Today’s businesses mainly rely on advertisements to build brand awareness or reach a specific audience. One of the best ways of advertising is using the online platform—Google Ads. You can create campaigns on Google Ads to promote your products. The data collected by Google Ads holds immense value in optimizing marketing campaigns and making other business-related decisions. To ensure you harness such potential, migrating data to a robust data warehouse like Amazon Redshift is crucial. It helps you to centralize data for efficient data governance across your organization. This integration amplifies data-driven decisions, empowering more effective marketing initiatives and improving business performance.

In this article, you’ll explore the two popular methods to replicate your data from Google Ads to Redshift after a quick overview of both platforms.

Google Ads Overview

With Google Ads, you can promote your products and services by creating online ads for advertising. It helps you reach your customers across various platforms like YouTube, Google Discover, and Google Search, ensuring that your ads appear at the right time and place.

Google Ads uses AI to identify the top-performing ad formats that help you maximize conversions. It also assists in optimizing your ad spending by enabling you to track metrics such as cost, conversions, and sales. This allows you to obtain new customer opportunities with the highest ROI (Return on Investment). For further price optimization, you have the option to establish a monthly ad-spend cap for your campaigns; Google will automatically adhere to this, and you will be able to display ads to potential customers and reach individuals with specific interests and requirements.

Here are some benefits of Google Ads:

• It provides features like Keyword planners, Trends, and Suggestions, catering to diverse marketing needs and strategies.
• Drives more leads and customers, enhancing increased sales and business growth opportunities.
• For analysis, Google Ads swiftly shows clear outcomes, offering easy access to campaign details.
• It ensures a great return on investment by charging only for clicked ads, potentially outperforming other strategies.

Amazon Redshift Overview

Amazon Redshift is an AWS-developed cloud-based data warehouse service that provides a simple and cost-effective way to organize and analyze data. Its massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture facilitates the rapid execution of complex queries for quicker decision-making.

In addition to the above features, you also get access to the zero-ETL approach, a fully managed solution that makes transactional or operational data available in near-to-real-time. It eliminates traditional extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes by automating the creation and management of data replication from source to destination. Some of the sources that support zero-ETL are Aurora MYSQL, PostgreSQL, and RDS for MYSQL. This helps in aiding data for handling analytics tasks and managing data storage effectively.

Here are some key features of Redshift:

• As an AWS product, Redshift seamlessly integrates with AWS services, including AWS Cloud Trail, for enhanced data management.
• Redshift supports flexible scaling by adjusting to changing storage needs, avoiding expenses tied to unused servers.
• It gives you robust security, including encryption, network isolation, and granular access controls for safeguarding data.
• It offers flexible pricing models tailored to your workloads.

Methods to Move Data from Google Ads to Redshift

• Method 1: Using Airbyte to connect Google Ads to Redshift
• Method 2: Manually moving data from Google Ads to Redshift

Method 1: Using Airbyte to Connect Google Ads to Redshift

Airbyte, a cloud-based ETL service, allows you to effectively integrate data by offering a growing library of 350+ pre-built connectors and an intuitive interface. Its connectors facilitate seamless extraction of data from multiple platforms and databases to load into centralized storage systems. 

Ensure you meet the prerequisites before understanding the steps to connect Google Ads to Redshift.

‍Prerequisites

• Google Ads account
• Redshift account

Step 1: Configure Google Ads as Source in Airbyte

• Register for a new Airbyte account or login to your existing one.
• Select Sources on the Airbyte dashboard.
• Search for Google Ads in the Search box and click on the connector.

• Enter the Source name on the Google Ads source connector page. Authenticate your Google Ads account by selecting the Sign in with Google option. Then, click on Continue. Enter the Customer ID and specify the Start Date for data replication.
• Click the Set up source button at the bottom of the page.
• For more information on each field, refer to Airbyte’s Google Ads documentation

Step 2: Configure Redshift as Destination in Airbyte

• After setting Google Ads as the source, return to the dashboard and click on Destinations.
• On the Destinations page, type Redshift in the Search bar and click on the connector.

