AdWords Introduces Spreadsheet Editing

1st September 2009

Yahoo! has allowed advertisers to submit changes to their accounts via a spreadsheet for over 3 years. Microsoft adCenter has also allowed simple bulk edits and spreadsheet uploads from the start. Google (sort of) caught up and has now made it easier for their clients to make changes to their AdWords accounts.

Advertisers can make use of Google Spreadsheets to make the necessary changes to the keywords in their AdWords accounts.

By making use of the copy and paste facility in an external spreadsheet, advertisers can make several changes in their AdWords accounts such as changing the bid, creating a list of keywords, editing destination URL’s etc.

Users can edit keywords within an Ad Group and also edit the keywords with external AdWords tools.

In order to make bulk edits with a spreadsheet within the ad group, the steps are as follows:

Sign in to AdWords and navigate to the Ad Group that needs to be edited
Next, select the ‘Keyword’ tab and then the ‘More Actions’ command, which is at the top of the ad group table
Select the ‘Spreadsheet Edit’ operation from the drop down menu
Make the necessary changes
Lastly, click ‘Save’.

After these changes are saved, errors occurring in any of the cells are highlighted. When the cursor is placed on such a cell, the error is shown and can be corrected. Once all the errors have been corrected, the changes can be submitted to AdWords.

While using a spreadsheet within the ad group, users can make employ common keyboard shortcuts as well as spreadsheet formulas, with the Formula Autocomplete feature. These formulae can be used to change bids based on the performance stats in the spreadsheet.

All the cells in the column can be modified, but only columns with text in black will apply the changes that are saved. These columns are ‘Keyword’, ‘Max CPC, ‘Destination URL and ‘Status’.

Bulk editing of keywords with external AdWords tools can be done using either the ‘AdWords editor’, which is a free downloadable application for managing the account or by using AdWords API.

Tags: ad, advertising, google, google-adwords, pay-per-click, ppc, search-engine-marketing