Prepare AdWords campaigns in Excel for upload into AdWords Editor

One of the most common tasks when working with Google AdWords PPC is preparing campaigns in Excel ready to be loaded into Google’s AdWords Editor.

We think the following process is the quickest and most effective method for producing these lists in Excel. A lot of the speed comes from learning the keyboard shortcuts for various Excel commands, as typing keyboard shortcuts is faster than clicking around with the mouse.

The overall goal here is to create 1 Excel sheet for a specific campaign or upload.

There are 3 main pieces of data that we have to create:

Keywords
Ad Groups
Ad Text

The following sheet will contain all of these ready to be uploaded.

Start with a list of keywords

Typically, we start with a list of keywords tailored to the product we’re advertising. For this example I’ve used the keyword ‘widgets’ and results from the AdWords Keyword Tool.

Next, organise the keywords into Ad Groups

This is the most labour intensive part, but also the most important! At this stage we categorise and group the keywords into relevant ad groups; combine miss-spellings into correctly name groups and also edit out and delete keywords that are not at all relevant.

If you add in the Excel AutoFilters you can make life a little easier by sorting a re-sorting the keywords into related themes.

Now, add the search and content bids

If this is a new campaign, you’ll probably want to start by bidding well within in your budget.

In this example, we’re using Ad Group level search and content bids. To create different bids for different ad groups you need to ensure that the bids are present on every line of the Ad Group.

At this stage it may look a little redundant to enter bids for every line in an Ad Group, but as you’ll see later it make sense to fill out the sheet as completely as possible…

Time to write the ad text

OK, we’re almost half-way through creating a our campaign. Now we’re moving on to the most labour saving part of the process.

Creating individual pieces of ad text for an entire campaign from whithin the AdWords website interface can be extremely labour intensive. Doing this in Excel is a massive time-saver.

The time saving comes from Excel copy-down feature, this can be used either by copy and pasting cell contents or by using the fill handle in the bottom right hand corner of the selection marquee.

As you can see in the animated illustration on the right you can very quickly create sequential lists of data or you can quickly copy and repeat the same data. When you combine this with formulas and text it is becomes a very powerful way of quickly creating ad text.

Headline

For the headline we may as well keep things simple and use the Ad Group name, we can do this with the formula =A2.

Description line 1 & 2

In description lines 1 and 2 we are going to use ad copy that is relevant but that can also work accross the whole campaign.

Display URL

The display URL will simply be the url of the site.

Destination URL

The destination URL is simillar but we like to track everything we do in NetInsight, which means we need to add some tracking parameters to the query string. Using Excel this is nice and easy as we can use a formula to dynamically grab the right data.

Now, we’re ready to upload this data to AdWords Editor…

To do this you simply copy and paste the right columns in the right order for the 3 main multi-input panels in AdWords Editor:

Add/ Update Multiple Ad Groups

Add/ Update Multiple keywords

Add/ Update Multiple Ad Text

Tagged as: adwords, excel, ppc