How to Delete Google Ad Data

Cleaning up an old Google Ads account can feel like an overwhelming task, but knowing how to properly remove old data is essential for keeping things organized. This article will guide you through the process, showing you how to "delete" campaigns, ad groups, and keywords. We'll also explain what data is permanent and how to manage your account's history effectively.

Why Would You Want to Delete Google Ads Data?

Before jumping into the "how," it helps to understand the "why." Advertisers typically want to remove data to declutter their accounts and simplify their workflow. Over time, accounts can become filled with dozens or even hundreds of failed experiments, outdated promotions, and temporary seasonal campaigns.

Common reasons to clean up your account include:

• Reducing Clutter: Cleaning up the interface makes it easier to navigate and find the campaigns that are actually running and driving results. It's difficult to manage a dozen active campaigns when they're mixed in with 200 old, paused ones.
• Simplifying Reporting: When you pull reports or look at your dashboards, removed campaigns are typically filtered out by default. This gives you a clearer view of current performance without having to manually apply filters every time.
• Improving Account Structure: Sometimes you need to completely overhaul your account's structure. Removing old campaigns and ad groups is often the first step in building a newer, more logical framework.
• Handing Off Account Management: If a new agency or manager is taking over, removing irrelevant historical campaigns can provide them with a cleaner slate to start from.

Understanding What You Can and Can't Permanently Delete

This is arguably the most important concept to grasp about deleting data in Google Ads. The term "delete" is a bit misleading. In almost all cases, when you think you're deleting something, you're actually removing it. This is a crucial distinction.

When you "remove" an item like a campaign, ad group, ad, or keyword, you are essentially setting its status to "Removed." It stops running, stops accruing costs, and is hidden from your default view. However, all of its historical performance data - clicks, impressions, cost, conversions, etc. - is preserved within your account.

This is a feature, not a bug. Google intentionally preserves this historical data for several important reasons:

• Historical Context: It allows you to analyze long-term trends and compare performance year-over-year. Without this history, you'd lose valuable insights into what has and hasn't worked for your business.
• Account Integrity: It maintains a complete record of your advertising activity and spend for billing and compliance purposes.
• Learning for Google's Algorithm: Historical performance data helps inform automated bidding strategies, even from past campaigns.

So, what can you truly get rid of? You have more direct control over deleting user data and certain assets, such as:

• Customer Match Lists: You can permanently delete customer lists you've uploaded for targeting.
• Linked Account Data: Data in connected accounts like Google Analytics is subject to its own retention settings, which you can control.
• Some Assets: You can often remove assets like images or specific sitelinks, but the performance data associated with them when they were active will remain.

For the rest of this guide, we'll focus on the most common task: "removing" core elements like campaigns, ad groups, ads, and keywords from active use.

How to "Delete" (Remove) Campaigns, Ad Groups, and Ads

The process for removing campaigns, ad groups, and ads is nearly identical, just performed on different pages within the Google Ads interface. This is a non-reversible action - while the data isn't erased, a removed item cannot be re-enabled. You would need to create a new one to replace it.

How to Remove Campaigns

Follow these steps to remove one or more campaigns:

1. Log in to your Google Ads account.
2. From the left-hand navigation menu, click on Campaigns.
3. You'll see a list of all your campaigns. Check the box next to the name of each campaign you want to remove.
4. Once you've selected one or more campaigns, a blue bar will appear at the top of the list. Click the Edit dropdown menu.
5. From the dropdown, select Remove.
6. Google Ads will ask you to confirm your decision. Click CONFIRM to finalize the removal.

The campaign's status will now change from "Enabled" or "Paused" to "Removed." It will no longer appear in your default campaign list. To view removed items later, you can click the filter icon (a small funnel) at the top of the list and change the status filter to show "All" or "Removed."