• On the Redshift connector page, fill in the required details like Host, Port, Username, Password, Database, and Default Schema. Then, click on Set up Destination.
• For more information on each field, refer to Airbyte’s Redshift documentation.

Step 3: Create a Connection Between Google Ads Data and Redshift

• In the left navigation menu, choose Connections to establish a connection between Google Ads and Redshift. Then click on Create a new connection.
• Select Google Ads as the source and Redshift as the destination, as created in the above steps.
• Enter a unique Connection name on the connections page and select the desired Replication Frequency, Destination Namespace, and Destination Stream Prefix.

• Click on Start the sync to transfer data from Google Ads to Redshift. 

These three quick steps allow you to establish a connection between Google Ads and Redshift using Airbyte.

Why Choose Airbyte?

Synchronization: Airbyte helps update your target database or data warehouse by employing incremental data synchronization. This process transfers only the changed data since the last sync, minimizing storage resource requirements and optimizing the efficiency of data replication.

‍Scalability: You can efficiently handle diverse data integration needs, whether a small-scale task or a large-scale enterprise project, through Airbytes' scalability.

‍Built-in Connectors: The 350+ built-in source and destination connectors provided by Airbyte encompass popular databases, data warehouses, APIs, and SaaS applications. Leveraging these pre-built connectors streamlines the data integration process without requiring extensive custom development.

Method 2: Manually Moving Data from Google Ads to Redshift

Let us explore the step-by-step process of manually integrating data from Google Ads to Redshift.

‍Prerequisites

• AWS S3 bucket 
• AWS with read and write access to the S3 bucket

Step 1: Convert Your Google Ads Data to CSV Format

• Login to your Google Ads account and navigate to the desired data for export.
• Choose the specific campaigns, current views, or ad groups with the necessary customization that you want to upload in Redshift. 
• Based on your export preferences, modify the selected data in reports by adding location, applying a segment, filtering the date, conversion category, and campaign details.
• Now, click on the Download button.
• You will see a pop-up window. Choose CSV file format and download it to your computer.

Step 2: Uploading Data to Redshift

Formatting the data is crucial to ensure proper data storage in Redshift. Therefore, clean the CSV files and ensure the data is compatible with Redshift before uploading it into the S3 bucket.

• Install the AWS CLI on your machine to load the CSV files to the Amazon S3 bucket. 

Below is the AWS S3 CP command for uploading CSV files to S3.

aws s3 cp /path_to_csv_file s3://s3-bucket_path/

• Then, use the COPY command to transfer CSV file data from the S3 bucket to Redshift, as mentioned below.

copy table_name
from 's3://s3-bucket_path/file.csv' 
iam_role 'arn:aws:iam::AWS_account_ID:role/role_name' 
csv;

• aws_iam_role authenticates your AWS account ID and role.
• Since you are loading in CSV file format, include CSV at the end of the command.

Limitations of Manual Method

• Time-consuming: Using the CSV approach encompasses multiple steps to relocate data. This involves manually downloading CSV files, cleaning data, transferring them from the local machine to S3, and then uploading them to Redshift.‍
• Continuous Management: With the manual method, you would have to follow the same steps repeatedly whenever new rows or updated data emerge. 

Conclusion

Now that you’ve seen two different approaches to replicate data from Google Ads to Redshift, you can choose the one that suits your operational needs. Each method has its advantages and use cases. The first method involves Airbyte establishing a connection between Google Ads and Redshift. All it takes are a few clicks to set up the source and destination, and you are done.

On the other hand, if you use CSV files to move data from Google Ads to Redshift, it demands more effort than the previous one. The manual approach is convenient for small data transfers but time-consuming for larger data sets, resulting in latency.

Give Airbyte a try today to handle data integration needs at various scales. It offers incremental synchronization, a broad range of connectors, support for complex transformations, and monitoring features that will elevate your data migration journey.