Easily make changes to your ads and ad groups at scale

The ability to make changes to your AdWords account in bulk enables you to spend more time optimizing your campaigns to grow your business, and less time on repetitive tasks.  Just last month, we launched keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale.  Today, we are happy to announce bulk uploads for ads and ad groups.

Imagine you download a report from the Ads tab and want to test different creatives in ad groups that are underperforming.  You might also want to turn off certain ad groups, or change the budget for others.  Instead of toggling back and forth between AdWords and your spreadsheets, you can now download reports from the Ads and Ad Groups tabs, make changes directly in your spreadsheet, and upload them directly to your account.

Uploading changes to your ads and ad groups is simple.  Just like with keywords, when you download a report you will be prompted to make the report “editable.”

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After making your changes, you can save your changes in CSV, TSV and Excel formats.  To upload this file, click “Reports and uploads” on the left navigation panel, and then select the “Uploads” tab.  You will see a new column here titled “Upload type,” shown below.

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You can only upload one report type at a time; for example, if you want to make bulk changes to both your keywords and your ad creatives, you would have to do this by editing and uploading two separate reports.

As with keyword bulk uploads, there is no way to cancel or automatically reverse your changes once a report has been submitted.  Please remember to save a copy of your original downloaded report if you need to know what your settings were before you made changes and submitted a bulk upload.  You can also view your change history and reverse any unintended changes manually.

To learn more about bulk uploads for ads and ad groups, visit the bulk uploads article in our Help Center or discuss in our AdWords Community.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

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Making it easier to manage bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns

Bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns let you easily vary your bids depending on the user context -- like location, time, and device -- all within a single campaign. By optimizing for different contexts, you can get better results with AdWords.

Ad group mobile bid adjustment rollout begins today
Starting today and continuing over the next couple weeks, we’re rolling out ad group level mobile adjustments, as previously announced. This may be useful if you’ve been operating large scale campaigns and found that your optimal bids for some keywords require different mobile bid adjustments. The majority of advertisers will still see the most value in using the existing campaign level bid adjustments in enhanced campaigns.

Change multiple bid adjustments more easily
We’re also making it easier to change bid adjustments for several locations, dayparts and devices at the same time.

Say you want to set a bid adjustment of +10% for three cities that you’re targeting. Just tick the checkboxes next to each location, then click the “Set bid adjustment” button (see image below).



You’ll then be able to enter the +10% adjustment and apply the changes to all of the locations you’ve selected, rather than needing to enter the adjustments one at a time. This handy feature is available for making changes across multiple campaigns when you’re in the “All online campaigns” view, as well as when you’re editing a single campaign.

If you’re managing multiple campaigns and need to replicate lots of location bid adjustments or time-based bid adjustments from one campaign to another, you’ll save time by using the AdWords Editor. Available on Windows and Mac OS, AdWords Editor lets you easily copy and paste settings across campaigns, then review and post your changes.

Enhanced campaign reminders
Starting on July 22, 2013, we will begin upgrading all campaigns to enhanced campaigns.

We’d like to hear your suggestions on ways we can make managing enhanced campaigns faster and easier. Please share your ideas using this form so we can continue to improve the experience.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

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AdWords spreadsheet edit feature to be sunset May 30

When we created the spreadsheet edit feature in 2009, we wanted to make it easier for you to make bulk changes in your campaigns.  Since that time, we have released bulk editing to help you make large-scale changes across your AdWords account, and keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale. Bulk editing and keyword bulk uploads cover all the capabilities of spreadsheet edit while being more powerful and scalable. In light of this, we are sunsetting spreadsheet edit on May 30.

If you are accustomed to using spreadsheet edit, then based on what you want to achieve, you can do one of two things:

1. You can click the “Edit” drop down and choose the type of bulk edit you want to make.  Bulk edits on your keywords will allow you to:
• Search and replace text in the keyword or destination URL
• Append text to the keyword or destination URL
• Set new bids, including increasing to first page or top of page CPC
• Increase or decrease bids
• Change keyword match types
• Add/remove labels
2. You can use keyword bulk uploads.  On the same page where you’ve always been able to download keyword reports, click the box that says “Editable.”  This will download a special, editable version of the keyword performance report that you can modify and then upload.

