Running a PPC campaign can be a very time consuming business, particularly if you pay attention to the kind of effective segmentation necessary for good quality scores and click through rates.

Thankfully, Google provides a relatively little known tool that speeds up the organisation of your AdWords: the Google AdWords Editor.

Work offline

The Google AdWords Editor is a desktop application that allows you to download all the data concerning your PPC campaigns and make changes offline to be uploaded later.

The primary benefit is that you can introduce completed new campaigns, ad groups or sets of keywords simultaneously without the familiar scramble to get everything finished at the same time using the online version.

You can also get campaigns ready ahead of time ready to go live at the click of a button when all your other marketing strands are in place.

Collaborate

Being able to work offline also makes it easier to collaborate. Aside from physically showing a colleague your changes before uploading them, the AdWords Editor allows you to export your changes to send to someone else to load into their copy.

They can then either upload your changes themselves, return them back to you or circulate them.

Bulk actions

Unlike with the online version, you can add and modify multiple campaigns, ad groups, keywords and bids simultaneously. If you run a campaign with hundreds of keywords, you can save time by creating your list in a spreadsheet and importing it into the program.

You can change your bids across all adverts, or change the destination URL for particular groups of keywords. Almost anything that has to be done one by one online can be done in bulk using the editor.

Copying and moving

Just as useful, the AdWords Editor lets you copy and move information between campaigns, ad groups and keywords.

Let’s say you’re in the ski holidays business and you want to set up a new campaign advertising Christmas deals using the same keywords as your year-round campaign. You can copy the entire campaign (keywords, ads and bids included) into a new campaign and make changes to the ads from there (e.g. change the destination URL in the ads and add Xmas into the titles).

You can then set your usual campaigns to pause and your Christmas campaign to take over ready to upload when the deals launch on your website.

Jobs that used to take hours can be done in minutes using the AdWords Editor

If you liked this article you may also want to read: Google AdWords quality score explained

This entry was posted on Friday, December 16th, 2011 at 11:22 am and is filed under Pay per Click. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.