There are 2 basic types of export files from Google’s AdWords Editor that can be imported back into the tool:
1) AEA – AdWords Editor Archive – generally used as a backup file
2) AES – AdWords Editor Share – generally used to share proposed changes with colleagues

You can export your entire account or selected campaigns from the File menu.

Editor gives you the option to export the whole account, selected campaigns, or the current view.

Once exported, you will have either an AES or an AEA file type that can then be stored for archiving or shared with co-workers.  Both file types can be imported back into the AdWords Editor tool as well.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when importing the files:

Importing of either file type is done through the FILE/IMPORT ACCOUNT SNAPSHOT menu.

AES – import a file someone has shared with you to propose changes:

• You have to have the most recent version of the account already in Editor.  If you are starting with a new, blank editor account or an account other than the one the AES came from you cannot import an AES file.
• If the version of the account you are importing into is older or newer than the one in the AES file you will likely get an error.
• You have to be logged into the account that the file was created for. (Again not a new account)

AEA – importing a backup/archive file

• This file type can be imported into an account other than the one it was created from.  However, if you do so, the AEA file will overwrite all information in the account you are importing it into.  Before doing this make sure you not going to lose important data.
• You can also import this file into a new account through editor.

You can spend hours seeking out keywords for your Pay Per Click campaigns or site optimization. With millions of users searching Google everyday there are undoubtedly countless keywords being used to search out products like yours that never occurred to you. Up until recently, Google keyword tools were limited to the AdWords Keyword Tool. But now Google has introduced the Search Based Keyword Tool to help track down those keywords that never crossed your mind but that searchers are using in Google search.

The basic premise of the tool is to tell you the most popular keywords being searched on in Google that match the content of your site but you are not currently using in your campaigns. Then, if you are logged in to the AdWords account for the site you are inquiring on, the Search-based Keyword Tool will make suggestions on landing pages that might be appropriate to use in ad campaigns. But don’t blindly take their word for it on the suggestions; make sure the page is appropriate for your goals.

The tool can be accessed directly from the site, http://www.google.com/sktool/, through your AdWords account under the Campaign Management/Tools tab, or direct from AdWords Editor under the Tools/Keyword Opportunities tab (more on this option later in this post).

The main screen from the site or through AdWords will look like this:

If you are logged in the “Website” box will have a drop down menu of sites associated with your account. If you are not logged in this box will just have example.com listed and this is where you would enter the site you want to inquire on. You can use the with words or phrases box to narrow your results down to only keywords and/or landing pages containing specific words or phrases. Once you have a site in the box click Find Keywords and your results will look like this:

The results brought back are
• keywords (that are not currently being bid on)
• monthly searches (same as the Keyword Tool)
• competition (same as the Keyword Tool)
• suggested bid (same as the Keyword Tool)
• ad/search share (This shows only if you are logged in and tells you the percent of time show in organic and search ads)
• landing page suggestions (remember to review the suggestions carefully)

(Note: if you do not own or have access to the site you are inquiring on, the results you see will be limited to up to 100 and keywords already being bid on will be mixed in with those that are not.)

Further details can be obtained on each suggested keyword by clicking on the magnifying glass . This will take you to Google Insights for Search.

The tool also gives you a few options for narrowing down the results on the left side of the results page.

If available, it will show you various categories for your search results. Click on the category headings to expand them and sort your keyword results into the various categories.

Or if you need to focus on specific brands or want to eliminate brands from your campaigns you are given options to sort the results list by brands (if applicable). This is very helpful to see if there are high ranking brands that you sell but are not focusing on or maybe to present areas you could expand into.

Once you have the list you need the tool gives you the option to save a draft which you can review later in the “My Draft Keywords” tab at the top. Or you can export selected keywords or the whole list to a csv file for later review or to bring into AdWords Editor.

If you are using this tool to beef up your existing campaigns with keywords you may be missing, the version of the Search-based Keyword Tool that can be used through AdWords Editor will save you the steps involved in exporting.
You can find the Editor version of the tool (currently in Beta) in the Tools/Keyword Opportunities menu. Once there select the “Search-based Keywords” tab.

