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How to Simplify PPC Management Using Google AdWords Editor Christine Churchill , KeyRelevance.com , Dallas, TX - Nov 2, 2010

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It's always surprising to talk with businesses about their PPC accounts and discover how many are not familiar with the Google AdWords Editor tool. This is a free, downloadable tool from Google that can greatly simplify managing an AdWords account.

Benefits of the AdWords Editor

There are many advantages to using the Google AdWords Editor that can save the PPC account manager time and effort. The application provides advanced tools and editing features beyond the regular Google interface. Features include change reverts, sorting, bulk edits, advanced search, and cut-and-paste editing that can empower the account manager.

Four Favorite Uses of the AdWords Editor

1. Cloning Campaigns

Our company handles many clients that are large companies with a local presence. In PPC management terms, this translates into many geographical targeting campaigns. Often the ads, keywords, and site structure are similar, but the targeting is different. Using the AdWords Editor is key to cloning campaigns quickly and efficiently.

Let's look at an example of how the AdWords Editor can save you time and effort by giving you a process to easily clone a campaign. Say you have a campaign already fleshed out in Google for the state of Virginia. You've made an extensive keyword list, ads, etc and you want to reproduce the established keywords, ads, adgroup, campaign setup, etc to a new state - Kentucky, for example.

If you had to build out a new campaign within Google AdWords this would be a lengthy process requiring many steps. The AdWords Editor can simplify this process.

The AdWords Editor allows you to download the campaign and do a copy-and-paste. Instantly you have a new campaign for the new state. Yes, you will need to do some tweaking to update the geographical names, but the bulk tasks of recreating the campaign are done for you.

2. Change Review

In many organizations, proposed changes need to be reviewed by others before going live. This review could be as simple as getting your boss to sign off on the changes. In the case of a large corporation, this might involve  multi-level review, including legal, brand managers, sales, and other divisions. You want an easy way to share the proposed changes among different people.

Fortunately, the AdWords Editor makes this easy by providing a way to share the proposed changes with members of your team for their review prior to you uploading the changes. Once your changes are approved, all you have to do is upload your revised campaigns and the changes are live.

3. Transitioning Google Accounts to Bing

Here's a use of the Google AdWords Editor that will really save you time. In late October, Microsoft announced that the Yahoo Bing Search Alliance was completed and that the new combined search market makes up more than 33% of all US searches. With that much of the search landscape now under Microsoft adCenter, moving more campaigns to Bing makes sense.

In many cases, the bulk of a company's existing PPC budget is at Google. If the Google campaigns are running well you may want to recreate them in Bing. Finding a way to ease that transition saves time.

If you want to recreate your entire Google AdWords account within Microsoft adCenter, you can download the Google account into Google AdWords Editor, then export into an Excel CSV file using the "Export Whole Account" option. Then upload that spreadsheet into Microsoft adCenter, thus saving you hours of painstaking data entry.

Using this AdWords Editor migration approach is easy and handles much of the heavy lifting involved with creating the account at Microsoft adCenter, but you will still need to do some transitional clean-up. Here are some things to watch for.

Targeting. Keep in mind that Google AdWords handles many things at the Campaign level that Microsoft adCenter handles at both the adgroup and campaign level. For example, geographical targeting is done at the Campaign level in Google. In Microsoft adCenter it can be done at either the adgroup or Campaign level. If you have geographical targeted accounts, you will need to ensure that the imported campaigns are targeted properly in Microsoft adCenter.

Negative Keywords. One of the most effective methods of controlling costs is to ensure your ads only show for relevant queries. Using negative keywords to keep your ad from showing for inappropriate queries can improve your relevancy, improve user experience, and save you money. Microsoft adCenter handles negative keywords differently than Google, so you will need to review your excluded keywords. Specifically, since Microsoft adCenter does not support negation of exact keywords, you need to insure that a short negative keyword phrase is not inadvertently blocking a longer phrase. For example, if you only sell "car insurance", blocking the exact phrase [insurance] in Google AdWords might make sense (since it is very broad) . If you migrate this term to Microsoft adCenter, it will end up blocking "car insurance," as well, not the desired outcome.

4. Efficient Bulk Changes

If you need to make repetitive changes across many entries in your AdWords account, using the AdWords Editor may help. Changing multiple landing pages to a new location, for example, is a simple matter of selecting the affected ads and making the change once. Fields which "vary" from selection to selection can be left untouched and will not be overwritten, while the updated field changes will be applied to all of the selected entries with a single click. In addition, using the "Replace Text" option allows you to make bulk changes within a given field, quickly allowing you to change all "Virginia" references to "Kentucky" within your ad copy, landing page URL, etc.

Make Friends with AdWords Editor

Life is too short to spend hours making redundant changes to a large PPC account. If you have a large number of campaigns and keywords, you owe it to yourself to take advantage of this free application. You can download the latest version of the AdWords Editor at http://www.google.com/intl/en/adwordseditor/. Google has been reasonably good at updating the Editor to include new functionalities that Google adds to the regular interface. If you have been looking for a new way to manage your PPC campaigns efficiently, AdWords Editor may be your new best friend.

Christine Churchill is the President of KeyRelevance.com, a full service Dallas search engine marketing company that specializes in helping businesses succeed online. Christine and her experienced team of online marketers provide a holistic approach to marketing: increasing a site's visibility online, improving the user experience on the site, and maximizing the site's conversion potential.