There’s more to Google Ads Editor than most of us appreciate. The core functionality – bulk edits, copy-paste, find and replace – tends to be the limit of most people’s use.
But there’s a layer beneath that which very few practitioners explore. Some of these features have been there for years. They’re not hidden, exactly, but they’re easy to miss if you’ve never gone looking. Here are five that are worth knowing about.
1. The built-in spell checker
Google Ads Editor has a spell checker, and it’s surprisingly easy to miss. It’s tucked away under Preferences > Download & Display, rather than anywhere you’d naturally look for it.
Once enabled, it checks your ad copy as you work – headlines, descriptions, paths – and flags anything it doesn’t recognise. It’s a useful safety net when you’re building or editing ads at scale, where small typos can easily slip through without a visual preview catching them.
2. Hide Empty Types
The type list on the left-hand side of Editor shows every possible item type for the selected campaign – keywords, ads, extensions, audiences, and so on.
For a standard Search campaign, that list includes a lot of things that don’t apply: app ads, display ads, video assets, and a dozen other categories that will never contain anything.
It makes the ‘lower left nav’ a bit of a pain.
Select the “Hide empty types” checkbox at the top of that panel, and it strips out everything with zero items. What’s left is just the things that actually exist in the campaign you’re looking at.
It sounds minor, but if you’re working across a large account with mixed campaign types, it makes navigating noticeably smoother.
3. Formula words in Replace Text
When you’re building out campaigns at scale – say, one campaign or ad group per location, or a set of ad groups with different product themes – you typically want the ad copy and keywords to reflect the specific ad group they sit in. Doing that manually across dozens of ad groups is tedious and error-prone.
What Google calls “formula words” let you do it in bulk. The process is straightforward: build your ads with a generic placeholder in the text – something like “X” – so your headlines read “Car servicing in X”, “MOTs in X”, and so on. Apply that across all the ad groups in the build. Then select them all, open Replace Text, and replace “X” with [adgroup]. Editor swaps in the actual ad group name for each one.
The same approach works with [campaign], [keyword], [finalURL], and several others. Google’s help page has the full list of available formula words. For a multi-location build, it turns what would be an hour of repetitive editing into a single operation.
4. Advanced filter functions
The basic search bar in Editor is fine for finding a keyword or an ad group by name. But the advanced filter functions are where it gets genuinely powerful – and almost nobody uses them.
There are eight filter functions available (NOTEXIST, EXIST, COUNT, ALL, CONTAINER, AND, OR, NOT), and they let you query items based on the things they contain. That means you can filter at the ad group level based on properties of the ads or keywords inside those ad groups.
A few practical examples:
Find ad groups with no enabled ads:
NOTEXIST(ads, status = enabled)
This is basic hygiene. It instantly surfaces any ad groups that have been left without a live ad – whether through accidental pausing, disapprovals, or gaps in a build. It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to miss in a large account and embarrassing to discover after the fact.
Spot gaps in a promo rollout:
NOTEXIST(ads, labels = (“PROMO”))
If you’ve labelled your promotional RSAs, this filter shows you every ad group that’s missing one.
When you’re rolling out sale ads across dozens or hundreds of ad groups before a deadline, this is the fastest QA check you can run. Select all active search campaigns, switch to ad groups view, apply the filter, and you’ll see exactly where the gaps are.
Find ad groups running on a single ad:
COUNT(ads, status = enabled) < 2
Not a disaster – but you may want to have two or three RSAs per ad group for certain types of ongoing message testing. This filter identifies the ad groups where that isn’t happening.
These filters can also be saved, so you can build a small library of QA checks and reuse them without reconstructing them each time.
5. Custom rules
If you spend much time in Google Ads Editor, you’ve probably become desensitised to the little yellow warning triangles that follow so many of your changes.
The rules behind those warnings are flexible. Rather than accepting the continual nagging, you can decide for yourself whether any part of your setup deserves a flag. Under “Custom rules” you can find the list of current rules and the controls to edit, pause, or remove them – and to create new ones.
A couple of the built-in rules are worth turning off straight away. There’s one that warns you whenever a campaign isn’t targeting search partners – but if you’ve deliberately excluded search partners (as many experienced practitioners do), you don’t need a warning every time. Similarly, there’s a rule that flags search campaigns for not also targeting the display network. That’s actively unhelpful advice for most accounts, and leaving it on just adds noise.
Once you’ve cleared out the rules that don’t serve you, the real value is in creating your own. Two that are worth setting up:
A URL checker that flags any enabled ads where the final URL doesn’t match your root domain. This catches copy-paste errors, test URLs that were never updated, or ads pointing to the wrong site – before they go live.
A brand keyword rule that flags brand terms appearing in non-brand ad groups. Set the criteria to something like: keyword contains [brand term] AND campaign name does not contain “brand”. This catches keywords that have ended up in the wrong campaign – a common issue in larger accounts where multiple people are making changes.
Once the rules are meaningful for you – and not too overzealous – you might start paying attention to those yellow triangles again.