The tool works similarly to the other version with one great convenience. You can drag the keywords directly into your campaigns. You can even select the match type to use and use the landing page and bid price the tools suggested for you.  Just make sure you are reviewing that information carefully before accepting it at face value.

If you prefer, there is an export option here as well.

If you do your own pay per click (PPC) management account, you most likely use the performance reports provided by Google Adwords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, MSN adCenter, or the other advertising service. These reports can be extremely powerful in giving you a very quick overview on the progress of your campaigns for a particular time period. However, there is an important thing that you should understand about where the numbers in these reports come from to truly understand the data. The number of conversions could change over time based on the expiration of the advertisements cookie on a user’s browser.

Google AdWords’ cookie expires after 30 days. This means that if a user clicks on an ad during a Google search a cookie is set on their browser. Even if they leave the website that the ad led them to by going to another website or shutting off their computer/browser, the cookie will track them should they come back to that website and complete a conversion at any time during the next 30 days. So if they come back 15 days later by typing in the website’s URL directly and complete a conversion, in these reports that conversion would be attributed to the PPC ad. However, if they come back 31 days later from a source other than Adwords and complete a conversion, it would not be tracked in Google’s AdWords reports as a conversion. Yahoo! Search Marketing’s cookie lasts for 45 days. You also want to keep in mind that if the user specifically deletes or removes cookies from their browser these expirations do not apply.

Besides the lifespan of their cookies, Google and Yahoo! also differ in how a conversion is attributed in their reports. Google AdWords attributes a conversion to the day the click occurs. Meaning if a visitor clicks on an ad on March 1st but doesn’t complete a conversion until March 7th, the report in Google will show the conversion occurred on March 1st as this is when my initial click happened. Of course, if the visitor returns to the website via another PPC ad, the cookie is reset. Yahoo! Search Marketing attributes the conversion in their report to the actual day the conversion happens. Using the previous example, a Yahoo! report will show the conversion on March 7th, which is the day of the conversion, not the initial ad click. Therefore the number of conversions reported via the Google reports can change for up to 30 days. A report created on March 1st for the February 15-29 date range will likely have fewer conversions than a report created on March 15th for the same February 15-29 date range because these conversions can show up in the past for up to 30 days. In Yahoo! Search Marketing reports, you may see new conversions appear for up to 45 days after the click.

Next time you’re reviewing your pay per click marketing performance reports, be sure to take into account the cookie lifespan of the advertising provider and make sure to understand how conversions are attributed in these reports. These subtle differences may have an effect on how you manage where your PPC marketing dollars go tomorrow!

WebShare is a Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador and Google AdWords Qualified Company, and can help you with your Google AdWords Management as well as your Yahoo! Search Marketing, Microsoft adCenter, and Ask.com paid search accounts. We help clients maximize their advertising budgets with solutions that range from training to active daily management. We look forward to helping bring you to the next level.

First time Adwords advertisers often don’t understand that the position of your ad is not determined soley by bid price—that is just one of several factors. Google instead tells us that ad rank is a combination of bid price and something called a “Quality Score”. On top of that, a poor Quality Score could cause your minimum bid price to jump by 19,000%!
So the next logical question would be “What’s my quality score?” Until recently, this has been a guarded secret, much to the frustration of advertisers worldwide. Google will reveal that it is determined by your keyword’s click through rate (CTR), relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, and other relevancy factor. Google still isn’t going to tell us the formula or even the exact score, but they are now giving advertisers a general idea of the quality score for each keyword. If you want to make the most of your search marketing campaigns, you need to check out your quality score today.
First, I want to clarify that there are actually two quality scores for your keywords, each computed in a slightly different way. One is for determining the minimum bid price the other is for determining ad position. The two are similar in the fact that they both look at CTR, your accounts historical performance and other relevance factors. Where they differ is that the bid price quality score considers landing page quality and the relevance of the keyword to its ad group. Whereas, the ad position quality score considers the relevance of the keyword and ad to the search term. For more on the definition of quality score, see the Google help file.
You can view your quality score through your AdWords account. Choose the Campaign then AdGroup of interest. Click the “Keyword” tab. Look for the “Show/Hide Columns” drop down menu. Choose “Show Quality Score”.

