Since this week’s topics are all about saving PPC advertisers time when managing their accounts, this one is a must-know-and-use strategy that will surely help save you time creating new PPC campaigns, ad groups or accounts as a whole.
If you’re like most people, you start out with a Google AdWords account. Either you can build it from scratch in Adwords or you can use Adwords Editor, which is a free desktop software program that allows you to make bulk edits to your account. If you don’t know this already, you can take what you have in Google, and easily and quickly upload those changes into Yahoo! and MSN.
Upload into Yahoo!
Step 1: To upload your Google AdWords accounts into Yahoo, simply download your account, campaign or ad group from Google into a .csv file.
Step 2: Once you have this csv file, you’ll want to delete any negative keywords from the file since yahoo doesn’t convert negative keywords. You’ll also want to change the start date if there is one listed. Save that file, and log into your Yahoo account.
Step 3: Once you’re into your Yahoo account, click on the campaigns tab, then the “Import” link, then the ‘Convert third party campaigns’ tab.
Step 4: To convert your Google file into the Yahoo! format, simply upload your Google .csv file, give it a name, and hit the convert button on this page. This will literally take your Google .csv file and format it automatically for you so that you’ll have a completely editable file for Yahoo.
Step 5: Once your converted file is complete, you can download it in the ‘converted campaign file’ column. Download your new file and save it to your desktop. Then,
Step 6: Back in yahoo, click on the ‘import campaigns’ tab near the convert third party campaigns tab. Here, you again simply upload your new file, name it, and hit upload.
This will literally upload everything you had in Google directly into Yahoo with zero manual editing!
Uploading into MSN adCenter
Step 1: Once you are logged into your account, click on the campaigns tab. There is an option located above your list of campaigns to ‘Import campaigns…’, click it! You can then select either an excel or CSV template to choose from when adding in your new campaigns. MSN has a slightly different format than Yahoo, it won’t directly ‘convert’ the Google file for you, you have to format it manually, but it’s not hard. The key thing to remember is that you can only upload up to 500 lines into MSN at one time.
Step 2: Format your file. The MSN formatting of the excel or CSV file is as follows:
Campaign > Ad Group > Keyword > Keyword Matching > Current Maximum CPC > Keyword Destination URL > Headline > Description line 1 > Description Line 2 > Display URL > Destination URL.
If you follow this order in your MSN template, you should be able to upload your new campaigns into MSN without stress!
Step 3: Now, once you have your new file formatted according to MSN’s specs, you can literally go to the same page under the campaigns tab in your MSN account, and import your file normally. I rarely have problems importing my Google or Yahoo campaigns into MSN. The only thing that will hold me up is the 500 line limit, so be watchful of that!
The truth is that Yahoo and MSN knows if they are compatible with Google they’re going to benefit. These two major search engines may be the next two down from Google, but they also know everyone usually starts out in Google. By making it easy to upload your Google AdWords campaigns, Yahoo and MSN are getting more money too. This is a great way to quickly transfer or move your accounts over with minimal effort on your end.
