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bidsmith

bidsmith vs Google Ads Editor

Both tools let you bulk-edit Google Ads without clicking through the web UI one field at a time. They solve overlapping problems, and most teams will use both. Here’s how they compare.

The side-by-side

Google Ads Editorbidsmith
Source of truthYour last download. Gets stale the moment someone else edits the account.A Git repository everyone shares. Always current.
HistoryYou see your own pending changes. Past edits are gone once posted.Every change is a Git commit. Years of history, searchable.
Review before postingYou see your own diff. Nobody else does.Open a pull request. Teammates review and comment before anything ships.
UndoUndo a pending change locally. Once posted, the only undo is editing manually.git revert <commit> → bidsmith apply. Five seconds.
Concurrent editsFirst one to post wins; the other has to re-download and reconcile by hand.Git merges the edits. Conflicts are visible and resolvable.
Bulk find-and-replaceExcellent. The UI is the strongest part of the Editor.Works — it’s just text, so any editor’s find-and-replace does it. Slightly less ergonomic for ad-hoc bulk edits.
Reporting and inspectionLimited. Use the web UI.Not at all. Use the web UI.
Search-term reports, recommendations, audit insightsRead-only views in the Editor; rich in the web UI.Not bidsmith’s job. Use the web UI.
ReproducibilityA posted change is a snapshot in time. There’s no way to ask “what did this account look like in March?”Yes — every state the account has been in is a Git commit you can check out.
Automation / CINot designed for it.First-class. Run bidsmith plan in a GitHub Action on every PR.
Learning curveFamiliar Google Ads vocabulary, dropdown menus, point-and-click.New file format and a few terminal commands. Steeper for one person; flatter for a team of five.
Works offlineYes.Editing and validate yes. plan and apply need the Google Ads API.

When to use what

Reach for Google Ads Editor when:

  • You’re doing a one-time bulk edit and don’t need a record of who/why.
  • You’re inspecting performance, search-terms, recommendations.
  • You’re new to the account and want to poke around interactively.
  • You’re the only one editing the account and changes are infrequent.

Reach for bidsmith when:

  • More than one person edits the same account.
  • You need an audit trail (“who set that bid, and why?”).
  • You want a teammate to review a change before it goes live.
  • You want a CI pipeline to run plan on every PR and catch mistakes.
  • You’re managing five, ten, or fifty similar campaigns and want to generate them from a template instead of duplicating in the UI.
  • You ever need to roll back a change cleanly.

They’re not mutually exclusive

Most teams will:

  • Use bidsmith for the config of their account — campaigns, ad groups, keywords, budgets, shared sets, conversion actions.
  • Use the Google Ads web UI for everything else — reports, recommendations, search-term review, day-to-day monitoring.
  • Use Google Ads Editor for one-off exploratory bulk edits, then run bidsmith refresh afterwards to bring the changes back into Git.

What about the API directly?

If you’re a developer and you’d happily write Python scripts that call the Google Ads API — you can. But that’s exactly the gap bidsmith fills:

  • Your scripts have no diff between “what I want” and “what’s there.” You write imperative code: create this, update that. bidsmith is declarative: here’s what should exist.
  • Your scripts have no built-in plan/apply preview. bidsmith does.
  • Your scripts aren’t reviewable as a clean diff in a PR. A .bid file is.

bidsmith is what you’d build if you wrote those scripts five times and got tired of writing them.

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