Your quality score is listed next to every Keyword along with the minimum bid for that keyword. If you click on the question mark next to the quality score title, Google provides you with a list of possible quality score, information about each one, and links to FAQs.

Remember, if you have a high quality score, your bid price will be lower which means you can pay less for a higher ad position. However, you shouldn’t just be looking at quality score as a way to get a lower bid price. Ultimately you want a successful ad. This score is an indication of how relevant your ad is in Google’s eyes. A relevant ad will be a more successful ad.
If you have a “poor” or “ok” quality score, there are several reasons why this could be happening. Here are some questions to ask yourself: Are you sending people to the correct landing page (more than likely not your home page)? Does the ad text contain the keyword? Is the list of keywords for this Ad group too broad? Is the keyword itself too broad? If you have a poor quality score, you should have answered no to at least one of the above questions. This is where you should start making improvements. The best pay per click campaigns are the ones that are constantly monitored and improved. Now that Google provides us with the quality score the job of improving our campaigns just got easier. So check yours out today!
If you’re interested in learning more, we go further in depth about how to improve and use Quality Score to your advantage in our Adwords/Paid Search Bootcamp—contact us today for more details.

WebShare is an AdWords Qualified Company. We are recognized as a premier pay-per-click management company in the search marketing industry, and offer a wide range of PPC services that can help you increase the performance of your PPC campaigns.

If you continue to manage your Google AdWords account solely via the web interface you are likely wasting a ton of time. Try downloading the new version of the AdWords Editor (version 5). It’s free and you will be happy you did, as it will likely change your entire pay-per-click management process and workflow. This tool always had the ability to allow you to work offline and make bulk (batch) changes to your AdWords account(s). But you may not realize some other features that can really help you.

When doing Google AdWords management via the offline editor in the past there was one major drawback: it was frustrating to have to go back and forth between the web interface and the offline editor just to see the cost, conversion rate, and other crucial performance statistics of your campaigns, which were available on the web interface but not inside the offline editor. Since you can’t manage a campaign without these stats, but the web interface is very inefficient for large campaigns, you simply had to live with use both simultaneously. Thankfully that problem was resolved with version 4 of the Adwords Editor, where you can see all the data in the one place and still get the benefit of large-scale changes made easy. You can configure it to display data from the date range you desire. You can quickly make “mass” changes on keywords or ads. You can sort by cost, CTR, cost/conv, etc. I promise you this feature will vastly improve your efficiency.

There are other great features of AdWords Editor that few people realize when doing their pay per click management. The Find Duplicate Keywords tool is extremely useful when you have lots of campaigns or adgroups. You may have continued to evolve you AdWords campaign over a long period and not realized you placed the same keywords in two different ad groups. This is undesirable as Google will only show one ad per advertiser and thus you are competing with yourself in addition your true competitors. The Find Duplicate Keywords tool allows you to quickly identify where you have inadvertently added duplicates. One note: it is ok to have the same keywords for a keyword-targeted campaign and a placement-targeted campaign since they don’t compete on the same playing field, keyword on search network and placement on content network.

Another helpful feature is the comments feature. For any item you can select in the editor, you can add a comment to that item. Where this becomes really powerful is managing changes over time. If you’ve ever gotten on a roll and made a flurry of changes, only to look back a few weeks later and have no recollection what you modified (or why), this may prove very useful. Granted, Google tracks all your changes online for the past 3 months (in your campaign go to Tools then My Change History). But the changes they track are very basic and will not give you insight into why you thought a change was the right thing to do. With the comments feature you can write yourself, your co-workers, or your clients a simple note regarding the change. One drawback is that the comments are not stored online when you post your changes to Google. You will have to export your local file for sharing with others (in the editor go to File then Export for Sharing).

