Google Ads Import Cleanup in Microsoft Advertising

What the scheduled import is doing to your account: Two things at once, in nearly every account I open. It re-creates campaigns somebody deliberately removed on the Microsoft side, and it carries across tracking templates that still read utm_source=google, so traffic Microsoft delivered is filed under Google in your analytics and the channel looks like it does not work. Both are fixable in a fortnight. Neither is fixable by running the import again. Why deleting does not stick: The import treats Google as the source of truth on every run. Anything deleted in Microsoft is absent, therefore new, therefore re-created on the next sync. Pausing survives; deleting invites the item straight back. That single behaviour accounts for most duplicate campaigns, duplicate shared negative lists and duplicate budgets I find, and it is why the fix is a policy rather than a cleanup. What the sync flattens: Settings that exist only in Microsoft are the ones at risk: the Audience Network checkbox inside search campaigns, LinkedIn profile bid adjustments, Microsoft-specific extensions, and target CPA values that arrive as a Google number in a different currency. Ad schedules land against the Microsoft account timezone rather than the Google one, so a schedule built for Paris evenings can run an hour off without anything looking wrong. The tracking pass: GCLID means nothing here. Auto-tagging of MSCLKID has to be on before offline conversion import can work at all, and tracking templates need rewriting so source and medium describe the platform that delivered the click. Then the conversion goals: imported analytics goals sitting alongside UET goals that already count the same action produce double counting, and a target CPA reading two conversions per sale bids roughly twice as hard as you intended. I reconcile goal by goal and switch off whichever copy is worse. What you receive: An ownership map. Every setting in the account assigned to one side: the import owns it, or Microsoft owns it and the import must never touch it. The import itself reconfigured to match, filters included. A de-duplication pass with the removals listed. A rewritten tracking setup with the before and after visible in your analytics. And a monthly diff so re-created items are caught in weeks rather than quarters. Not included: Building new Microsoft campaigns, which is separate work. Restructuring the Google account, though I will tell you which parts of it are the reason the import behaves badly. Feed work. Analytics implementation beyond the parameters this touches. Who should not buy this: Accounts spending under 5,000 EUR a month in Microsoft. The cleanup costs more than the waste it recovers at that level, and the honest advice is to leave the import alone, accept the duplication, and revisit when the channel is bigger. Also anyone who wants Microsoft to be a mirror of Google. If the intention is that the two accounts stay identical forever, keep the import as it is and spend the money elsewhere; the only reason to separate them is to run Microsoft differently. What tends to surface: Once the duplicates are gone and reporting is honest, Microsoft usually turns out to have been either better or worse than the dashboard claimed, rarely the same. Both outcomes are useful. Roughly half the accounts I clean up get a budget increase; the rest get an argued case for reducing Microsoft to brand and a short list of generics, which is a defensible answer nobody enjoys giving. Working languages are French and English, and I read your Google account before touching the Microsoft one, because import problems are usually Google-side naming decisions arriving downstream.