the PPC Book|PPC Blog | Querying for Dollars

As with most professional services organizations, 90% of my profit comes from 10% of my clients. Most of these clients have particularly large campaigns, especially in Adwords. So, when I recently undertook a campaign redesign for my biggest client, I dreaded the day the actual work would begin. A bulk outpost of the campaign before the redesign was around 7 megs. Big.

Weeks were spent building out the campaign architecture into a new and more efficient layout that would make it easier to manage in the future. Obviously, all of that work is done in excel.

Now, one way to approach this would be to format everything into the bulk upload template and be done with it. However, because we were copying and moving keywords and ad copy from several different adgroups and campaigns, I thought it easier to use Google’s new copy and move tools. The one caveat here was that you can’t copy anything to a group that doesn’t exist. So, I had to go through and build each campaign and adgroup to create the shell first, then I could move stuff over.

The other quirk is that to create an adgroup you have to create adcopy and put in keywords. So, the way to get around this is to put in dummy copy and a dummy keyword. Then, when you’re done with everything do a find and delete with the aforementioned tools.

So, this was all done in the live Adwords environment. We all know how slow Adwords can be sometimes, and when you add in your normal daily distractions, phone calls, emails, other clients, etc etc, you’re looking at a long and tedious process.

After about 10 days I was finished. Mind you, this wasn’t 100% my only focus, so that timeframe could be decieving. Nevertheless, a long period that was frustrating to the client. Not only that, but several urls were changed during that period, so when he went to review the new campaign, there were several errors. Ughh.

Now I’m sitting at my computer yesterday thinking of how long it’s going to take me to hand check every url in the campaign and make sure it goes to the correct landing page. We’re talking hundreds, maybe thousands of landing pages. I’m also thinking how annoyed my client is, and how much more annoyed he’ll be in a couple days when I finish. Hmmm.

So, borne of frustration, I suddenly remembered the “Adwords Editor Invitation” in my inbox that morning. I had been procrastinating, and now seemed like the right time to try it out. After a download and 15 minutes of setup, I was ready to give it a whirl.

Let me tell you something, working off of the Adwords client as opposed to the website is absolute bliss.

Like driving a Yugo and then one day someone hands you a Porche. Mind you, it’s not perfect, but I was able to blast through all the changes in 20 minutes. I swear, it would have taken me 2 days otherwise. No waiting for site hangups, just pure, unbroken periods of concentration. Basically, the ability to rifle through all the campaigns and adgroups to view and edit ad text/urls is greatly enhanced. When you’re done, you click “post changes” and that’s it. Done.

I’ll spare you all the nitty gritty details, I think it’s enough just to say that if you manage super size campaigns, you need to give this a shot. It WILL save you time.