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Is it possible to change the ad group for a campaign? I've searched Google and seemingly clicked on every tab in Adwords. I have a difficult time believing something like this wouldn't be possible... or that Adwords would make it so convoluted to do this. Any help is appreciated.
Thank you!
Short answer is no, you can't. Nothing in Google Ads is actually deleted. You'll appreciate this at some point in the future.
You can use Google Ads editor to "cut and paste" an ad group from one campaign to another. In reality, what it's doing is copying it from one into the other then removing the original. It's still visible in the original, just no longer active and no longer possible to reactivate it.
The reason for this is because there is a hierarchy within each account. An ad group (and the ads and keywords within it) accrue costs, impression, click data etc. within them. Those costs are associated with that campaign. As budgets are allocated at the campaign level, you can't just move costs from one campaign to another once they've already accrued. Otherwise, budgets would be useless.
If you're just looking for an easy way to copy your ad groups from one campaign to a other in the traditional "copy and paste" mindset that you're used to, use Google Ads Editor (the desktop app). Just understand that you're really just creating a duplicate and deactivating the old one because the campaign costs have already accrued. Even if you haven't accrued costs yet, this is the behaviour that's enforced and it makes sense once costs actually do start accruing.
You can download ads editor here : https://ads.google.com/home/tools/ads-editor/
Hi Dave, thank you for the in-depth response. Copy and paste was my thought process. One business was running and then a second brand of their business was added on which for ad purposes is the exact same except for location. So I duplicated my ads for the first branch and wanted to copy over the ad group and then change a few location specific keywords. My assumption was that ad groups are inside of ads! Everything worked out - and the lessons learned much more valuable than the time that would have been saved copy-pasting! Thanks for the ad editor recommendation. I'll check it out.
No worries. It's a difficult concept to grasp as it makes no sense in the traditional way of thinking, until you start really spending. If you could remove spend from a campaign and move it to another campaign, all hell would break loose. Glad you got it sorted anyway.