For more information about using these features in place of the spreadsheet edit feature, read the bulk edits article and the keyword bulk uploads article in our help center.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, Product Manager, AdWords

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Large-scale keyword changes made easy with keyword bulk uploads

With our launch of bulk editing back in November, large-scale changes across your entire AdWords account became much easier.  Today, we are launching keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale.

Have you ever downloaded a keyword report and wished you could make changes to your account directly, without having to upload the report into another tool or go back into the AdWords UI and search for the same keywords you already have in front of you?  Now you can. Right in your downloaded keyword reports, you can add, delete, edit, pause, and unpause keywords, and then upload these changes directly into your AdWords account.

This feature not only saves you time, but it also provides a new level of flexibility and automation by allowing you to use standard spreadsheet functions and logic to manage your keywords.  Here’s an example.  Imagine you want to create exact match versions of all your broad match keywords, and you want to set their MaxCPC bids to be 20% higher than their broad match counterparts.  You can quickly do this by copying the broad match rows, changing the match type column value, and creating a basic formula to multiply the existing bids by 1.20.  Then, you simply upload the entire sheet and AdWords will apply your changes.

Here’s a quick look at how it works:

On the same page where you’ve always been able to download keyword reports, click the box that says “Editable.”  This will download a special, editable version of the keyword performance report that you can modify and then upload.  In order to get the hang of this feature, check out the keyword bulk uploads article in the AdWords Help Center for some basic instructions.

Once you’ve finished making your edits, you are ready to save your changes and upload your report.  You can save your changes in CSV, TSV and Excel formats.  To upload this file, click “Reports and uploads” on the left navigation window, and then click the “Uploads” tab.

It’s important to know that once a bulk upload is submitted, there is no way to cancel or automatically reverse your changes.  Therefore, we recommend that you always save a copy of your original downloaded report in case you ever need to see what your settings were before you made changes and submitted a bulk upload.  You can also view your change history and reverse any unintended changes manually.

For more information on keyword bulk uploads, visit the keyword bulk uploads article or discuss in our AdWords Community.

Posted by Jon Diorio, Senior Product Manager, AdWords

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Making large-scale changes faster and easier in AdWords

Have you ever needed to adjust your AdWords bids by 5% for several thousand keywords? Or had to find and replace a bit of text in your ad copy across a couple hundred ads? Maybe you’ve changed your web address and need to update all of your visible URLs and destination URLs across your account.

We love making AdWords faster, simpler and more beautiful. So I’m happy to announce our new bulk editing features in the AdWords interface. With these tools, you’ll be able to more quickly and easily make large-scale changes across your entire account.

Initial preview
Initially, we’re releasing these bulk editing features to a limited number of AdWords accounts to collect your feedback and ensure everything works as expected. We hope to expand availability to everyone in the coming weeks.

Update (Dec. 4, 2012): These features are now available in all AdWords accounts globally.

Do more, quickly and easily
Here's a summary of the kinds of changes you'll be able to make.

Keywords	Search and replace text in the keyword or destination URL Append text to the keyword or destination URL Set new bids, including increasing to first page or top of page CPC Increase or decrease bids Change keyword match types Add/remove labels
Ads	Search and replace text in the ad or URL Append text to the ad or URL Change the capitalization of the text Add/remove labels
Ad Groups	Increase or decrease bids Set new bids Add/remove labels
Campaigns	Increase or decrease budgets Set new budgets Add/remove labels

You’ll be able to preview changes before you apply them. If you’re making a lot of changes, they’ll run in the background. That means you can leave the page and do other things in your account (or even log out entirely!) while bulk changes are in progress. A progress bar lets you know how close your changes are to completion. You can review your changes after they’re done.

Below is an example of how easy it is to change “Road bike” to “Commuter bike” in over 25,000 ads with a single click.



Keeping things simple
As these new editing features become available in AdWords, you might also notice a few changes to buttons and menus to reduce redundancy and keep things simple for new users.

The “Edit” button will become an “Edit” drop-down menu. We’ll also be phasing out the “Edit in table” view since its multi-item editing capabilities will be far surpassed. Now when making a change to an individual campaign element, you can just click on it to enter editing mode.

More details and feedback
We’ll be updating articles throughout the AdWords help center, including our AdWords glossary entry on bulk edits, as we roll out these new editing features.

Please share your comments about the new bulk editing features with us if you use them over the next few weeks. Your feedback helps us make AdWords even better.

Posted by Prashant Baheti, AdWords Product Manager

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