How to Export Keywords From AdWords

You want the list out of the account. That part is quick.

Open Google Ads. Go to the keywords page, then look above the table for the download button. Pick a spreadsheet format. The file lands on your machine. For the whole account rather than one list, Google Ads Editor pulls everything down at once. Keyword Planner has its own download button. This site covers that one elsewhere.

So that is the whole of the how. AdWords is called Google Ads now. Another page here handles the rename. The rest of this is not about the button. Instead it is about the file.

The Download Button Is the Whole Answer

Nobody needs eight hundred words on where a button sits. You found it. Then you clicked it. Your keywords are in a spreadsheet.

What almost nobody says out loud is what you are now holding. Not the account. Something that resembles the account. One of those two spends money. The other never will again. That export raises a smaller question, whether a file is SEO friendly once it leaves the account.

Nothing Leaves When You Export

Look at the word.

Export means a thing goes out. A country exports grain and the grain gets on a ship. It is gone. Somebody else has it, and you do not.

Click download on your keywords page and nothing of the sort happens. Every keyword is still sitting in the account. Still enabled. Also still matching searches this afternoon. Charging your card too, exactly as it did before you touched anything. Not one of them moved an inch.

So you exported nothing. What you made was a second version.

That sounds like a small correction to a word. It is not.

The File Stops. The Account Does Not.

Here is what a second version means.

There are two of your keyword list now. One of them is running. The other is finished. It finished the instant it landed on your machine. You can edit it, of course. Nothing will ever update it.

Meanwhile the account carries on. Somebody pauses a keyword on Thursday. A bid gets raised. Nine new terms land in an ad group on Friday. The search terms report turned up something good. None of that reaches your spreadsheet. It cannot. Nothing joins the two.

Your file is not wrong, then. It was true when you took it. Now it is simply describing a Tuesday.

Then comes the part that costs money. The file is the thing that gets worked on. It gets emailed to the agency. Then it gets sorted and read. Somebody argues over it in a meeting, then turns it into a plan for next quarter. All the while the account is the thing that keeps spending. So the decisions get made on the version that stopped. The money goes out through the version that did not.

Some downloads carry a date range at the top. Good, and useful. Only that tells you when the file was taken. It has never told you what moved afterward.

Somebody Will Point at Google Ads Editor

Fair enough. Editor does not work this way at all.

It pulls down the whole account rather than a list. And it knows what you changed. Then it checks what moved while you were away. Nothing gets pushed until you have looked at the difference.

Only consider what Editor is conceding. A version of an account goes out of date. An entire desktop application is built around that, as though it were obvious. It is obvious.

The download button on the keywords page offers you none of that. It hands over a file. Then the file is on its own. Editor is also where changing a keyword match type actually happens.

Nobody Exports a Sleepy Account

Now ask why you pressed the button in the first place.

Nobody exports keywords for the pleasure of it. People pull that file at a particular kind of moment. A new agency starts Monday. The website is being rebuilt. Campaigns are getting restructured. Somebody wants a record before a big change goes in.

Read those back. Not one of them is a quiet week.

There is the trouble in one line. The file goes out of date fastest at precisely the moment you needed it to hold still. A quiet account would have held still for you. So would a dead one. Yet nobody exports those, because nobody has a reason to.

Where the Argument Stops

None of this makes the download button a trap.

Plenty of accounts barely move. One campaign, forty keywords, nothing different from one month to the next. Export that and it will still be accurate at Christmas. Use it.

The file is the right tool for one job in particular. That job is worth doing. Reading your keyword list end to end. All of it, one column, nothing on the screen asking you to act. Plenty of advertisers have never once read their own list start to finish.

And you can put keywords back, before anybody writes in. Bulk uploads exist. So does Editor. The file was never a one-way door.

Pull It Twice

Here is the practice. It costs nothing.

Export once when you want to think. Sort it. Read it. Hand it to whoever is asking. That version is for arguing about.

Then export again on the day somebody is going to act. Not the week before. The day itself. Put the two beside each other and look at what shifted while you were making up your mind.

Mostly the answer is a handful of rows, none of which matter much. Sometimes one of them is the keyword the whole plan was built around. Paused quietly in March, by somebody who has since left.

Try it on your own account. Find the last keyword export you took, then pull a fresh one. Count the rows that changed.

Nothing changed? Your account is settled. Stop thinking about it. Plenty changed? That first file is the one your agency has been planning from.

No statistic about other advertisers settles that one. Yours is a single download away.

What To-The-TOP! Does With a Keyword List

The first thing we ask for when a business hands over a PPC account is not the spreadsheet. Rather it is access. A file tells you what somebody bought. The account tells you what happened next.

So the export turns useful after that. Now there is something live to check it against. Businesses across Calgary arrive holding a keyword list from a previous agency, and a plan built on top of it. Usually the list is fine. The plan built on top of it is not.

SEO Company To-The-TOP! has been doing paid search and search engine optimization since 2007. Our Google Ads management work starts with the account rather than the artifact. The To-The-TOP! approach to keyword research leans the same way. What somebody typed last week beats what somebody typed last spring. The portfolio shows where that work has landed. SEO in Calgary is patient work, though. Three to six months before positions move in any meaningful way. No guarantees. The other direction is a competitor keyword gap analysis, which reads accounts you do not own.

Common Questions About Exporting Keywords

How do I export keywords from AdWords?

Open the keywords page in Google Ads, then use the download button above the table and pick a spreadsheet format. The Editor tool pulls the whole account down instead of a single list. Neither takes long.

Does exporting keywords change my account?

No. Nothing leaves, and nothing stops. Your keywords keep running exactly as they were. The campaigns carry on spending, while the file sits on your machine doing nothing.

Does the export include match types and bids?

Yes. Match type travels inside the keyword text, so it comes along whether you asked for it or not. Bids and status arrive in their own columns. Your ads and landing pages are a separate download.

Can I re-upload a keyword file back into Google Ads?

You can. Bulk uploads and Google Ads Editor both accept a file going the other way. Take a fresh export first, though, so you know what has changed since the old one.

How often should I export my keywords?

Whenever you are about to change something, and again on the day you change it. Nobody needs a monthly ritual for this. A file from last quarter is a record of last quarter, and nothing more.