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.
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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. |
Dave Reichenbacher
DR directs program management and operations at WebShare. He also is one of our Seminars for Success instructors and has an affinity toward local search marketing. You can find out more about Dave here.
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