OutWit Hub is my new favourite extension for Firefox. It let’s you easily extract data from any HTML web page and export to Excel.
The interface is very intuitive and works like a browser. The Guess and List functions are accurate and usually extract infomation as expected. Guess and List are suitable for most data extraction tasks, but if you really need something more complex you can write custom scrapers for OutWit. It’s also pretty easy to automate OutWit and scrape and store data from multiple pages. OutWit Hub is easily the best entry-level scraper I’ve used.
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outwit hub,
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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
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If you’re dealing with keywords, then Excel is your friend. Excel makes managing large lists of data very easy and it has a number of features that work especially well with keywords.
Here is a simple recipe to combine a few simple keywords together to create a list of long-tail terms.
Ingredients
Core terms
Geographic terms
- new york
- los angeles
- boston
- philadelphia
Recipe
In Excel, enter your core terms into column A.
Enter core terms
Now we need to multiply the amount of core terms (3) by the amount of geographic terms (4). So, in Excel we need to copy down the core to repeat them 12 times.
Select the cells A1 to A3 and click Edit -> Copy. Then select cells A4 to A12 and click Edit -> Paste.
Copy and paste core terms
Now sort the list by clicking Edit -> Select All and then Data -> Sort -> Sort By -> Column A -> Ascending.
Sort column A ascending
Now enter your geographic terms in column B and copy and paste them down.
Geographic terms enter, copy and paste
Now all we need to do is combine the 2 sets of data into to column C with the following formula: =A1&" "&B1
Combining formula
Now hit enter to see the results and the copy and past this cell (C1) into cells C2 to C12.
Copy and paste the formula
Now you have your long tail terms in column C. You can add these to your PPC campaign and improve and improve the chances of you add being seen.
This is obviously quite a simplistic example, but you can use this approach to build much richer, complex keyword lists.
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When importing CSV files into Bento it’s important that the date is exactly the right format, so if Bento has a date like 30/09/2008 then the CSV dates must be in exactly the same format.
In Excel, you can format the cells to be a custom date type by typing dd/mm/yyyy in the cell format dialog in the custom category.
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