Adwords Editor, Why?

[Discovery]

Its a completely new system to learn, it does nothing more than the online version, its clunky and complicated. Why in the world would anyone use the adwords editor, or any PPC campaign editor?

I could see that if I could copy and paste and bang out a campaign with 200 adgroups each complete with keywords, tracking URLS and 3 ad creatives in a couple hours, then I'm game.

High level copy and paste or drag and drop functions in a folder view. Now that would be cool to restructure your campaigns and adgroups by pooling some together and breaking others out into smaller groups.

But this tool doesnt do any of these things.
What am I missing? Sitting at the beach with my laptop creating adwords campaigns? Please Quint throw me to the fishes.

[shilly]

Discovery, I think you and I ARE missing something. I feel the same way you do, however the people I know that have been using it since it came out in beta, swear by it. They can't live without it.

I dont get it?

[Discovery]

I also used it when in beta, then again a bit later and again just recently. Each time hoping to see or find something that I was missing. So now I just have to ask the open question - What's the value in it? Just to work in some fashion off line?

I can see one point, if you have a huge MCC account Adwords can grind to a halt from time to time so an offline editor may be helpful in those situations. Outside of that? I have no idea.

[leftoverjoe]

To me, the primary advantage of the Editor is that I can post changes on my desktop, which is so much faster than loading page after page online. I can also get a clearer overview of my larger campaigns. It's helpful to see things aggregated neatly so that, for example, I can see which of my ad groups actually have the same destination URL, at a glance.

It's not perfect, for sure. I wish they would add the full geo-targeting functionality to it, as well as a way to import all of the accounts in my client center at one time to have easy access to them all at once if need be.

Anyway, I like it. I don't use it more than once or twice a week, but it does save me time when I do.

[PPC]

I also have no idea what the advantage of AdWords Editor is either. I suppose if you don't have high speed internet, I guess it could be easier.... but how many search marketing professionals don't have high speed internet access?

[Wilko]

Can't believe what I'm hearing here......your words offend my ears!

Adwords Editor is an amazing tool, many people swear by it (including myself). Its very different from Adwords itself, Adwords does not allow you to make bulk changes to your account. Whether its adding hundreds on new adgroups, mass CPC changes or just the ability to navigate accounts quickly offline to make minor changes. Adwords Editor has revolutionised Adwords account management

[leftoverjoe]

I do have high-speed, but that's not the point. It still takes longer, probably even if you're on a T1. Anytime you can cut out the middle man (the internet connection) when you're doing the editing, then I am all for it. Obviously you have to submit those changes then, but it is better for me to make any bulk changes offline first.

It does seem like a personal preference thing at this point though.

[Wilko]

Adwords Editor just makes account management and editing so much quicker and easier. I can't see a single disadvantage to using it. Admittedly there are other features which I would like to see on it, but Google seem to be listening to the Editors users by doing some fine tweaking since the beta first came out

[egain]

Personally i thought one the major reasons why to use it was the bulk upload facility, which I seem to recollect Google are phasing out online

[Matt in London]

I've found it brilliant - it allow us to upload high amounts of ad groups/keywords in an instant... It's shortened our timelines quite a lot! It's a lot easier than swapping between pages...

[Discovery]

Well it goes to show that one should always take the time to fully explore before making an evaluation. I threw my hands up too early in the game on this one.

Day to Day changes in editor? No not very efficient. However, when you need some heavy lifting then adwords editor can be a huge time saver.

As mentioned previously, being able to view the campaigns in a folder structure really helps me visualize what I have built out as well.

I think the largest benefit I have found so far is simply the ability to quickly generated the structure of a large campaign with many adgroups and targeted ads. Or quickly re-structuring existing adgroups.

Perhaps I have missed this feature as well, but it seems to me there is no way to create a csv version of a complete campaign structure campaign, adgroups, adtext and upload it. From what I see you must create campaign and adgroups, then adtext for each adgroup. Then add keywords and negatives. I would like to export a complete campaign in csv, then find and replace certain terms and upload the structure again as another campaign.

Has anyone found a solid process to do just this?

Discovery - I believe again

[wasatch27]

Our company has thousands of keywords spread over hundreds of campaigns. We also have countless adgroups and adcopy. Editor allows us to make huge changes to adcopy (when promotions and seasonal changes require it) without having to spend days on the project.

We can load new campaigns quickly, update multiple adgroups/keywords. It is very helpful for making bid updates, too.

I make changes to my campaigns on the airplane, then upload them when I hit the ground... total efficiency.

You can run reports out of the interface to a .csv, make changes to them, and then upload those changes directly through editor in minutes.

I still make one-off changes directly in the interface, but for mass updates it's editor all the way.

[Wilko]

How long can Yahoo! and MSN go without a similar editorial tool? Adwords Editor has been one giant leap by Google to help their advertisers stay on top of their accounts, in turn making search results better quality. Yahoo! and MSN must follow suit....quickly

[wes]

You can also copy and paste in the Editor - keywords, ad groups, ad texts - is even faster than the Move function in the Tools. Mass deletes, CPC changes, URL updates - I can copy an entire ad group's keyword list with URLs out to Excel, make a change in a tracking variable, and paste the whole thing back into Editor and upload much faster than working in the actual campaign itself.

[dotTim]

I rarely used Google AdWords Editor, but as of this month, I can't live without it. Ok, an example, making mass edits to MAX CPC's would mean I have to either (a) copy the keywords out of adwords.google.com from the Edit Keywords like, paste into Excel, edit and fill, fill down the needed ** characters, re-merge the columns and then copy and paste back into the browser; or (b) set my view to 500 results and, select all and then fill down the CPC price - repeat again if you have over 500 keywords.

Now, with the Editor, I just like on the Campaign or AdGroup, click on the Keywords tab, wait for it to load every keyword, do a Select All and then change the MAX CPC in the bottom pane to the amount I want. Hit Upload and I'm done.

The same goes for making mass changes to Text Ads; it's just easier and quicker for these two tasks. And lastly, the Find and Replace capability of the Editor is handy for mass changes as well.

[Beatever]

The duplicate keywords functionality is a big advantage of the Adwords Editor

[shorebreak]

...and became essentially the only browser available to the world from 1999-2004. It was free, it worked relatively well, so why not use it?

If you're in the industry, you'll know that AdWords Editor does a lot of the things that Google *doesn't* allow 3rd parties to do for free any more via the API.

Sounds anti-competitive to me. Leveraging one monopoly to compete in a related space. Of course, I worked at Netscape then and am at an SEM firm now, so I might just be having a deja vu moment