Creating new campaigns or making mass edits to existing campaigns can be quite time consuming and slightly confusing when logged in to AdWords itself. Here are a few tips on how to speed that process up using AdWords Editor.
1. Copying and pasting campaigns and ads
If you are creating campaigns for different countries for example, so wish to have the same campaign repeated for each country in order to easily see which drive the most traffic and/or sales. Or because you wish to assign different budgets to different areas of the world, then AdWords Editor can make this a very simple and quick process.
Simply create one campaign with a complete list of ad groups, keywords and ads and then copy and paste that campaign in AdWords Editor and change the location settings to each country(s) that you wish to advertise in and alter the name of the campaign to reflect that country. You may also wish to alter the daily budget accordingly too.
2. Append and replace text
If you have a list of keywords that you wish to expand or alter then using the append text and replace text features can really speed things up. For instance if you have a list of core keywords that cover the products/services that you offer and you would like to expand your keywords to other permutations that a user might enter in to Google, such as “buy XXX” or “XXX for sale” then you can do this by appending “buy “ before or “ for sale” after the selected keywords.
Similarly if you have created a set of ads for one ad group and you wish to keep that same format of ad for a different product you can copy and paste the ads over to a new ad group, highlight the ads and choose the ‘replace text’ feature and replace the name of the first product with the name of the second one (giving that the characters still fit).
3. Search / filter
If you have ads in multiple ad groups that you wish to pause in one go the search and advanced search feature can speed that up.
For instance if an advertiser is running a sale or free delivery promotion for a finite amount of time and you need to pause the ads once that promotion has ended, you can search the ads for a mention of “60%” for example, if all the sale ads all mention 60%. Then simply order the filtered ads by status, highlight all the active ones that you wish to pause and change the status of all of them to paused with the click of one button.
4. Add multiple ads and keywords
If you need to add multiple keywords and ads you can easily copy them into AdWords Editor from a spreadsheet using the ‘Make multiple changes’ option.
If you need to make alterations to several ads in different ad groups, that have different landing pages and headlines that you need to keep the same, but you wish to change the message in one or both of the description lines you can easily do that in AdWords Editor.
Simply filter the ads to get a list of the ones that you wish to alter, with their respective headlines, destination URLs, ad group and campaigns and either change the lines of description straight away in Editor or copy and paste them into a spreadsheet. If you wish to pause the old ads, rather than deleting them, then make sure you copy and paste them into the spreadsheet, then you can alter the lines that you need to update within the spreadsheet and copy and paste the amended ads back into AdWords Editor in the ‘Make multiple changes’ box, but make sure you check the ‘My text ad information below includes columns for campaign and ad group names’.
5. Save changes offline
As AdWords Editor is offline you can make changes, save them and then upload them when you are ready for the changes to go live.
So if you have a sale starting at 4pm you can create the new ads in AdWords Editor during the day and pause the previous ads in those ad groups, and then click ‘Post changes’ at 4pm when you are ready for those ads to start showing on Google.
Some of these steps can be done within AdWords itself but I find them easier and quicker to do within AdWords Editor. Also some processes, such as pausing and activating ads can be done using automated rules if you wish to schedule the changes for the future.
Here’s one final tip when using AdWords Editor… Always remember to click the ‘Get recent changes’ button at the top left hand corner of the screen before making any edits. Also all changes are offline so you can draft changes and double and triple check them before posting them to your live campaigns.
