to create a new account.

    I am assuming that you realize that you can remove the "deleted" campaigns from view in the online interface by selecting the "Show Active Only" or "Show All But Deleted" options from the online interface.

    If you are using the AdWords Editor, then if you actually UN-INSTALL the Editor (you might also need to manually delete the various data and system files created by the Editor, which are sometimes found by a re-install), and then re-install the AdWords Editor, your deleted campaigns are not re-loaded when you download your account data. (If you haven’t had to un-install and re-install AdWords Editor, be thankful — there are a number of strange little bugs that require this step.)

  2. Lukene
    on 12 Jul 2009 at 10:36 am

    https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=6283&query=delete&topic=&type=f&onClick=