It Ain’t Easy, but You Can Move Keywords in Panama

Of all the great strides that Yahoo! has made in simplifying keyword management, they missed a big step in the process with Panama: They took away the ability to move keywords with historical data. Within the Panama interface, it is impossible to move a keyword from one ad group to another without deleting the keyword and reinserting it in a new location. Various calls by our staff to Yahoo!’s support have covered this topic.

One possible solution to this problem is to move an entire ad group if it makes sense to relocate it to a new campaign. However, this isn’t always the smartest option, nor is it recommended. In a recent webinar hosted by Yahoo!, the topic of choice was Panama’s bulk upload (Import) feature. We took the opportunity to ask as many questions as we could, considering there were four Yahoo! personnel present for Q&A. Finally, after months of toiling with bulk spreadsheet options and dead-end answers from Yahoo!’s support staff, we were presented with a solution for moving keywords.

Here are the specific directions for moving a keyword using the bulk upload (Import) feature.

1. While working with your bulk spreadsheet, decide which keywords need to be moved.
2. COPY the original row of the keyword you would like to move.
3. PASTE this keyword row into its “new” ad group home within the spreadsheet.
4. For this keyword row, change the AD GROUP ID column to reflect this new ad group. If this keyword is being placed into an altogether different campaign, change the CAMPAIGN ID column to reflect this new campaign.
5. ***VERY IMPORTANT STEP*** Delete the KEYWORD ID and CHECKSUM column information for this moved keyword.
6. Return to the original keyword row (from step 2) and mark the COMPONENT STATUS column as Deleted.
7. Save your file as a Unicode text type with a .csv file extension.
8. Import your bulk file into Yahoo! Panama.

There are a few pieces of information to note in this process. The first is that by moving a keyword in this fashion, you will lose all historical data associated with that keyword. You are in a sense deleting the keyword and inserting it into another ad group, as if it were a new keyword. Second, the advantage here is that it is now possible to do this through the bulk upload (Import) feature, thus saving advertisers the time and trouble of navigating through their Panama accounts and deleting and reinserting each individual keyword.