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Adopt sitelinks and callouts you already have

Most accounts arrive with extensions already on them: sitelinks somebody added years ago, callouts attached to the account rather than to a campaign, a structured snippet on one campaign that nobody else has.

Writing them out by hand is risky. Declare a sitelink whose text you got slightly wrong and bidsmith creates a second one; declare a link that already exists and Google rejects the whole batch. bidsmith import avoids both: you point at the live resource, it writes the block that matches it, and plan goes quiet.

Find what’s there

Terminal window
bidsmith query "SELECT customer_asset.resource_name, asset.sitelink_asset.link_text
                FROM customer_asset WHERE customer_asset.field_type = SITELINK"
customer_asset.resource_name                          asset.sitelink_asset.link_text
customers/1234567890/customerAssets/4001~SITELINK     Shop
customers/1234567890/customerAssets/4002~SITELINK     Support

Those resource_name values are what import takes. Swap SITELINK for CALLOUT or STRUCTURED_SNIPPET for the others, and customer_asset for campaign_asset to see the ones attached to a single campaign.

Import them

  1. Preview one. --check prints the block and writes nothing:

    Terminal window
    bidsmith import --check account.google_ads_customer_asset.shop_link \
                    customers/1234567890/customerAssets/4001~SITELINK
    resource "google_ads_sitelink_asset" "sitelink_shop" {
      link_text = "Shop"
      final_urls = ["https://example.com/shop"]
    }
    

    resource "google_ads_customer_asset" "shop_link" {
      asset = google_ads_sitelink_asset.sitelink_shop.id
    }

    Two blocks, because a link can’t exist without its asset. If your files already declared the sitelink, only the link would be written and it would point at what you have.

  2. Write it. Drop --check:

    Terminal window
    bidsmith import account.google_ads_customer_asset.shop_link \
                    customers/1234567890/customerAssets/4001~SITELINK

    account. is the module segment — it names the file (account.bid) the blocks go into.

  3. Repeat for the rest, then confirm nothing would be created:

    Terminal window
    bidsmith plan .
    Plan: 0 to create, 0 to update, 0 to destroy, 0 to adopt, 8 unchanged.

Nothing was written to Google Ads at any point. The adoption is a diff in your repository, reviewable like any other change.

Give them better names

import names the asset the way refresh would — sitelink_shop, callout_free_delivery. If you’d rather call it something else, rename it afterwards:

Terminal window
bidsmith mv google_ads_sitelink_asset.sitelink_shop google_ads_sitelink_asset.shop

mv rewrites the block and every reference to it, and changes nothing live.

Assets have no name of their own that a .bid file can point at — bidsmith matches them by their text and URLs. Two live sitelinks that are byte-identical are therefore indistinguishable, and plan tells you so:

plan: warning: account.google_ads_sitelink_asset.shop: 2 live resources
are identical to it (4001, 4009) — adopted 4001, the rest stay
unmanaged.

Nothing is duplicated and nothing is broken — but one of the two is outside bidsmith’s view, and will stay there. Delete the extra in the Google Ads UI, or import it too under its own address.

See also