How to Remove Ad Groups

The steps for finding and removing ad groups are just as simple:

1. In the left-hand navigation menu, select the specific campaign containing the ad group you want to remove.
2. Once the campaign is selected, click on Ad groups in the secondary menu.
3. Check the box next to the ad group(s) you wish to remove.
4. In the blue bar that appears, click Edit and select Remove.
5. Confirm your choice, and the ad group will be removed.

How to Remove Ads

Removing individual ads follows the same familiar pattern:

1. Select the relevant campaign and then the relevant ad group from the navigation menu on the left.
2. Click on Ads in the secondary menu to see a list of ads within that ad group.
3. Check the box next to the creative(s) you want to remove.
4. Click Edit and select Remove from the blue bar at the top.
5. Confirm the removal.

How to Remove Keywords

Just like with campaigns and ad groups, removing keywords is a way to permanently clear them from your targeting while preserving their history. This is different from pausing, which keeps the keyword in your active list with the option to re-enable it later. Removing is best for keywords that you've determined are definitively not a good fit for your business.

1. Navigate to the correct campaign and ad group.
2. In the secondary menu on the left, under the Audiences, keywords, and content section, click on Search keywords.
3. You'll see a list of all keywords in that ad group. Select the checkbox next to each one you want to remove.
4. Click the Edit dropdown menu in the blue bar and select Remove.
5. A confirmation prompt will appear. Confirm the removal.

Managing Account History and Data Retention

While you can't erase your core performance data, you have more control over other types of data, particularly those related to audiences and tracking.

Your Account's Change History

It's important to know that Google Ads keeps an uneditable audit trail of every action taken in your account, called the Change history. Even when you remove a campaign, this log will permanently show who created it, what changes were made to it, and who removed it. This protects account security and provides a full record of its management.

Data in Linked Accounts (like Google Analytics)

Much of the audience and behavioral data you use in Google Ads originates from other sources, most commonly Google Analytics. If you're building remarketing audiences, this data is subject to the data retention settings in your GA property.

For example, you can set the retention of user-level data (including conversions) to 2 months, 14 months, 26 months, and so on. After this period, the user data is automatically deleted from Analytics servers. This directly impacts the size and freshness of your remarketing lists. You can find this setting in Google Analytics under Admin > Data Settings > Data Retention.

Deleting Customer Match Audience Lists

Customer Match lists are one of the few data types you can truly delete yourself.

1. In Google Ads, go to Tools and settings (the wrench icon) in the top-right corner.
2. Under Shared Library, click on Audience manager.
3. Select the customer lists you've uploaded, click Remove from the menu that appears, and confirm.

What to Do Instead of Deleting Your Data

Since true deletion isn't an option for performance history, the goal should be organization, not eradication. Here are a few best practices that achieve the same "clean up" effect without permanently removing items.

Use Pausing for Temporary Changes

If you plan to turn a campaign or keyword back on later - for example, a seasonal promotion - always use Pause instead of Remove. A paused item can be re-enabled with a single click, whereas a removed one cannot.

Use Smart Naming Conventions

A simple but powerful trick is to rename old campaigns before you pause or remove them. For example, add a prefix like "[z_OLD] - Old Campaign Name." Using "z_" pushes the campaign to the bottom of your alphabetically sorted list, getting it out of your way without losing the data.

Master the Filter Function

The most effective way to manage a cluttered view is with filters. You can easily configure your dashboard to show only enabled campaigns. Simply click the filter icon above your campaign list, select Status, and check only the Enabled box. You can save this filter so it’s applied every time you log in.

Final Thoughts

While you can't truly erase historical performance data in your Google Ads account, the ability to "remove" old campaigns, ad groups, and keywords gives you full control over keeping your workspace tidy and focused. This process essentially archives outdated items, preserving their valuable data for historical reports while clearing them from your daily view.

Manually sifting through past campaign data to extract meaningful insights is one of the biggest time sinks for marketers. For this reason, we designed Graphed to connect directly to your Google Ads account and do the heavy lifting for you. We help you use simple language to instantly build charts and dashboards that analyze your performance, so you can spend less time wrangling data and more time acting on it.