These are just three of the helpful features in the Google AdWords Editor, you can learn more in our Google Adwords Training Courses. This tool can help you save time and thus money when doing your pay per click management. For a full list of all the new features in Google’s AdWords Editor view the release notes.

WebShare is an AdWords Qualified Company. We are recognized as a premier pay-per-click management company in the search marketing industry, and offer a wide range of PPC services that can help you increase the performance of your PPC campaigns.

If you are looking for another way to expand your search marketing program, Microsoft’s adCenter may be good option. AdCenter is Microsoft’s Live Search pay-per-click (PPC) management application. As the fourth most trafficked search engine in the world, Live Search has the potential to be a high performing search marketing medium. Features of Microsoft’s adCenter include campaign importation templates, immediate editorial feedback on keywords and ads, specific ad targeting options and updated reporting capabilities. The implementation of these features brings adCenter closer to the caliber of Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing consoles. There are however, a few things to keep in mind when using Microsoft adCenter to manage your Live Search PPC campaigns.

The adCenter console operates very much the same way Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing do, making it an easy transition to getting started in adCenter. If you already have PPC campaigns in Google Adwords or Yahoo! Search Marketing, you can easily import the campaigns and keywords into adCenter through the use of Microsoft Excel templates. The templates can be downloaded from adCenter, and used to help format all of your existing campaign information and keyword lists from other PPC vendors.

It has taken a while for Microsoft to catch up with Google and Yahoo!, but Microsoft finally introduced an immediate editorial feedback function in adCenter. The function makes it easier to create ads that meet the technical requirements for Microsoft’s editorial guidelines. AdCenter instantly validates ads or keywords by checking each ad to ensure it meets the following four conditions:

1. All of the required fields are complete (e.g. ad title, ad text and destination URL).
2. None of the fields exceed character limits.
3. The destination URL is formatted correctly.
4. The display URL is formatted correctly.

Passing the immediate editorial feedback validation, however, still does not guarantee that your ad will be displayed. Your ad must still meet the content requirements in Microsoft’s editorial guidelines. Content editorial guidlines cover ad characteristics such as the type of product or service being advertised and the use of trademarks in ads. Microsoft says that newly created ads that are approved usually become active within a few minutes, and that your ad was probably approved if you don’t receive a rejection email within two hours of your ad being submitted.

Microsoft hypes adCenter’s dynamic text ad and incremental bidding options, which are intended to help you further customize your ads and target them at specific times in order to increase click-through-rates (CTRs). Dynamic text ads use keyword variables to display a customized ad that is more likely to appeal to potential customers. Incremental bidding allows you to bid an additional amount beyond your keywords bid in order to increase the position of your ads and target customers by location, day of week, time of day, customer age, or customer gender. While Microsoft’s claim is true that dynamic text ads and incremental bidding can increase CTRs, it isn’t guarranteed. You should carefully examine your ad campaigns by evaluating keywords, keyword match type settings, ad position performance and budget before implementing either of these targeting options.

AdCenter’s reporting capabilities are typical of what Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing offer. Reports are categorized by report group. Each report group contains reports that are related to a specific aspect of an account. Campaign performance reports can be viewed for an entire account, campaign, ad group, ad, or a specific keyword. Custom report options include a drag and drop feature to reorder custom report columns and the ability to include totals and averages at the bottom of reports.

Recently, Microsoft unveiled their adExcellence program, which provides advertisers with the opportunity to hone their adCenter skills and become recognized as an adCenter industry expert. WebShare is one of the first companies in the world to become an adExcellence Member. Members of the adExcellence program must complete classroom training and demonstrate their knowledge by passing an exam.

In addition to being an adExcellence Member, WebShare is also an Adwords Qualified Company and Yahoo! Search Marketing Ambassador. We are recognized as a premier pay-per-click management company in the search marketing industry, and offer a wide range of PPC services that can help you increase the performance of your PPC campaigns.